From the Old Stone Wall to the Manger at Midnight

This year's Mead Street Mummers Play was based on the children's book Frederick, by Leo Lionni.

For readers unfamiliar with our quasi-annual tradition: a mummers play is an old British solstice ritual -- a play in which the hero dies and is revived, symbolizing the death of the old year and the birth of the new. The traditional story features Saint George and the Dragon, a bumbling Doctor, Father Christmas, and a few other stock characters. On Mead Street we take rather large liberties with the story and setting -- previous productions have been based on the carol "Good King Wenceslas," Hans Christian Andersen's "The Old Oak Tree," the local Native American tale "Raven Steals the Light," and most recently, Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince" -- but we always stick to the basic hero-dies-and-is-revived plotline.

Generally the production barely pulls itself together in time, and we're never absolutely sure until the very last minute that we actually want any of our friends and relations to come see us perform it. (Then of course when we emerge triumphant at the end, we always wish we'd invited more of you...) This year it was well past Thanksgiving before we decided we had it in us to do a mummers play at all, what with school and work and the Streets' never-ending soccer season and our own departure for LA two days before Christmas. 

But we were all craving a little spark of revival, I think -- that moment when the hero is laying there lifeless, when the buffoonish doctor has tried his or her last remedy and declared the case hopeless... and then somehow, magically, the corpse begins to stir, and the hero springs up smiling once more.

So we sat down and got to work. We had to ratchet our production values down a bit: previous performances have included live music and shadow puppetry -- and once Craig even borrowed (and operated) a vanload of theatrical lighting equipment for us -- but we knew we didn't have time for any of that this year. Fortunately "Frederick" proved to be the perfect tale: ripe with ready-made graphics (adapted with only a few hair-tearing Photoshop fiascos), easily expanded to incorporate our cathartic parody of education reform, and full of juicy yet easily-costumed roles for (almost) everyone.

The story opens with a chatty community of field mice playing happily along the old stone wall that is their home. As the summer ends, they begin to gather wheat and nuts, corn and straw, for the winter to come. When the others ask Frederick why he isn't working too, he says he is working: he's gathering the sun's rays, collecting colors, and storing up words for the long cold grey days ahead.

Fall comes, and the mice head off to school. Bryan, typecast as the teacher, encourages his students to explore their individual passions, while also teaching them important things like fractions, physics, and limnology.

But as the winter drags on, life gets grimmer and grimmer. The corn runs out, the berries are gone, and the school budget is cut, and cut again. An officious Superintendent and her Minion begin to enforce a strictly standardized curriculum, along with a series of authoritarian, soul-crushing rules: "Due to your failure to make Adequate Hourly Progress under No Mouse Left Behind, recess will be replaced with an hour of test-taking drills."

Eventually Bryan is fired for giving his fourth grade mice colored pastels -- which, the Superintendent points out ferociously, are defined by the Absolutely and Completely Aligned Standards for Regimented Creative Expression in the Visual Arts as a fifth grade medium (this was one of many plot points that came more or less directly from the educational trenches).

Frederick (played by Menna) confronts the Superin- tendent (a.k.a. her mother): "You can't stop us from doing art! We can take your stupid tests all day, but that won't teach us what's really important! We need to know what's inside us! We need to know how to do the things that matter to us! We need to know how to share our gifts with the world!"

The Superintendent, hissing with rage, lifts the book of Completely Aligned Standards high, revealing flaming dragon wings beneath her business suit. "This," she sneers, "is all you need to know." She brings the enormous tome crashing down on Frederick's head. Thus our Hero is slain.

Simon and Ioan played the Doctor, in the form of Batman and Robin (their entrance involved a not-terribly-subtle "Waiting for Superman" joke, for those of you steeped in the latest ed reform debates). Their Strategic Planning fails to revive Frederick. Singapore Math has no effect. The lottery ticket to a charter school is no good either.

Robin offers up an enormous bag of cash: "Holy tax cuts for the rich, Batman -- have you tried adequate educational funding?" Batman sweeps the bag aside: "You can't just throw money at this problem, Robin. What we need isn't anything you can buy, like pencils or books or smaller class sizes. No, Robin, we just need to believe in ourselves! We can make things better if we keep trying, and trying, and trying. And trying. And trying. Forever! What we need is an injection of Hope!"

Robin is happy to administer this (what little brother wouldn't jump at the chance to slam an enormous red syringe into his sister's left buttock?) Alas, the injection of Hope is not enough to revive the lifeless (though noticably giggling) Frederick. "Sorry folks," says Batman on his way out, "some students you just have to leave behind."

Then comes the real revival. Frederick's friends recall how during the summer he gathered his own supplies for the winter. They find his jar of sun rays, and Bronwen begins to draw a picture of Frederick, which appears on the screen behind her.

The teacher gives her the forbidden colored pastels, and the picture on the screen blooms into color. Then Bronwen reads Frederick's poem -- the words he gathered to get them through the long winter.

As she reads, the mouse on the screen turns around and opens his eyes.

The mice all watch in wonder as the Frederick on the screen jumps off the rock and reaches down toward the slain Frederick sprawled on the floor below. As the screen mouse stretches back up, the real Frederick stirs, stands, and recites the final lines of the poem together with Bronwen. Then, as in the book, the other mice say, "Frederick, you're a poet!" And the two Fredericks blush and bow in unison. "I know it."

(If you're seeing a connection between the revival of Frederick -- by means of his own supplies of light, color, and words -- and a certain Christmas light installation, you may not be too far off the mark.)

Warmed and cheered by the play and the pot-luck feast that followed, we packed our bags and headed south, hoping to gather a few sun rays of our own on Granny Shan's deck.

The downside of staging an amateur theatrical production in your neighbors' basement on December 22nd and boarding a plane on the 23rd, is that Christmas Eve finds you woefully unprepared in the gift department. Thus we spent our first morning in Los Angeles frantically scouring the West Side for certain highly-coveted items, and the afternoon in a paroxysm of wrapping that, it is believed, may have finally used up the last of the polka-dot paper the 'rents bought from Lexi in 1991 as part of a Junior High fundraiser.

Lexi unearthed her painted walnut Santa, vintage 1983.

At dusk the whole extended family gathered to decorate the tree -- and to enact the age-old struggle between the children's delighted attachment to the ornaments they remember from their youth, and the secret parental desire to have at least three items hanging on the tree that are not faded, squashed, threadbare, or shedding grade-school glitter. The intergenerational maneuvering was all the more amusing as we had just experienced it from the other side in our own living room three days before. Fortunately, fir trees have many branches, and plenty of room for everyone's favorites. (And don't worry, Josie, we love your 1999 yarn-and-foam Baby Jesus just as much as you do.)

I got Emmett to dig out the giant felt
heart I remembered from my first
Christmas in Santa Monica.

Four hours later the tree was trimmed, with presents piled high underneath it. Our bellies were stuffed with ham, and the stockings were stuffed with mysterious lumps. We felt like we had just completed some kind of crazy Christmas tri-athalon.

But instead of sinking into the hot tub, downing some eggnog, and then hitting the hay, we somehow found the energy to journey out into the night for Midnight Mass at Saint Augustine by the Sea. We're not Catholics by any stretch, but, like many ritual-starved spiritual seekers, we enjoy the majesty and spectacle of an all-out church service once in a while. (It turns out St. Augustine's is an "open and inclusive" Episcopal congregation that dates back to 1875 -- but we didn't know that when we went.)

For one thing, all those lovely Christmas carols resonate so much deeper when they're sung in context -- that is, as part of a ceremonial retelling of the story of Jesus's birth -- and even more so when they're wafting down from a white-robed choir above you, or rolling out of a 30-stop pipe organ whose thrilling volume is matched only by that of a slightly tipsy tenor in the row behind you. You haven't really sung "O Come All Ye Faithful," for instance, until the opening bars have caught you on your way up the church steps six minutes late, and you manage to scamper inside and plop down in a pew and grab a hymnal just in time to join in on the first line. Now that, my friends, is joyful and triumphant.

The sermon touched me too: a gentle musing on the improbable, earth-shattering notion that God -- you know, the Almighty, Everlasting Father, the Creator, Alpha and Omega, that Guy -- should somehow choose, when it comes time to put in an appearance on Earth, to take the form of a helpless, homeless infant. "When we come into the stable and see the baby laying there in the manger," said Father Mark Stuart, "it's as if we are looking into the engine room of an ocean liner. This is the force that's powering the Universe? It's unnerving: we don't really want to know." People want to think that God is going to protect them, comfort them, guide them, answer their prayers, judge their enemies (I don't really think of God this way, but it seems like if you're going to have an anthropomorphic God, He might as well be the kind who comes sweeping in with awesome power and sets things right). That's certainly the kind of Messiah anticipated in the verses we had just heard from Isaiah and Hebrews.

And instead here is this totally vulnerable creature reaching out his tiny arms to us, searching our faces with wobbly newborn eyes. We are going to have to nurture Him. This idea has been slowly trickling through me ever since: that somehow we have all been invited to share in the responsibilities of protection, comfort, guidance, and judgment -- and in the scary, exhilarating process of Creation too.

Our friend Colin lights up the
room while awaiting the
start of "Frederick."

You could look at it the other way, I suppose: maybe our own power lies in giving up the illusion of control, facing up to the fragile, helpless creatures we are -- whether children or parents, mice or men -- and reaching out to the world with brand-new, wide-open, wonder-ridden hearts. I hope it's not sacrilege to imagine that each of us has the capacity to light up a stable, if not the whole world.

The service ended with "Joy to the World," which carried us out of the church, through the empty midnight streets, back to the house, into the hot tub, and then finally, finally -- into bed.


Merry Belated Christmas, everyone! More LA stories on the way... Thanks to our California hosts on both sides of the family, and to Rachel for the Mummers Play pictures!