Ho Ho, Oh No!

By Ben Siegel

This column appeared in the November/December issue of Block Club Magazine.

Of all my theatrical conquests in grade school, no role was more undeserving and unwarranted than that of my debut.  Well, not my technical debut, when I hovered over Sleeping Beauty as a tree.  In nursery school.

No, I’m talking about my debut on the legit stage, the role that gave me the bug to perform on stage and off.  I couldn’t hide from the fact that I was born to play him; even at the tender age of seven I could see that.  Thoughts of character motivation and psychoanalytical insight permeated my every thought.

“Oh, the joy and happiness I’ll get to bring to my audience of colleagues in the second grade; those lowly drama spectators who spell theatre with a ‘-er’ instead of the Shakespearean ‘-re.’ How pedestrian, what fools!”

“What will I offer to the role that enhances yet does not detract from what everyone loves about this character?”

“Who would take my headshot on such short notice?  Is Annie Leibovitz available?”

And then the piercing reality became apparent to me:  I’m a Jew!  How can I, Benjamin David Siegel, play Santa Claus in earnest?  Couldn’t another kid stuff his gut with padding and pay homage to his own patron saint of 2-for-1 sales and catalog shopping?  And furthermore, couldn’t this December concert include something other than Christmas?

I should include, at this point, that at that time in the Williamsville Central School District, the term “holiday concert” wasn’t yet used to describe what was essentially the Christmas concert.  Such multi-denominational allowances weren’t made to those of us on the fringe until years later, when a gang of parents demanded seasonal phrases like “winter concert” and “spring break” be implemented.

I got the point in my chorus teacher’s casting me, though.  I was the fat kid.  There were few others like me, and certainly none that could hold a note long enough to solicit applause.  If Santa were to be played to any reasonable effect, I must be the one to assume the legendary red and white suit.  At least the gym teacher-slash-costumer thought sympathetically of me enough to pad my mid-section (and adhere my beard with cotton balls as rubber cement).

Looking back on this, I laugh.  Of course, I’ve exploited the whole ordeal of being pointed out in chorus rehearsal as that grade’s rotund jelly roll of joy, of finding the gentlest way of telling my proud Jewish mom, of getting over the embarrassment of not being a slender athlete type.

Hell, this was my chance for a slam dunk of my own.  Or a jumping jack.  Or whatever it was kids did in gym class.  I don’t remember. I was in the nurse’s office.

I remember this story not because it provides evidence of my dramatic tendencies at such a tender age.  Not because it opens the door on a resume of stage and screen appearances, volumes of which I cannot list here for reasons not at all unrelated to modesty.  (And the fact that one does not actually exist.)

I remember this because it sums up what the holidays, for me, are all about.  The facts of this casting are self-evident:  I was a young Jewish boy in a diverse yet mostly Christian population, who sacrificed any semblance of religious self-pride for the sake of pleasing others, let alone obeying my teachers’ direction.  I could also enunciate pretty nicely.

Now I don’t consider my dressing up as Santa and parading in front of parents and teachers any more humiliating than any other daily happening in grade school.  Lunch table overpopulation seats you with the nose-pickers; no one likes you, everyone likes everyone else.  Nothing new here.

Today I make my own lunch table next to God’s multi-denominational holiday buffet.  I celebrate my Jewish holidays because I don’t celebrate the Christian ones.  The story of Hanukkah and the eight days of light the oil miraculously provided means very little to me.  Pass the salt.  My potato pancake is bland.

While I no longer attend to the religious aspects of my Judaism (only the spiritual, at the risk of sounding like every other enlightened twentysomething), I am at home in my Jewishness when the culture and traditions of gathering and togetherness are involved.  The same, I would suspect, goes for some Christians who may have forgotten that Christmas starts with Christ.

So I was a fat Jewish kid who fit into the costume they already had.  Big deal.  I was made to give up my unalienable rights and give in to The Man.  Whatever.  I was seven.

At least I could hit the high notes.

Posted by on 11/12 at 05:17 PM