Time Out for Fun
Light blogging continues this week with Sam here until Friday. I was out of town all weekend in a cabin by a lake a few miles west of Monticello, NY with Christina’s family, including her Aunt Elizabeth and her little boy Andrew, who’s only a year or so older than Sam.
I guess “cabin” is a bit of a misnomer: it was a fully modern, 3-bedroom, 2-bath bungalow with a full array of appliances, a private beach-front, a dock, a grill, and a kayak. Christina’s parents go up to the area every summer because her sister Chelsea goes to a theatre camp in the area. “This is the first time we rented one of these cabins,” her father said over beers on Friday. “I hate this part of NY. The services suck, you can’t find decent beer, everything closes early, and the hotels are overpriced and low-quality. But this year, Skee found this place and we figured why not. Man, this beats the hell out of a hotel!”
I had to agree. The house is on a private road, we had plenty of food and there was no impetus to do anything but sit around, imbibe, watch the kids play, and jump in the lake.
While we were there, we headed up to the camp to see Chelsea’s final performance (she’s 18 and this was her last year). Chelsea is such a talented young woman, a fine actress with a stellar voice, and it’s not hyperbole to say she carried what was otherwise (IMO) a nearly unwatchable production of something called “Children of Eden”, a musical play based on the first two stories in Genesis, the Adam and Eve myth and the Noah myth.
The songs were, in a word, brutal. I’ve never much cared for show tunes, but this was the worst kind of tuneless, forcing-a-melody-when-there’s-nothing-to-base-it-on garbage I’d heard in some time. On top of that, God’s relationship to humanity was portrayed as a parent-child relationship, with Adam and Eve calling God “Mother” (Chelsea played God). But if you think about it, it’s not a very good analogy, unless you really mean to elevate child abuse to some kind of divine status: after all, God not only has no forgiveness at all for Adam and Eve’s trespass against Her commands, She curses all of Cain’s offspring for something their father did, and then proceeds to murder all of Her children with a 40-day flood. Meanwhile, humanity-aka-her-children keeps thanking Mother for this scrap of food and the other. Thanks for the food Mom, please don’t beat me to death like you did my sister…
Also frustrating was the implicit assumption on the part of the playwright that the audience is familiar with Genesis. One thing I’ve learned as a writer is that the only assumption you should ever make is that your audience doesn’t know what you’re talking about Without exposition, the characters were nothing more than a flat allegorical device. You never get to learn Eve’s motive for eating the Fruit of Knowledge, you never really understand why Cain slew Abel or why God curses all of Cain’s offspring, and you never really get to learn why God is so intolerant of and threatened by these powerless creatures she made in Her own image and claims to love, that she feels she has to destroy them. Imagine the plot-free “Starlight Express”, but churchy. The playwright clearly assumed the audience had some level of biblical knowledge, which may be an easy assumption if you’re putting on a production in a church. But for a kid like Sam who hasn’t grown up with the propaganda, it was difficult if not impossible to follow.
This turned out to be a good thing. If there’s one thing I am not looking forward to as a parent, it is answering questions about the nature of God, a myth I simply do not believe in and cannot defend. [If there's any belief I espouse, it's the philosophy (as distinct from the religion) of Taoism, which gives you the same moral precepts, but without the anthropomorphized God and silly, arbitrary rules about homosexuals and shellfish.] If Sam was to ask, it would be very difficult for me to relay the Adam and Eve story without adding that it’s a total lie, a story dreamed up by primitive, pre-literate people who had no concept of the idea of science. And it would be even more difficult for me to explain why this parental character, who’s so busy abusing and slaughtering her own children, merits all this praise, worship, and gratitude when Sam’s barely ever been spanked in his entire life.
Luckily, I didn’t have to. Between the tuneless how-tunes and the incomprehensible plot, Sam was hopelessly lost, which is probably why he looked up at me halfway through act one and whispered “I’m bored.”
“I know,” I whispered back. “but give it ten more minutes and if you’re still bored, we’ll go do something else.” Ten minutes later, as the not-so-forgiving God was throwing Her beloved children out of Paradise forever because they broke a rule, Christina looked down and asked Sam, “Is it getting better?”
“NO!” he said, loudly. “I’m still BORED and I want go do SOMETHING ELSE!”
Which is exactly what we did with a random football we found laying around, before heading back to the lake for some more swimming and Looney Tunes. It was a relief for both of us.
And now I’m back in Philly, cranking out the grants and thinking about how I have to rent a cabin like that next year.
July 13th, 2009 at 8:49 pm
Gives me the creeps to think of an entire evening surrounded by crazy fundies. When my kids ask me about bible stories, I tell them my vague recolection, then I remind them that these stories were written by people that still thought the sun revolved around the earth. Yikes.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:21 am
god damn man,
my old man spent LOADS of cash one time to take our family to see that starlight express abomination. It was the worst thing I have ever seen!
I hate musicals too…
if you are looking for people to share a cabin and costs next year, keep me in mind…
July 14th, 2009 at 10:28 am
@kinmo: let me clarify. i wasn’t surrounded by crazy fundies, which is not the way i’d describe C’s parents at all. The camp where all this went on was putting on a series of plays (”a funny thing happened on the way to the forum” was going on a few hundred yards away). Her sister just happened to be in this particular play.
@steve: my dad accidentally ended up at starlight express when he was on a business trip in the 1980s. he doesn’t remember how he got tickets or even exactly why he went. All he remembers is that he HATED it.
July 15th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
Sorry ’bout that. The mental picture was just my trigger reaction to the mere thought of being caught in the middle of some Jesus freak woodstock. I apologize to C’s family.