Topic 119: Church Theatricals

Carol:

The Play’s the Thing

My fellow dog-walkers let me down this morning. When I asked  what they remembered about church theatricals from growing up in the mid-west, Marilyn didn’t say a word (she has laryngitis), Jim didn’t say a word (he doesn’t talk about church) and Mary reminisced about a particularly special puppet show at a Christmas Eve service ( she belonged to a conservative church). Now I know that churches used to have theatrical productions because my mother told me so. Even though she met my father when they were both students at UCLA, their courtship took place not at school but at church, namely the young people’s group at Maywood Methodist Church.
 

Maywood Youth Group outing, 1925.

My grandparents moved to southern California from Pennsylvania in 1920, and they were one of the first families to build a home in Maywood, which incorporated in 1924 with a population of 1000 people. They lived on 58th street, a short walk from their elementary school, Heliotrope. Education was important to my grandparents, but their life revolved around their activities at the Maywood Methodist Church. Grandpa was the Church School Superintendent, Grandma taught in the church nursery school, and my mother and aunt participated in all the youth activities. Our family scrapbook shows happy groups of teen-agers hiking and sledding at Lake Arrowhead. No pictures of the plays, but my mother talked about how much fun she, my father and their friends had rehearsing small play productions in the church basement.
 

The Maywood Methodist Church was the beginning of my mother’s love for music and acting. She started high school at 12 and joined the glee club at Huntington Park Union High School.  I still have the program from their 1924 production of The Mikado, in which she played Yum-Yum. She later appeared in a production of Robin Hood at Hollywood High School. Douglas Fairbanks Sr. loaned them his sword from from his 1922 movie.
 

I suppose my parents’ marriage and life raising a young family in the 1930’s and 40’s put an end to any secret ambition my mother had for theater. By the time we returned to  Los Angeles  in the 1950’s, she had again refocused on family life centered around church, this time at a much bigger Wilshire United Methodist church where she sang in the choir and taught Sunday School in the family tradition. She took her singing seriously enough that she worked with a voice teacher, and I would sometimes go with her to lessons.
 

Probably the most significant aspect of my mother’s singing “career” was a very different kind of church theatrical than the light-hearted productions of the 1920’s Maywood youth group. Beginning in the early 1950’s when we lived in Houston, my mother would sing  in the chorus at performances of the Easter Passion Play, the solemn reenactment of the trial, suffering and death of Jesus Christ.  It was common at the time for traveling theater companies to audition in the local cities for the Passion Play chorus, which my mother did in both Houston and Los Angeles. 
 

My mother continued to enjoy an active life with a church “family” wherever my father’s job transfers took her, and when she moved to Prescott at the age of 80, the United Methodist Church choir welcomed her. They all showed up at her 85th surprised birthday party, and they all sang at her memorial service a few weeks short of her 90th birthday. She always enjoyed church theatricals, especially the Christmas pageant where her grand-daughter performed a brief solo at the age of 11.  Theatricals—I guess it’s in the blood.


Sources:
Maywood City history http://www.cityofmaywood.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=50&Itemid=73
 

Megan:

On Friday night, I went out with a few friends to see a band play. At the same event was the principal of our old Catholic school – although she was not the principal while we were there but she was excited to meet two graduates.  She asked us if we owed our "success" to our K-8 Catholic education and my friend, a math teacher, and I hesitated because our current circumstances (ie being back in our hometown)  were never a part of either of our plans, and also because we had absolutely hated that school by the time we graduated 8th grade.  We informed the principal that we had been part of the very worst class that school had ever seen (something we could confidently qualify with anecdotes about broken windows, and of making teachers cry and then resign).

The principal insisted that the school must have done something right to turn out a math teacher and a librarian, and asked how our classmates had fared. One of our classmates has died, and my friend the math teacher hadn’t known so that diverted our conversation. Otherwise, I could have told her that from that same class, we also have a fireman, a pediatric nurse, a social worker and a radiation therapist.  We have a doctor and a medical student, and a police officer, a lawyer and a documentary filmmaker. We have at least one veteran of the Iraq war. We didn’t all start kindergarten together, and some of us changed schools and there are many I’m no longer in contact with, but that list there is pretty respectable – and service orientated.  I hadn’t realized that until I wrote it out.

I’m not sure to what extent my classmates would credit our elementary school with their career choices. I owe mine to my college work placement position. When I think back to my childhood school, I mostly think of the times we got in trouble. But I also remember the Christmas Pageants (ah ha, you say, now she is getting to the point). I know I played an active role in every one, and I remember being excused from class and sitting in giggling groups with the social worker, the radiation therapist and the nurse,  in the back of the church waiting for our turn to rehearse. But I only remember one play by name-- called “Angels Aware.”

In the 9 years I attended the school, we did that play twice – when I was in kindergarten and again in 6th grade.  The pageant is narrated by the Angel Gabriel, played first by the brother of the pediatric nurse, and then by the brother of the radiation therapist. The first time I was either a shepherd or a baby angel, I can’t remember. The second time, I was in the Angel choir and I had a solo, along with the future documentary filmmaker.  The solo came shortly after Gabriel informed the angels that God was going down to Earth to fix some things. Then the angels sang a song speculating about what form the Lord would take upon arrival. During my solo, I was supposed to sing “If it were up to me, He would be a famous man, more well known than Abraham, a household name across the land” and while I sang, the future veteran played air guitar and head banged down the aisle. During the dress rehearsal, his wig flew off his head and into the audience and I started laughing and forgot my lines. Then I burst into tears and ran off the stage. The veteran apologized for being so funny, and on the main night, I managed to sing all my lines with my eyes closed so I wouldn’t get distracted.

I haven’t been back to a Christmas pageant since my brother graduated from that school two years after me. I remember being bored, sitting in the audience and I realized that our amateur productions were probably a lot more fun for the cast members than the people watching. But it’s funny now to remember my classmates and friends when we were little, before we knew what we were going to be when we grew up, when it probably seemed to our teachers that we would never amount to anything.