Religion – Everything That Happened

Category: Religion

Parochial School

On October 7, 2019

A statue of Jesus Christ is lowered off the roof of St. John’s School after it toppled during a wind storm on Sept. 19, 2012. – Julio Cortez / AP

A lot of the kids in my neighborhood went to Saint John’s parochial school, not a majority, but enough that they were a danger when they were set free in the afternoon. Local public-school kids knew to stay out of sight when Saint John’s let out. The St. John’s kids’ spirits were so crushed, and the boys so full of pent-up anger, that anything could happen. The exception to this was the Doheny kids; there were six of them and they could go off at any time, not just after school. Anyone who fought a Doheny kid had to fight all of them. They lived a block away from me, but their house was not on the way to my school, a public school, so I could avoid them.

Saint John’s parochial school, aka Columbus Hall, 1915

St. John’s school took up one corner of St. John’s cemetery. On top of its domed roof was a floodlit statue of Jesus Christ . At night, the statue seemed to float above the dark cemetery, its outstretched arms either comforting or threatening, depending on the state of your conscience.

When I walked home late at night from my job setting up bowling pins, I encountered a double dose of creepiness. From two blocks away I could see floating Jesus; next I came to the cemetery itself. I walked on the opposite side of the street, because its high, stuccoed walls always seemed to be bulging outward. I knew the level of the earth inside the walls was higher than outside, and that the graves were old, with some burials done at least two caskets deep, so I imagined a great pressure against those walls. It didn’t help that I had been reading a lot of Edgar Allan Poe.

Years later I was doing family research, and someone in the church rectory told me my great-grandmother Bridget owned a family plot there. When I located the plot it was mostly grass and bushes, with very few grave markers, none of them with a family name. I think some fishy stuff goes on with ownership in these old cemeteries.

My wife went to parochial school, in Pennsylvania. She had a story she told me in private, but I have repeated it so often that I might as well tell it one more time. I call it “The Fart-Detecting Nun”. When my wife was in the early grades of parochial school, Sister heard somebody fart and demanded to know who had done it. When none of the girls confessed, she searched the classroom by sniffing her way up and down each aisle. That’s it, that’s the whole story, it’s not much but I think it’s funny.

Vocal performance in the Crypt of the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart

One last creepy story. When we lived in Newark, we sent my older son to the parochial school at Sacred Heart Cathedral because the Newark public schools were failing. On rainy days, if his class had to travel between the school and the church, they went underground, through the Crypt of the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart, where deceased parish priests and higher ranking members of the clergy were said to “await the Lord’s return” in their marble vaults. My son said it was ‘spooky’.

Three-minute YouTube tour of the crypt – courtesy egermainet

Epilogue

St. John’s parochial school closed in June 2018. The diocese now rents its classroom space to the Orange public school system.

Credo, more or less

By Paul

On September 20, 2019

In Musings, Religion, School, Teachers

My father was a Catholic, nominally. I don’t think he ever went to church as an adult. One of my aunts said when he did go to Mass as a child, he always managed to avoid the collection plate.

Similarly, my mother was a Protestant, nominally. I don’t think she ever went to church as an adult either. Her way of staying right with the Lord may have been simply to make sure I attended Sunday School. She accomplished this by finding neighbors who attended a nearby Protestant church and were willing to give me a ride each Sunday. She didn’t seem fussy about which flavor of Protestant services I attended; I remember Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist, depending on where we were living. Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Eick, pronounced “Ike”, of Linwood Place, for giving me a weekly ride to the Washington Street Baptist Church in your rumble-seated car, and for sometimes treating me to a second breakfast if I showed up for my ride too early.

Full immersion baptism, Chestnut Mountain Church, Flowery Branch, Georgia

I was baptized a Catholic at the age of one month, so even if the rules about who gets into Heaven are as stringent as I’ve heard from some Catholic sources, I remain eligible. In the Baptist church, baptism (full-immersion, y’all, Acts 8:38, Mark 1:5) is reserved for those “able to make a mature confession of faith”; most baptisms I’ve seen were of young people in their early teens or a little younger; certainly mature enough .

Somehow, the Baptists never got around to baptizing me; that’s probably just as well, because there are some doctrinal problems with being baptized twice; your mileage may vary. The closest I have come to professing the Baptist faith openly was having “BAPTIST” stamped on my army dog tags, along with my blood type, “O”.

Soon after I opened my first checking account, a local radio station aired a feature story about an orphanage in Kearney (next to Newark) burning down, and soliciting contributions to rebuild. The fire sounded pretty devastating, and I had once written a book report on Oliver Twist, so I was ripe. I broke out my new checkbook and wrote Sacred Heart Orphanage of Kearney a check for something like five or ten dollars, not a trivial sum then. When my first bank statement arrived, I asked my mother to help me understand it. As we reviewed the half-dozen or so cashed checks, we came to the one to Sacred Heart, and she said “What’s this?!” I relayed the whole burnt-down orphanage story, which only seemed to anger her. Raising her voice just a little, she said “The Pope doesn’t need your money.” End of discussion.

I married a woman who was raised Catholic; this never posed a problem because she was not a churchgoer either. Back when Catholics were forbidden to eat meat on Friday, she ignored the rule; the only time it ever came up was once when we were out shopping – she said “It won’t feel right to eat meat on Good Friday”, and I said “Okay, let’s get fish then.” We started both our kids along the Catholic path of confirmation and first communion, because that way they can make up their own minds later on, right?

During a confirmation ceremony, the officiating bishop asks the candidates several questions from a predefined list. The kids get advance coaching in the questions and the correct answers from adult volunteers; those kids who have not attended parochial school find the questions and concepts more difficult. Despite my protests, I got volunteered into coaching my older son. To keep my own conscience clear while still following the study guide, my practice questions took the form “Now, if the bishop asks you ‘How does the Holy Spirit help us?’, what are you going to say?” On the day of the ceremony, I got some holy water sprinkled in my face as the bishop’s procession entered the church. It didn’t burn, so I guess that approach was okay.

Imagine this seven years older, green and much less shiny

One thing I did in high school was definitely a Bad Thing, religion-wise, as was confirmed by Miss Riley, our world history teacher. I had a ’47 Pontiac, and in the morning I might pick up a few friends, then, once at school, if I was not planning to stick around, ask “Who’s going in?”. Those remaining in the car would drive around aimlessly with me for the rest of the day, or at least until it was time for me to go to work. I was not at all familiar with the ceremonies of the Catholic Church, and one Ash Wednesday my friends wanted to get their ashes applied before school. I drove around town under their direction, but the churches all had long lines. Some of them decided to get out and line up anyway, leaving just me and one passenger. Knowing that the only excuse to arrive late to school that day was to enter through the attendance office with ashes on our foreheads, I suggested using the ashes in the car’s ashtray. I don’t recall whether my passenger joined in or not, but I decorated my forehead with a smudge similar to those I had seen walking the streets all morning and entered the school without difficulty. I should have thought to wash off the ashes as soon as I got past the attendance office, but did not. When I got to world history class, Miss Riley, who had attended this very high school with my mother and knew her well, took one look at my smudge and squawked “YOU’RE NOT CATHOLIC!”. She didn’t know, of course, that my ashes were fake; that would have been so much worse; she was angry at my assumed (by her) decision to present myself to a priest as Catholic to obtain an excuse to be late to school. She told me I should be ashamed, and to wash my face and think very hard about what I’d done. I was ashamed, or at least I am now, for disrespecting someone else’s religion; I did wash my face; and I do continue to think about religion, although not so hard any more.

Thoughts

Back in the day, my wife and I liked to explore old cemeteries. While admiring the statuary and mausoleum architecture of a Catholic cemetery in Westchester, we noticed off at one side two rows of tiny headstones. There were maybe 30 or 40 in all, each very close to the next, and marked with numbers instead of names. We wondered what that was all about, and one day my wife called to ask. The woman who answered asked her in turn “Are you Catholic, dear?”. Getting an affirmative, she explained that section was the unconsecrated part of the cemetery, and those were graves of unbaptized babies and stillbirths. I don’t know what we expected, but that made us sad.

Church dogma then said the unborn and unbaptized were consigned to Limbo., which Encyclopedia Britannica defines as “Limbo, in Roman Catholic theology, the border place between heaven and hell where dwell those souls who, though not condemned to punishment, are deprived of the joy of eternal existence with God in heaven.”

However, according to Wikipedia, “Recent Catholic theological speculation tends to stress the hope, although not the certainty, that these infants may attain heaven instead of the state of Limbo.” So that’s at least something.

The editor of the syndicated newspaper column The Ethicist once responded to a question from a lapsed-Catholic-gone-atheist reader who had been pressed into service as a pallbearer in a Catholic funeral ceremony. The main point of his response was “Your participation in the service was not hypocrisy; it was an act of compassion and affection for your family. To join in some parts of the service does not require you to join in every part.” I commented to the editor:

I liked what you wrote in your “pallbearer” segment. As a non-Catholic married into a large Catholic family, I have been in that situation several times. The trick when participating in any Catholic ceremony is to finagle things so as to never be seated in the first row. One can then take the cue from others to stand, sit, or slide forward in lieu of kneeling – without seeming disrespectful, and optionally without praying.

There is a bumper sticker that says “God is who, evolution is how”, an attractive simplification. The real truth may be so deep and complex that no human has yet even imagined it.

Plainfield Courier-News, Nov 1, 1958

I’ve seen some things

By Paul

On August 14, 2019

In History, Religion, Working

“You’re not gonna believe this”

Three unrelated things I’ve seen that people seem reluctant to believe when I tell about them. Your mileage may vary.

As a child, I saw two or maybe three Civil War veterans riding in the backseat of a convertible in a patriotic parade in Bloomfield, probably on Decoration Day (now Memorial Day) 1943. I remember because I came down with measles that same day and threw up across my mother’s chenille bedspread.
I have always enjoyed watching faith healers such as Jimmy Swaggart and other noisy, lovable fakes. In the 1960s, at nine o’clock on Sunday nights on one of the local channels in Newark, there was a black preacher who practiced Faith Dentistry, although not by that name. He did the standard laying-on-of-hands, fall-backward-into-the-catchers, send-me-the-money show, but he also had testimony from those who had been cured of dental afflictions.

“…and when I woke up the next morning, my cavities were filled!”
“What were thy filled with?”
“They were filled with… SILVER!”

Google is no help tracking down this preacher or his show, so good luck to you and keep me posted.

One winter day in the early 1960s at about seven o’clock in the morning I was sitting in a bar in Dover (the Dover in Morris County) New Jersey. Don’t judge me, I was trying to stay warm until the store next door opened, and you can’t just walk into a business and not buy anything. Anyway, the TV news came on, and one of the first stories was about a huge explosion in Russia, much damage, thought to be a meteor hit. (I was guessing nuke accident.) Nothing about it in any of the newspapers next day, no follow-up on TV, nothing on Google now. Mysteries abound.

Gentleman farmer

By Paul

On August 8, 2019

In Early days, Family, Religion

My uncle Bert (Herbert, actually) Becker lived in Temperance, Michigan, farm country just across the state line from Toledo, Ohio. He worked as a pattern maker and draftsman in the auto industry and was a car lover who had owned a Stanley Steamer in his youth. He was a good man who was like a father to me. I miss him and think it’s sad that he had to leave New Jersey to seek his fortune.

A gentleman farmer, he had a house on eight-and-a-half acres of land and raised chickens as a hobby. The warm eggs were collected from the nests each morning by his daughters. They sold some, and Bert brought some to work.

Bert Becker

I was invited to stay with Bert and his family over two happy summers. My mother tried to give him money for the expense of feeding me, but he refused it.

His only son Herbie was born with Down syndrome, a disability I didn’t recognize until later. I thought he was just a person without a lot to say, not too swift and with thick glasses. When he did speak, he was hard to understand. He had three older sisters. They knew how to sew, and made their own clothes. As far as I know, their dressmaking wasn’t a money-saving thing, it was a country, small-town craft thing, and perfectly ordinary – they probably took sewing in high school . I think a high point for them was choosing from the local feed store’s 100-pound patterned-cloth chickenfeed bags whichever designs would make the prettiest blouses. I remember Uncle Bert lifting and pulling the heavy bags, shifting them around to get to the ones they wanted.

Unlike Bert, his wife Evelyn was Catholic, a woman of Irish background who raised their kids Catholic as well. Virginia, the oldest, was in training to become a nun until her order sent her home after she contracted tuberculosis before final vows. That pretty much did it for Bert with the Church. Virginia got well, and she and her sister Charlotte became nurses, often working in the same hospital and vacationing together. Naomi, the youngest girl, became a teacher.

Herbie had a friend from one farm away named Alec, who was about 14, the same age as Herbie. I was probably four years younger. Thinking back, Alec may have been just a bit limited also, but he drew fantastically detailed and lifelike pencil studies of animals and birds. One evening Herbie and Alec invited me to come along while they looked in windows, I guess a regular practice for them. I went along but not enthusiastically. I was worried we’d be caught, and we didn’t get to see anything anyway.

We spent a lot of time together walking around the “neighborhood”, really just other farms. One day I noticed something different about some barbed wire we had just come up to, the barbs were longer and sharper than what I’d seen before. I mentioned this just as I touched the point of one, getting a healthy shock. My tour guides thought this was hilarious. Fun fact: electrified fences can be recognized by the white porcelain insulators holding them to the fence posts.

One excursion that I won’t forget was a visit to a nearby farm that raised pigs, on Castration Day. I think I may have been brought there by my pals for shock value as much as for my education. The castration procedure is quick, but to this city boy even years later seems astoundingly cruel. A young pig is caught, held down, his back legs spread and his ‘gear’ vigorously cleaned with a stiff paint brush and pink antiseptic from a bucket. The testicles are squeezed together, sliced off with a straight razor and dropped into the bucket. The wound is then repainted with the pink antiseptic and the pig released. No anesthetic is involved, and the pig squeals/screams from the moment it’s caught. I asked one of the young guys involved the reason for the procedure; the answer was it makes the pig get fatter and be better behaved.

At night on Dean Road it was pitch black and dead quiet except for the crickets and frogs. I slept on the living room couch. The rare times a car passed by it could be heard coming from far up the road, then its lights seen through the screen door. The traffic was so light and random it was hard to get used to. My hosts didn’t seem to have many books, at least not in the living room, the only one I remember was a hardbound illustrated medical book of chicken diseases.

Bert’s (healthy) chicken yard was maybe 30 feet by 30, with the coop where the chickens roost at night at one side, and in the center a long-unused outhouse. When Bert and Evelyn had friends over who had never visited before, if they asked for the bathroom Bert would walk them out to the chicken-yard gate with a flashlight to see how far they would go before stopping. Just out of curiosity I used the outhouse once, it was smelly.

I had brought my cap pistol and holster along. Chickens wandered loose in the yard alongside the house, pecking the ground for insects and whatever looked interesting. I would walk up behind one, take aim and pop off a cap or two. After a while one rooster took exception to being a regular target and spurred me in the leg. My pants were heavy enough that I didn’t need stitches, but he did draw blood. A couple of weeks later Evelyn was planning a chicken dinner and Bert asked if had any thoughts on the subject. I pointed out my attacker and Bert caught him, then trussed him up so he couldn’t move. Bert was a civilized man, and didn’t like loose chickens running around spraying blood after their heads were chopped off. I asked if I could do the honors. Bert nodded, stroked the bird gently for a moment, then stretched him out on the tree stump execution block. I managed only one or two timid taps of the hatchet before Bert said “Give me that.”

There’s a lot more to a chicken dinner than killing a chicken, and I felt somehow deflated and maybe a little sad watching his innards be removed, then his carcass soaked in scalding water so the girls could more easily pull out his feathers, a tedious task. When we had Sunday dinner, I ate some, but not as much as I normally would.

Rooster spurs

Me in Michigan. The hat came with the house

Best job ever

By Paul

On August 7, 2019

In Family, Religion, Working

I got into the wholesale bakery business by answering a newspaper ad after I was fired from Foodland for telling the manager it was stupid to wait until closing time to collect the carts from the parking lot. In my supermarket days I had watched different bakery route guys operate, and it seemed like a job I might like. I applied, and although I was only 21, they liked my supermarket experience and I was in. I trained by going out on an existing route with a supervisor. An unspoken part of the first day on the job, for him, was observing whether the new hire could shift gears and steer a bakery truck without crashing or falling out the always-open door.

That day it was raining and still dark when we left the garage. After a few blocks, we approached a red light where there was stopped a mobile construction crane, no lights on, its long boom lowered to windshield height and taking up 40 feet of road behind it. When I came to a gentle stop behind the boom, the supervisor sighed, as if to say “Why is this guy stopping way back here?” Then he realized I hadn’t smeared us both against the unseen boom of the unlit crane, sighed a different kind of sigh and settled down on his wire-basket seat.

As the most-recently-hired driver/salesman, I had the least seniority, and thus ended up with the least desirable route. Its sales volume was low, meaning low commissions, and it was the longest, at about 120 miles through Morris County and parts of Essex. Some guys made little jokes about how long it was, but I had always loved driving and to me that was a plus. The route was also green and scenic; one ride-along boss came back claiming to have seen a bear chasing an Indian.

Drivers were required to be members of the Teamster’s Union, so after paying an initiation fee I became a dues-paying, union-book-carrying Teamster.

Local 37, baby

Back at the garage one afternoon, I was surprised to see Pete, the crook and my friend from Kingsway Markets. He has had a sales route here for a while. We shake hands and he says in a low voice “Tips are good here, Paulie, tips are good.” Seeing us talking, the bosses are surprised and probably a little disappointed in me that I know Pete, about whom they have their suspicions. Later, one casually asks how I know Pete, and seems reassured when I say simply that we both worked at the Kingsway supermarket in East Orange.

Morris County was just then entering a boom phase, with new housing developments, apartments and supermarkets springing up all over. No thanks to me, my route became one of the best in the garage. The company even gave me a bigger truck.

During the Cold War, Nike anti-aircraft missile bases were sprinkled about the U.S. to defend against Russian attack. The Nike base in Livingston NJ became one of my stops, with a not-very-profitable standing order of 12 loaves of bread every other day. The base was surrounded by cyclone fence and razor wire, with a guardhouse at the gate. The procedure to enter was: halt, greet the guard, wait for the gate to open, drive through.

One morning the gate was standing open and I could see that the guard was asleep. It was still dark. I tapped the horn lightly, then again, with no response. I waited for a while, then drove slowly up the hill to the mess hall. As soon as I got there, the mess sergeant came up to me in his chef’s whites and said “If you ever come through that gate again without permission you will be shot.” I didn’t see any point in making trouble for anyone by explaining why I had done that, so I remained silent. Later that day, I calculated the sales commission on 12 loaves of bread three times a week, not much. The base was a bit away from the rest of the route, eating up my valuable time and the company’s gasoline. I decided not to go there anymore.

A customer in Rockaway wants a loaf of fancy, rich butter bread, which I don’t normally carry, once a month, on the Friday before the first Sunday of the next month. It will be cut into neat cubes and used for Holy Communion in his (likely Baptist) church. I need to order my stuff one day in advance, and it’s hard to remember to check whether tomorrow will be the Friday before the first Sunday of the next month. I am a monthly disappointment to my customer; each Friday before the first Sunday of the next month, he shakes his head in sad resignation and I say I am sorry, which I genuinely am.

Sometimes I disappoint my bosses instead of the customers. One supervisor hears of a store in Mendham, according to him “just a turn of the wheel” off my route, that would like to sell Dugan products. At home I check a map and see it’s about eight miles off my route, let’s see, 8 miles times 2 at 30 mph, that’s 32 minutes – how am I supposed to add this store of unknown sales potential to my route and still get home at three o’clock in the afternoon? I am a creature of habit, and for the next few days I forget to go to my theoretical new stop and the bosses stop bringing it up.

People sometimes order specially-made cakes but change their mind. Then the driver has to bring it back to the garage. There’s a raffle; anyone interested can buy a chance for a dollar. I win this time, and proudly bring home a sheet cake inscribed “Happy Birthday Jazzelle”.

One day I finish my route early and decide to stop home for lunch before going back to the garage. After my truck has been parked in front of the house for an hour, a nosy neighbor begins to suspect the house-to-house, retail Dugan man has something going on with my wife. She sends her child to our door to snoop, saying her mother’s been waiting to pay her bill. My truck is way bigger than his, so the whole notion is absurd.

All good things must come to an end, and in 1966, Dugan Brothers, “Bakers for the Home Since 1878”, is ~~raped~~ taken advantage of in a leveraged-buyout scheme, and soon thereafter files for bankruptcy and shuts down. My kids are sad – I won’t be home at three in the afternoon any more.

Once I took my older guy out on the route with me. It was a few days before Christmas and my customers treated him like a king. He still remembers that day, and calls that job the best job ever.

Transaction

By Paul

On August 7, 2019

In History, Religion, Working

In the 1960s, the Morris County resort town of Mount Freedom was booming. The town catered to Jewish clientele from New York and Brooklyn, many of them post-war refugees from Europe. The town competed with the Catskills’ “Borscht Belt”, with a half-dozen hotels and more than 40 bungalow colonies.

I had a wholesale route for Dugan’s Bakery. One of my customers was Hesh Steinberg, who owned a grocery store convenient to the bungalows.

One day as I walked into Hesh’s to get his order, I saw that he was concluding a sale to a dark-haired woman. Because Orthodox Jews may not have physical contact with the opposite sex unless they are married, Hesh will deliver any change by dropping it into her palm.

Wearing my company’s gray uniform, I step next to her to wait my turn.

As I do, she sees that I see the numbers on her outstretched arm and snatches her hand back. The coins bounce on the counter.

A Day at the Opera

By Paul

On August 1, 2019

In Family, Music, NYC, Religion, Teachers

In grades seven and eight I had a science teacher that I really liked and admired, Mr. Fischer. He knew I liked science and science-fiction books, and was open to such classroom questions as, if light is really particles (turns out it isn’t), can it be used to push a spaceship along, even just a little bit? The atomic bomb and the possibility of atomic energy were also hot subjects in our classroom. Mr. Fischer was a bachelor, with a slight lisp and some fussy behaviors. Given what we know, or think we know, today, he was probably gay. Mr. Fischer was good friends with our music teacher Miss Barnett, who had season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera.

Miss Barnett offered Mr. Fischer a pair of tickets to see Aida, and he asked me if I wanted to go. My mom said fine with her, and off we went one Saturday on the bus to New York. On the way, we saw acres of empty steel drums stacked up in the meadowlands along the bus route. It later turned out they were not empty, as most of the world probably thought, and had been leaking toxic goo into the North Jersey soil for years.

We arrived at the Met, still in the original building at 39^th Street, and climbed to our seats. This is not meant as a complaint about the tickets, but we were in real nosebleed territory, the highest section in the house. The section was so steep that when I looked around, I was peering straight between the knees of the old lady behind me. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the whole outing and thought the opera was fantastic. I know now that some people think Aida is bombastic, but what did I know then, kids love bombast.

Aida. Metropolitan Opera, 2014

Now, here’s what I think happened next, deduced by putting together two and two and based on the available evidence,

One Mr. Grady, who lived two doors down from us on Rayburn Terrace, was the janitor at Cleveland Street School. He was a devout Catholic who went to Mass every morning; he carried a rosary in his back pocket and could be seen fingering it from time to time. Mr. Grady hated Mr. Fischer for the predictable reasons, and had gotten wind of our opera excursion. Mr. Grady put a bug in my mother’s ear that perhaps Mr. Fischer was leading her son astray, and she should beware. My mother then confided in her boss, Mr.Edwards, with whom she was on friendly terms and maybe just a little bit office-romancy – Mr. Edwards would sometimes drive her home at night so she wouldn’t have to take the bus. Perhaps her bookish son was being groomed as a Friend of Dorothy? Mr. Edwards considered the issue and came up with an idea.

Next, the only tangible evidence I have of all this speculation.

My mother came home from work one day and said “Mr. Edwards thought you might like this calendar.” Indeed I would, for it was probably the most risqué pinup calendar then available, Vargas Girls in provocative poses and showing as much skin as was legal. “Um, thanks!” I had never been given anything by Mr. Edwards before.

After a decent interval I was upstairs, the staples were out and my top six picks were on the wall alongside the Honor Roll certificates. I was cured.

12 months of Vargas Girls

Presbyterian Minstrel Show

By Paul

On July 25, 2019

In Music, Religion

My church, and I call it “my” church because East Orange Presbyterian was the closest Protestant church that my mother could get a neighbor to give me a ride to every Sunday, decided to give a minstrel show. I know what you’re thinking, but it was a long time ago, we didn’t know any better, and the nation was young.

Church members with an interest in show business volunteered for the various roles of minstrelsy, and rehearsals began on the fellowship hall stage. Maybe there is some sort of widely available, generic script for a minstrel show, for everyone seemed to know what they were doing. There was singing (Swanee River, Polly Wolly Doodle), tap dancing, and comic skits — for example, one included a collection of one-off fruits and vegetables, and a woman who says to her suitor “But darling, we…”, then holds up, wait for it, a cantalope!, as immediately recognized and shouted out by a willing audience.

Was there blackface? I honestly don’t remember, but yes, probably. Burnt cork is easy to manufacture, apply and remove, and also makes a fine beard for a Christmas Wise Man or Halloween hobo.

The players rehearsed religiously, seated onstage in the traditional minstrel-show arrangement of chairs. At only nine or ten years old, I was a stagehand, my sole duty being to open and close the curtains between acts. The show was scheduled for one night only, a Thursday. On that Thursday, as I was getting ready for bed, a stray thought crossed my mind and I froze and said to myself “Shit.”

I assume the show started just fine without me, but I never went back to that church and never knew for sure what happened that night at eight o’clock. Whenever I tell this story to someone, they always say “Wow, maybe they’re still stuck behind the curtains.” That’s crazy, right?

to me and sometimes to other people

Category: Religion

Thoughts