Christmas Carols Past

I miss my cue because I am six and hiding in a cupboard. The cupboard fits my small person precisely. I am tucked neatly into the cupboard, in costume, giggling. After a bit, I notice the green room outside the cupboard door has gotten quiet. This is not usual. Green rooms to my knowledge at this time are either places of much noise and laughter and arm-flinging argument and various sorts of loud drama, or places of a dreary, dusty afternoon silence that still echoes slightly with the voices the actors trail behind them like silk scarves when they leave. In any case green rooms do not just suddenly go quiet. Unless the whole cast has left for the final scene, in which there is much jolliness and great cheer and Scrooge becomes a changed man and wishes everyone a Happy Christmas and gets down on his knee before the Littlest Caroler and she sings him a bit of “The Holly and the Ivy” and he cries and everyone cries and all is warm and wonderful and British and wintry and well. But the Littlest Caroler has missed her cue because she is in a cupboard into which she fits just right. She sticks her head out of the cupboard. The cast is gone. The green room is empty: worn couches with sagging seats, cigarette butts in the ashtrays, a lingering haze of smoke. She realizes the director will assassinate her for missing her scene. She tucks herself back into the cupboard and shuts the door. * I had a costume with a velvet bow at the waist, and a bonnet, and a little cape. The best part obviously was the bonnet, which had a velvet ribbon beneath the chin. I confess I envied the grown-up ladies’ dresses, which were taffeta and satin and had full complicated skirts of many layers, and bodices, and bosoms, and made a rustling sound that is now inseparable in memory from the smell of costume shop and perfume. I wore makeup like anyone else, but it was not the same as the ladies’ makeup, and though I regularly went digging through their makeup boxes to borrow their shocking red lipstick and rouge, inevitably some rustling perfumed creature in taffeta would swoop in on me, wipe off the inexpertly applied lipstick, select some dreadful soft girly pink instead, and tell me, No, like this. Pout. And I would study her lips with enormous, brow-furrowed attention and attempt to properly pout. Also, I had no bodice with boning, and no bosoms besides, and therefore no bosoms to dust with sparkly pale powder, using a large soft-bristled brush. Instead I had a bonnet. Which was all well and good. But still. * If you have a choice of where to spend your next childhood, then you should seriously consider a theater. At a theater, they largely ignore you and allow you to dart around elf-like doing whatever you please so long as you don’t ruin, break, or otherwise damage the set, nor tear or stain the gowns or suits in which you trail through the scene shop (nor ruin the chainmail, or dent the bowler hats), nor use the glue gun to glue anyone’s shoes to the floor, nor nail anything major to any other major thing. Especially you are not to nail anything to your thumb. Your thumb is the approximate size of the head of a nail. You have gotten so strong you can lift the hammer and swing it with relative accuracy; and you have gotten so big you can brandish a sword if you use both hands. This is useful both when you are playing a pirate and when you are practicing Mercutio’s death scene, which is your favorite part. * It is harder to do “A Christmas Carol” in California than it is in Minnesota, because there is no snow. Your mother and father disallow the begged-for flocked tree. They allow you, however, to spray all the windows with foam snow. In this way, spinning in dizzying circles in the living room to watch your skirt twirl, you can pretend you are in London and it is snowing and you can more easily get into character. Your mother says she does not know where you can get any chestnuts for roasting, nor does she know how to roast a chestnut, but to make up for this failure she makes a plum pudding and a mincemeat pie, which delight you so much you nearly die. You insist upon wearing your bonnet to Christmas dinner, with your red sweater and your Toughskin jeans. * Things you know: dry ice is the thing in the fog machine that makes the fog. The trap door through which Marley rises up, clanking and dragging his horrible chains, does not really lead down to hell; it leads to the downstairs hallway. Catwalks are not very dangerous if no one knows you’re on one; the trick is to not look down. The dust on the catwalks is thick, as is the dust on the black metal lights, and the entire spectrum of lighting is created magically by red, yellow, and blue films that fit over the lights. Things about which you get confused: the difference between Walter, the young man who plays Christ in “Godspell,” and God Himself. You assume for years that God is a blonde tenor in rainbow suspenders. (And who am I to say now that he is not?) You hold these truths to be self-evident: women run the costume shop, men run the scene shop, and the reason you are not allowed to play Tiny Tim is because you are a girl. This is also the reason given for why you cannot play Hamlet in your second-grade play. No one clarifies for you why, then, you can play the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father, which is what you play. (In your off scenes, you play Ophelia’s lady in waiting, which is a role that sucks so bad it is not even really a role, and in which you have to wear a flowered dress with puffy sleeves, adding insult to injury in a very big way.) No one tells you that you should not, when at an audition and asked your most recent role, say, “The King of Denmark,” if you are seven, and a girl. * That’s the bummer of being a little kid—you’re always being typecast as a little kid. Maddening fact. You do not get to play, nor even audition for, the very best roles, which are almost always nabbed by adults, and too often (it seems to you) by men. The upside, though, is that all the little kids in all the plays get to play two, sometimes three little kid parts, because there is a paucity of actors under four feet tall. Hence: you play not only the Littlest Caroler, but also one of the little wailing beings who comes out from under Christmas Present’s red velvet cloak (in which you nap whenever possible)—the characters of Ignorance and Want. The other one—you can never remember if you were Ignorance or Want—was played by the little hog who got to play Tiny Tim. In any case, when the cue was called, the two of you ducked under the red velvet cloak, were wrapped in darkness, scuttled alongside the enormous tree-like person of Christmas Present, whose bellowing voice rattled your bones, and then he bellowed “Ignorance—and Want!” and lifted his cloak and out you came, wailing, in rags, and you could feel both Scrooge and the audience somewhere in the distance beyond him recoil. And then the red cloak and darkness wrapped around you again and you were scuttled offstage, where you ran downstairs and through the theater, you and the boy, Ignorance and Want, to throw off your rags and put on your respective bonnet and cap and let the rustling creatures dust your noses with powder and wait for the cue call to come through the speakers so you could run back upstairs to stand breathless, on tiptoe, waiting for the final scene to begin.