A Solution to the Early Arrival of Christmas

I've heard lots of complaints this year about what seems to be an earlier-than-usual arrival of the Christmas season--decorations in stores, holiday Muzak in every elevator and enterprise you enter. I've even seen some editorial cartoons on the subject.

The mercenary motives are obvious: Retailers need holiday spending the way, oh, the Pilgrims needed to know how to plant maize. So all the early advertising and Bing Crosby's crooning combine to get us in the mood to rub smooth our charge cards in order to buy and give things that people don't really want.

But it really has begun earlier and earlier, hasn't it? When I was a kid, you didn't see/hear much Christmas until after Thanksgiving.

So why hasn't Thanksgiving been able to hold its own in the Holiday Derby? Well, for one thing, the Thanksgiving spending is pretty limited to food and relevant supplies (turkeys and canned pumpkin and roasting pans and the like--and psychotherapy after the relatives have gone home). I don't know of any tradition of gift-giving on Thanksgiving--though maybe other families have different traditions? So--not all the merchants can benefit from a huge Thanksgiving hype. So ... Bring on Christmas!

Another reason, maybe? In recent times, the holiday has made some folks a little uneasy, reminding them that it celebrates one of those times when white Christians saw something they liked and just took it from nonwhite non-Christians. As we've become more socially alert and sensitive, we've tended, maybe, to become a little less proud of some of our history? A little more--what?--aware that other people don't necessarily feel the same way we do about it?

And, of course, unlike Christmas, there's no massive history and tradition of music and stories and poems and movies and TV specials and whatever about Thanksgiving. Oh, sure, there are parades--but have you noticed they feature a lot of Christmas stuff? We have no "Rudolf, the Red-Beaked Turkey" or "The Night Before Thanksgiving" or "Frosty, the Frozen Butterball" and the like. So maybe if we want to elevate Thanksgiving on our ladder of holidays, we need to start creating more songs and such to get people in the mood.

Some ideas ...

• a song: "Squanto, We Need You--Pronto!"
• a Charlie Brown special: The Great Turkey
• a song: "I Saw Mommy Cleaning Up While Daddy Took a Nap"
• a holiday movie: Miles Standish Mashes Potatoes with Priscilla
• a holiday character: Scruffy, the Scarecrow
• a song: "The Bad Words Daddy Said When the Football Game Went Dark"
• a song: "I'm Dreaming of a Short Thanksgiving"
• a holiday movie: The Headless Turkey
• a song: "The Bad Words Daddy Said to Mommy's Brother"
• a holiday special: Connie, The Cornbread Girl
• a song: "Why Don't I Ever Get a Drumstick?"
• a holiday movie: When the Zombies Came Back for Seconds
• a song: "When Grandpa Sliced the Turkey, He Cut His Finger Off"
• a holiday movie: Katniss Eats a Mockingjay for Thanksgiving
• a song: "My Cousins Are All Weird"
• a song: "Grandma Can't Cook Anymore"

I'm certain some of these ideas would propel Thanksgiving back to its rightful place as a notable American holiday and not just a paving stone on the Gold Road to Christmas. So let's get busy!

The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein, Part II: 20

Eight     

Early Thursday morning, there we were, Gil and I, standing outside the junior high at 5:50 a.m. We’d agreed to be early for our detention, thinking we’d impress Mr. Gisborne with our promptness. I don’t know why we thought we could impress him. We’d done little so far but antagonize him. He seemed to have some kind of magic anger button that our spoken words and our body language pushed—no, punched. All he had to do was look at us a few moments—listen to a few words—and his face flamed, his volume spiked. Strange.

Also strange: We were standing outside the school in a driving thunderstorm. I hadn’t yet learned where Gil lived, but in little Franconia, nowhere was very far from anywhere. We both walked. And when I was about halfway to school, the heavens opened, pouring Niagara on my head and distributing lightning bolts around like deadly Christmas ornaments.

But I was halfway: I was going to get just as wet (and maybe just as dead) by going on as going back. So on I went, mostly because I didn’t really want to talk with my father about the note I’d left on the kitchen table. Father, I’ve got to go to school early to work on my science fair project. Didn’t want to wake you.

Sort of true, actually. Though mostly not.

I could see Gil arriving about the same time. We were like the two sides of an animated letter V moving toward the same knife point. He had his head down—not a bad idea on such a day. But he looked up as he approached the building and saw me hurrying along, too, and we made for the tiny exterior recess by the front door—the only place with any overhead coverage.

He looked miserable. Soaking wet, pale as powder. I could hear his labored breathing.

“A perfect day for it,” I joked.

He didn’t react. He just leaned against the brick wall and tried to control his breath.

“Did you run?” I asked.

He looked at me, his dark eyes glimmering. “Some,” he said.

He started to reach for the door handle. “Don’t bother,” I said. “I already checked.”

He pulled it anyway. Nothing.

“Hope Mr. Gisborne gets here soon,” he said.

“Hmmm.”

On ordinary school mornings, the custodian—an old man whom everyone just called “Leon”—would not unlock the doors until exactly 7:30. I didn’t know if “Leon” was his first name or his last—or both, for that matter. (Some parents are just crazy enough to name a kid Leon Leon.) He didn’t care what was going on outside. Great heat. Rain. Whatever. He would stand there, looking at his watch (the only timepiece that mattered), then unlock at 7:30.

“Maybe Leon will let us in early?” I offered.

Gil finally spoke a full sentence. “I’m not counting on it.” He looked at me. “Maybe he’s not even here yet.”

“Oh, Leon’s always here,” I joked. “He lives here.”

We were both laughing when a flash of lightning whitened the entire sky. I looked back at the doors. And there was Leon, standing there staring at us. How long had he been there?

Then … I saw a bolt of lightning zigzagging down from the darkest cloud I’d seen since the day of the tornado. It was moving so slowly, as if in an animated drawing. I raised my arm for Gil to look. And the bolt blasted an old oak in the school’s front lawn. Bark and branches exploded away in all directions, some flying our way—again, in leisurely, even lazy fashion. A crash of thunder followed almost immediately—a sound so loud I heard the windows rattle all around the building.

I heard the doors swing open behind us.

“Get in here!” commanded Leon.

We did.

The Journey to Richard II: Part 17

Richard II
Shakespeare & Co.; Lenox, MA
July 2013

A series of posts about my journey through the works of Shakespeare--on the page, on the stage.

As I wrote the other day, I realized, oh, about a half-dozen years ago, that there were now only four plays by the Bard that Joyce and I had not seen in live production: A Winter's Tale, Titus Andronicus, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Richard II. I wrote the other day, too, that The Two Gentlemen of Verona was on our list--but I was wrong (I checked my journal in the interim). In that journal I found an item from 8 August 2010, when we saw Two Gentlemen at the Stratford Festival in Canada (not the first time we'd seen it). Seated right across from us, directly in our sightline, was actor Christopher Plummer (who was performing at Stratford, a terrific turn as Prospero in The Tempest). Anyway, we watched him as much as Two Gentlemen that night, I guess, and then, leaving the small Studio Theatre there, we were right behind him. I could have reached out and torn his shirt from his back. But didn't. (Wish I had.)

I see in my little blue Yale Shakespeare edition of Winter's Tale that I first read it in August 1984, then again in August 1989 (not sure why). I didn't underline a lot--but some of my marks are, well, interesting to the Me of  Now. In 1.2, for example, I've underlined Leontes (who's spazzing at the moment--insanely jealous of his wife's behavior), who says: It is a bawdy planet ...  That sounds kind of like wishful thinking, if you ask me. Later (2.1) I've drawn a little box around Mamillius' line: A sad tale's best for winter. (Gee, wonder why I marked that one?) And in 3.3 the most famous stage direction ever published: Exit, pursued by a bear. The bear will dine shortly. And later yet--a line that puzzled me at the time: Paulina says, I an old turtle, / Will wing me to some wither'd bough ... (119). I didn't yet know that turtle meant turtle dove. At the time, picturing a winged turtle probably did give me some transient pleasure, though. Oh, that wacky Bard!

I loved The Winter's Tale (love it still)--but for some reason no one around here (or at Stratford) was producing it. But ... in 2008 I got a copy of the flyer you see pictured here. There was going to be a performance at nearby John Carroll University! We drove up to see it on 27 September.

Here's some of what I wrote in my journal afterwards ...

... after a few missed parking spots, [we] got inside and saw very minimalist but very affecting performance of The Winter’s Tale with 5 British actors, each, of course, playing multiple parts: virtually no scenery, few props, good handling of the language (what is it about the Brits? they can just say the words in ways that sound more authentic/real/natural?!?) ...

What I didn't say is that I, of course, wept when the statue of Leontes' wife appears to come to life. Earlier, jealous Leontes--grotesquely, unjustly--confined his wife to prison, where she died--or so he thought. Later, he realizes his error. Sees the statue erected in her honor. Witnesses its movement. Realizes his wife is alive. Prostrates himself. And ... she forgives him. (Promise: One of these days I will post about Shakespeare and forgiveness.)

Then, of course, we promptly saw two more productions of Winter's Tale. It seemed as if producers had forgotten about the play for a while, then remembered: Oh, yeah! There's that great one about jealousy and forgiveness!  In 2010 Stratford did a wonderful production that had me weeping once again. And then on 11 October of last year, we saw it again at the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland. The principals were okay; the minor characters, not so much. And the house was small--only about half full. And this, of course, is the problem producers face with Shakespeare. They're going to get good crowds for Romeo and Hamlet and some of the others. But it's more difficult for plays that many have not heard of--or didn't read in school.

And speaking of "reading in school": In the spring of 2011 (the year I retired--for the final time!), our English Department at Western Reserve Academy decided to read the play, then meet to discuss it. I read an act a day for five days in the middle of May (my journal records that I wept--what a sissy!--once again at the end). We met on Tuesday, 24 May, at a colleague's place, had a good discussion of the play, watched a video of the final scene. Then my colleagues surprised me with some retirement gifts and farewells. And there went my leaky old eyes again ...

Anyway, by the fall of 2008, having seen Winter's Tale at John Carroll, we were down to just three unseen plays.

Next time: Titus Andronicus

The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein, Part II: 19

Both Gil and I were Perfect Angels in science class the next few days. We didn’t give Mr. Gisborne the slightest excuse to look our way—or to lose his temper with us again. On Wednesday, he once again sent us to the library to work on our project. This time we decided we’d really talk about what we wanted to do.

“So have you got any ideas?” Gil asked me as soon as we sat at our table.

“A few,” I said. But, of course, I had more than a few. I had a basement full of sophisticated scientific equipment—computers, microscopes, anything a little scientist could possibly desire. But I would not tell Gil Bysshe anything about that. Not yet … not soon … probably not ever.

“Do you think you might let me know one or two of them?” asked Gil mildly. “Because my brain is on Empty.”

“Is that a permanent condition? Or something you’re experiencing just for today?”

“It’s probably permanent,” he said—a little sadly, I thought.

“Well, I don’t want to do something dumb,” I said, “something like the effects of various things on plants.”

Gil seemed to be thinking. “There are advantages,” he said, “to doing something dumb.”

“Oh? What advantages?”

“We wouldn’t have to work too hard on it.”

I smiled. “Good thinking, genius. Let’s figure out something that we won’t have to work on too much.”

We shook hands. His was as cold as his voice and eyes were warm.

And later … I was surprised, as I was remembering that handshake, that I liked it. The handshake. And the memory of it.

But near the end of class that day—a bigger, or at least different, surprise. Mr. Gisborne came over to our library table and just stared at us. One of life’s most uncomfortable feelings, isn’t it? Being stared at? By someone in authority? Especially when you know you’ve done something wrong and you’re trying to figure out if he knows it, too.

He finally spoke. “I talked with Mr. Tooke this morning.”

“Yes?” said Gil and I simultaneously.

“He said he remembered when you came in. He just couldn’t find any record of it.”

I desperately fought a blush I felt forming—some kindling starting to ignite.

He stared some more. The blush and I were fighting to a draw … so far.

“Accidents happen,” said Gil helpfully.

More stares. Then words: “He said he was going to leave the punishment up to me. For your behavior. Your attitude.”

I’d already learned that Mr. Gisborne was one of those teachers who got more angry the more he talked. So I interrupted: “I said I was sorry.”

But my tone was wrong. I knew it as the words were passing my teeth and heading out into the air. I didn’t mean for it to sound sarcastic. But it kind of did.

Mr. Gisborne lost the battle with his blush, his, of course, being a blush of anger. (And I don’t think he was really trying too hard to control it.)

“Detention!” he roared. “Tomorrow! After school!”

Gil said, with the innocence of a shy child, “Don’t you have football practice?”

“Detention!” he roared. “Tomorrow! Six a.m.!” And he wheeled to leave, probably before he lost total control and started punching us. I was puzzled, really, about his rage. What was it about us that set him off?

“Six in the morning,” Gil was saying. “Not my best time.”

The Journey to Richard II: Part 16

Richard II
Shakespeare & Co.; Lenox, MA
July 2013

A series of posts about my journey through the works of Shakespeare--on the page, on the stage.

I started teaching Much Ado About Nothing to my 8th graders in the 1994-1995 school year, continued through 1995-1996 but then retired in January 1997 (disgusted with Ohio's--and our school district's--obsession with Ohio Proficiency Tests--don't get me started). As I've described in earlier posts, my time with Shakespeare in class got more and more complicated, more and more--what?--eclectic? "Full-immersion" may be the best term.  I did not tire at all of watching Kenneth Branagh's film of the play (I saw portions of it five or six times a day while students were viewing it)--and I wept, over and over and over again, at some of the moments. The scene, for example, when Beatrice is chiding Benedick for not believing in Hero's innocence is just flat powerful. And the huge dance at the end?  When the entire cast, hands linked, dance through the garden of the country estate, the music of "Sigh No More" soaring on the soundtrack? Oh, did I weep ... every time.

"Sigh No More," by the way, a song in the original play, appears in Act II, Scene 3, but Branagh--cleverly, I thought--moved it to the very beginning--and the music resonated throughout the rest of the film. No one knows what the original music sounded like (the earliest setting is 1648), but I really do love Patrick Doyle's setting in the film. There's an interesting montage version of it on YouTube: Link.

I always had my kids memorize Shakespeare, too: a sonnet (they could choose between 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" and 130 ("My mistress' eyes are nothing lie the sun")) and a passage from the play we were reading. (I soon tired of those two, which I'd memorized myself, and memorized a new one every year, took a quiz on it on the same day the kids took their sonnet quizzes. I now know 14 of the 156 sonnets.) In Shrew, as I wrote the other day, the kids learned Petruchio's speech to Kate (it contains the line "What is the jay more precious than the lark, / Because his fathers are more beautiful?"). And for Much Ado? What else but "Sigh No More":

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never:
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into Hey nonny, nonny.

Sing no more ditties, sing no moe,
Of dumps so dull and heavy;
The fraud of men was ever so,
Since summer first was leafy:
Then sigh not so, & c.

Meanwhile, Joyce and I were going to see all the plays we could--here, there, lots of places. We learned, of course, that a handful of plays are produced over and over and over again: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, and some others. But some of the others are very rarely produced. We started going to the Stratford (Ont.) Festival in 2001, and there we saw some of those rare ones--Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, Pericles: Prince of Tyre, King John.

And one day I decided to make a list of the plays we had not seen in a live production. The list was short: The Winter's Tale, Titus Andronicus, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and ... Richard II.

Next time...The Final Four!  (Okay, there were five: The Two Noble Kinsmen, which Shakespeare co-wrote with John Fletcher.)

**Info on music from Ross W. Duffin, Shakespeare's Songbook (W. W. Norton, 2004).

The Journey to Richard II: Part 15

Richard II
Shakespeare & Co., Lenox, MA
July 2013

Much Ado About Nothing includes one of the most wrenching scenes in all of Shakespeare--and in a comedy! Of course, Shakespeare knew that darkness and light dance together in their unpredictable choreography throughout our lives. And so it is that there is humor in his grimmest tragedies  (the gravediggers in Hamlet), and gravity in the funniest comedies (near the end of Love's Labour's Lost comes news of a loved one's death).

There are actually two wedding scenes in Much Ado. In the first, the young groom, Claudio, destroys the service when he accuses his bride, Hero--in front of everyone, in the middle of the service--of having sex with another man just the night before. This is false, of course. The bitter "villain" of the story, Don John, has fooled Claudio, staging a scene for him late at night. Indignant, Claudio and his friends stalk out of the wedding (one of them has just called Hero "a common stale [prostitute]"). Hero faints. Even her father initially believes the lie. Not exactly a Bride's magazine ideal nuptial, is it?

The Friar suggests they make everyone think Hero has died (sound familiar, Romeo and Juliet fans?); they do; the truth comes out; Claudio repents--and agrees, as part of his penance, to marry Hero's "cousin," sight unseen. And so he does--finding out at the end of the ceremony that it's actually Hero he's just married--Hero, who's forgiven him. (By this time, the principal characters, Benedick and Beatrice, have also agreed to marry--so a double wedding's about to commence--though Benedick insists they all dance first. And that's how the play ends, with a dance of joy.)

Hero's supreme act of forgiveness always bothered my students--especially the girls, I think, one of whom cried out right in class one year as we were reading the script: Why would she forgive him?!  Indeed.  Why?  That, I think, will have to be the content for another post one of these days.

Anyway, the kids were curious about what an Elizabethan wedding service would be like, so I decided we would have one. We randomly picked the bride and groom (I got to officiate!); I gave them copies of the 1559 edition of The Book of Common Prayer; we read the wedding ritual and talked about it (Link to the BCP). Then one day in class we went out onto the school stage and enacted the ritual--and I reminded the kids, of course, that I had no legal authority to perform a marriage, so, don't worry, you're not actually married!

The 8th graders took it all very seriously--surprising me, I guess. And I actually found the whole experience quite moving. The picture below shows the "cast" of the ceremony one year--early-mid 90s? Someone will have to tell me what year it was. Obviously, we don't seem to have dressed up all that much, either ...

The Papers of Victoria Frankenstein, Part II: 18

What a sensitive kid, I thought, looking at the phone now moaning its dial tone. Bruises more easily than a piece of soft fruit. As I sat there, thinking, it rang again, startling me so much I nearly fell over onto the floor.

“Stone’s residence. Victoria speaking,” I said, just as Father had taught me to do.

“Gee, that’s impressive,” said Gil. “You’re really well-trained.”

“Thank you, Underwear Freak,” I snapped.

Gil hung up again.

This time I remembered something: The handout that Mr. Gisborne had given us had two things on it I really needed to know: Gil’s last name and Gil’s phone number. (Even later I remembered I could have just hit *69. I guess I was just too nervous?)

I found my backpack, dug through my science folder, and found it:

Gil Bysshe. The name startled me.[i] But there was his phone number, too.

I returned to the phone and punched in his number.

“Yes?” It was Gil.

“Is this where Hazelnut lives?” I asked. 

Silence. Breathing.

“And don’t hang up!” I warned. “I’ve got your number now, and I’ll just call you back.”

“Okay,” said Gil in a small voice.

“I promise I won’t say anything more about underwear.”

“That would be nice.”

“You’re a weird kid,” I laughed.

“You should talk.”

I laughed again.

“So do you think Gisborne put the two weird kids together for this science fair project?” he asked.

“I’m not so sure about that,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because,” I explained, “that would mean that Gisborne actually thought about his schoolwork. I’m not sure he really does that.”

“I see your point,” said Gil.

“Gil, do you pronounce your last name like ‘bish’?”

“Yes,” he sighed. “It rhymes with ‘fish.’”

“Hazelnut Fish,” I said. “That’s quite a name.”

“Thank you,” said Gil. He started laughing so hard that he ended up with some kind of coughing fit.

When he quieted down, I asked him: “Do you know how famous your last name is?”

“Sure,” he said. “Percy Bysshe Shelley. The poet. His wife, Mary, wrote Frankenstein.”

“I’m impressed,” I said. And I was.

“Are you related?” I asked.

“My father doesn’t know,” he said. “But we probably are. I mean, it’s a pretty unusual name, don’t you think?”

“Very unusual.” And at that point, I decided to change the subject. After all, I still had not told anyone—not even Harriet—that my father’s family name was Frankenstein. He’d changed it to Stone for obvious reasons. I’d discovered it after the tornado the previous spring when the storm’s damage to our house had revealed a storage area in our basement, a place where Dad had hidden all the papers about our family history.

“Gil?”

‘Yeah?”

“Why did you call me?”

“Oh, yeah. I just, you know, wondered what happened in Mr. Tooke’s office the other day.”

Gil had been absent a couple of days, and I hadn’t seen him at all since Mr. Gisborne had sent us to the office.

“Not much. He called me a ‘fresh mouth.’”

“Where did he ever get that idea?” asked Gil with fake innocence.

“I don’t know,” I said, playing along. “It’s a real mystery, isn’t it?”

“So what happened?”

“Oh, he just entered me in his database”—I decided not to say anything to Gil about deleting the entry; I wasn’t sure how much I trusted him yet—“and predicted I’d be back.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Gil. “You’re not that type. I’ll bet you never get sent to the office again.”

“Thank you.” There was a moment of silence. “And what about you, Gil? What did Mr. Tooke do to you?”

“Nothing, really. By the time I got out of the nurse’s office, he was talking to some other kids, and he just sort of gave me a warning.”

“He didn’t put you in the computer?”

“Oh, yeah, he did that. But it’s no big deal, really.”

“And what did the nurse want with you?”

“Oh, nothing,” said Gil. “Just wanted to make sure I was all right. After I fainted and everything.”

“I thought just girls fainted,” I said.

“That’s right,” said Gil.  “Girls and guys named Hazelnut Fish.”

We laughed and talked a little more, and then we finally hung up.  It was getting toward dinner time, and I had to make something so Father wouldn’t starve. Now that Aunt Claire was gone, I had taken over the kitchen duties. She had taught me a lot about cooking, Aunt Claire. But in so many other ways she was a total mystery. The last I knew she had swirled up into that funnel cloud—and had seemed to enjoy it.

When I put the phone down and turned around, I saw Father leaning in the doorway, staring at me. He had a strange look on his face.

For some reason, I felt myself blushing.

“Vickie?” he said. “That wasn’t Harriet, was it?”

“No,” I replied. “Not Harriet.”

I started to move through the doorway. “Well,” he asked, “who was it then?”

“A kid from school.”

“A kid? Boy or girl?”

“Yes.” For some reason, I was really embarrassed, and I didn’t want to talk about this.

“Which?”

“Boy.”

“Do I know him?”

“Probably not. He’s new. We have to work together on a science fair project.” I looked at my father. “The teacher, Mr. Gisborne, assigned us to work together. That’s all.”

“Hmm,” said Father. “You didn’t sound as if you were talking about a science fair project.”

“Father!” I exclaimed with mock surprise. “Were you listening in on us?”

My father blushed. “Oh, uh, not really. It’s just that I, you know—”

I finished the sentence for him: “—listened to your daughter’s private phone conversation.”

“I guess I did,” he admitted.

“And you’re ashamed, aren’t you, Father?”

He just looked at me. “Look, Vickie, I was wrong. I admit it. But don’t try to make me feel too guilty. Adults aren’t good at that, feeling guilty.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

---

[i] “Bysshe” was the middle name of Mary Shelley’s husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; his friends all called him “Bysshe.”  It was also the name of Percy Shelley’s grandfather.