The Nativity

The year was 1992. First grade. Catholic school. My class was putting on a holiday play, something to do with Mary, Joseph, and the inn they got booted from. From a very young age, I was taught the story of Jesus’s birth, the three wise men, a star, etc. I can’t say I relate to Jesus’s heterosexual parents’ Christmas experience because I’m gay and the only time I’ve ever been kicked out of an establishment is when I went to a Shania Twain concert in Las Vegas. (An usher said I had too much to drink, and apparently some of the other patrons complained that I was singing “Man, I Feel Like a Woman” too loudly. That was blasphemous.) Regardless, I’ve never been turned away from lodging, so I’m sure it’s especially tough when you’ve been traveling by foot or camel and you’re preggers. The religious tale, a holiday staple, was repeated to me every year since my own birth, and when I was seven years old, my schoolteacher thought it would be appropriate for us to recreate the legendary Christmas night as a performance for our parents.

The story of Mary and Joseph doesn’t have a ton of characters for students to play in an adaptation. Ocean’s Eleven might’ve worked better, but that wasn’t in the cards for Saint Rita Elementary. Instead, the teacher cast the few main roles while assigning most of my peers as horses, camels, sheep, and other randos that were added to the script to accommodate over thirty children. I remember one kid was dressed as a black cat for the nativity play because his mom had a leftover costume from Halloween that she insisted they let him use. Our teacher, already mentally on winter break, gave in, and suddenly a cat was listed in the playbill. The play narrator had to explain that the cat followed Mother Mary from Nazareth so that the audience would understand why a young boy named Christopher was purring in the background of every scene. The program credited him as Chris the Christmas Cat and confused a lot of us. So much holiday imagery is thrown at young people, and they’re expected to understand how Jesus and Santa are both somehow the leading men of Christmas. Now here comes a cat named Chris, leading many young impressionable students to deduce that the Christmas holiday might’ve been named after the character, the only student whose recently divorced mother, Marnie, refused to spend any extra money at Joann Fabric for a costume she knew would only be worn once. Marnie had legal bills to pay and a fresh perm waiting.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to play an animal. Instead, I got to portray an angel, specifically the angel narrator! I was the first one the audience saw, and I got to explain the cat situation. It wasn’t a lead role exactly, but it had more lines than the man and woman who ran the inn. If this was Ocean’s Eleven, then I was Matt Damon—not the lead but also not Scott Caan. My job was to welcome everyone to the show, introduce the first scene and our cast of characters, and then step aside until the end when I’d shoo baby Jesus and the cat off the stage to say goodbye to the audience.

I took my responsibilities very seriously, as I’ve always wanted to be an entertainer. I daydreamed about a modeling scout being in the audience, sweeping me away to Hollywood to make me a star. Not only did I have to know my lines, but I had to look great too. As soon as I booked the role, I rushed home to tell my mom that I needed to look like the best angel the town had ever seen! Linda Pellegrino can do a lot of things, and she’s the greatest woman on planet earth, but she’s not super crafty. She can cook the best casserole you’ll ever have, but she’s not great with a hot glue gun. Being that we were also living on a tight budget back then, it meant my costume was simply going to be one of my mom’s white button-down shirts. We planned on using my dad’s shirt, but the morning of the show, he saw his shirt pressed and thought it meant he was supposed to wear it to work. Mom improvised and ironed her ladies’ business wear instead. When I told her I needed a halo, she told me to “figure it out,” so I went to my teacher, who tossed me a leftover pipe cleaner. Since my costume was shit, I knew I’d have to dazzle with my performance. I’d studied my lines, changed a few words in the script to play to my strengths, left room for improvisation, and learned to project my voice so it would carry to the back of the room. I basically just shouted every word during rehearsal, in an acting style multiple teachers back then and throughout my adult life describe as “too loud,” but that’s neither here nor there.

The final and only performance was the last day of school before winter break. We were supposed to arrive at the classroom in the morning, get into costume for one last rehearsal, have a quick lunch in the cafeteria, and at exactly one o’clock, our audience (parents who either didn’t work or were able to get off work) would enjoy the fruits of our labor. After the show, the kids and their guests would have a party, which mostly meant snowflake-shaped Jell-O and Hi-C juice boxes. Mom sent me off on the school bus that morning with a kiss, ensuring me that although Dad and my grandparents were booked for the day, she would be leaving work early to come see my big play. She also told me to be careful with her shirt. I was elated.

Dress rehearsal was perfect—some might even say Meryl-esque—and the confidence it gave me turned me into a monster. I walked around the cafeteria encouraging the young lady playing Mary to enunciate, told Joseph his costume made him look hunchbacked when he didn’t elongate his neck, and even asked Chris the Christmas Cat to be more aware of his entrances. Like Tom Cruise on the War of the Worlds press tour, I was a nightmare. Lunch wrapped up, and we all headed back to the theater (a classroom with the desks removed) for the big performance. As the guests flooded in, I was walking on cloud nine, excited to show off my skills to my mom. I figured if a modeling scout wasn’t in the audience, Mom would at least recognize my talents and whisk me away to the West Coast to become a star—my own Midwest Dina Lohan.

More and more people arrived as the clock got closer to one. I saw my friend Brian’s mom, my buddy Michael’s grandparents, and even a girl named Kelly’s older brother, a sixth grader who got special permission to come watch the show. It felt like absolutely everyone was there…except Linda Pellegrino. Mom was a busy woman, but she always showed up. If for some reason she couldn’t make it to an event, she would send my dad, a grandparent, or an aunt in her place. Someone would be there because someone was always there. By quarter after one, the flop sweat started, and there was still no sign of anyone from my circle. My teacher asked me if I was ready. WAS I READY? Of course not! Mom wasn’t there! Dreams of becoming Hollywood royalty were slipping by, and furthermore, I couldn’t possibly perform without emotional support in the audience.

“We need to begin,” my teacher proclaimed. “The guests are getting antsy.”

I froze, and within moments, I did what I assume Nicole Kidman does before a take when she doesn’t have a handle on whatever accent she’s attempting…I cried. And I cried. And I cried some more. Again, this show was being done in a classroom, not in a theater, so I wasn’t behind a curtain; I was simply sobbing in front of the crowded room. The audience awkwardly stared while the other students reveled in my misery. I had just spent an entire lunch hour telling them all how glib they were as actors, and now I couldn’t even start the show. As if that weren’t bad enough, they couldn’t begin without me because I opened the whole shebang! It wouldn’t make sense without my angel character explaining why there was a fucking cat onstage for the nativity. How would the audience know why there were seven wise men traveling on Christmas Eve instead of the traditional three? And what would the crowd make of them carrying not frankincense, gold, and myrrh but a leftover Jell-O snowflake and a handful of pencil erasers since one of the other students had vomited on some of the props? (He forgot his lunch, and the staff ran out of whatever they were cooking, so he had to have a leftover meal. The lunch lady called it Salisbury steak, but was it maybe dog food? Unclear.)

The teacher told me we could wait until 1:30, half an hour later than planned, but then the show had to start because she was planning on going home early, and pushing it back any further meant she wouldn’t be there by four to watch Oprah.

1:28 p.m.: Still no Mom.

1:29 p.m.: The door opened, and I thought maybe it was my mom, but instead it was the lunch lady tiptoeing in to either watch the show or apologize to the young boy she’d poisoned an hour earlier.

1:30 p.m.: Time to start the show!

My teacher walked toward me, and I knew what was coming. She was going to tell me the show must go on. The conversation went something like this (probably)…

“Are you okay to go on, or do you want me to do your part?” the teacher asked me gently.

“How dare you put me between a rock and a hard place? Please just give me ten more minutes!”

“There’s no time! You get your ass out there and start the fucking nativity play, or I will!”

“You want to throw the fucks around? I’ll throw the fucks around! I am not starting the fucking play until my fucking mother is in the fucking audience. You fucking got that?” I replied, wide-eyed and firm.

“That’s it. I’m going out there and reading your lines!”

“You bitch.”

The teacher began exiting to the front of the stage.

“No, wait! I’ll fucking go,” I said.

I walked in front of the audience, tears still streaming from my eyes, no strength to deliver my lines with any oomph after I just wasted my energy on the impatient instructor. I mumbled through the script, barely enunciating, like an early Gerard Butler performance. Inside, I was a mess. As soon as I was done with the intro, I ran out of the classroom to get some space and calm my nerves. There was no way I could stay inside and see all the proud parents watching their kids play absurd animals. And the last thing I wanted to see in that moment was a Halloween cat meowing through the birth of Christ.

There I was, in the hallway of my grade school, sitting with my knees to my chest and thinking about how mad I was at my mother. How could she do this to me? She never did this to me! I wish I could say I was worried about her, but the truth is, at that age, you think everyone around you is invincible. The thought that something had happened to her didn’t even cross my mind. She must’ve decided not to come. Just as my tears started to mix with the anger, I heard a bell and saw my mom running down the hall in a red blazer (complete with shoulder pads because it was the early ’90s). Around her neck was a beaded green-and-red necklace I had made her the year before as a gift, complete with a bell in the center. I looked up and saw Mom, her eyes matching mine: filled with tears.

“I missed it.” She sighed as she sat on the cold cracked tile next to me, knees to her chest.

“You missed it,” I replied.

“Danster, I’m sorry. Someone rear-ended my car, and they insisted we report it even though there was no damage. I did everything I could,” she explained.

I wish I could say I forgave her immediately, understanding that accidents happen and sometimes life is out of your control. Instead, I seethed with anger, unable to control my emotions. She’d let me down.

Shortly thereafter, the play ended. I never went back inside the room, but the other students did join me in the hallway, where the holiday party was set to begin now that the nativity theater performance was done. Some of the other PTA parents passed out candy and festively shaped Jell-O, while a mom with a camera offered to snap photos of the kids with their guests. When she approached us, Mom insisted that we smile for the photo. A Christmas memory we could cherish forever, she thought. Problem is, I didn’t want to smile. The result is a photo that makes me look like a child warlock in an oversize ladies’ shirt.

Mom faked the best smile she could when she gripped my shoulders to pose for the Polaroid. The photo made its way to a Popsicle stick picture frame with a red-and-green ribbon tied at the top, which we hooked on our tree each December. Year after year, Mom and I would decorate the tree with a collection of homemade ornaments. We would hang the memory on a branch and reminisce about that day at school. Eventually, I moved out of the house, and Mom would give me a call around Thanksgiving, after she trimmed the family tree, to remind me just how badly she wanted to be there for me that day in grade school.

Now that I’m an adult, I have my own box of ornaments to hang. As I get the decorations out of storage, I think about how lucky I am. Although I wish Mom could’ve seen me perform that day, I am grateful she desperately wanted to be there. No adult wants to sit through a first-grade play—hell, most adults don’t want to sit through any play. But she did.

When I visit my parents’ house and see that familiar Popsicle-stick ornament on their large fake tree, I don’t remember the sadness I felt in the first grade, the first time I realized my mom wasn’t invincible. What sticks out now is the sound of the bell shaking as she rushed toward me in the school hallway. Her beautiful brown eyes that were passed down to me filled with tears, just like mine. I no longer care that she didn’t make it. I’m simply thankful I had a mom I wanted to be there more than anything and that she felt the same. The holiday season is not about the gifts or the decorations; it’s about the people you’ll do anything to see.