December 7, 2025
Sunday

This is the irrational season
when love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason
there’d have been no room for the child.
— Madeleine L’Engle, 1918-2007
American writer of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and young adult fiction

I knew when the mother of the youngster I wanted to see in The Nutcracker put out a request to borrow a pair of character shoes, the footwear used by participants in staged musical performances who are not wearing some kind of specialty shoe (like tap shoes), ballet flats, or pointe shoes. They are sturdy, often handmade, and provide stability to the wearer. They can be very expensive, hence my friend’s desire to borrow a pair. I knew then that she had been offered, or assigned, some on-stage role, possibly as an acknowledgement of her tireless efforts as Ballet Mom.

My daughter, Lynn, acquired a pair of such shoes when she began participating in her high school musicals. She’d had basic ballet and gymnastics classes, and enjoyed them (I think — I know I did) before she took up field hockey and traded her ballet flats for cleats. In high school she continued with music performance  groups, including ambitious productions of Les Miserables, The Sound of Music, and The Wizard of Oz. I wasn’t exactly sure where they were. Had she taken them with her into her adult life? (Not likely.) Were they somewhere in my house, on a high shelf in a closet in her room? And what size were they? Before I undertook the arduous task of finding them, I determined that they were very likely the wrong size. Thus the energy she left in them would not be appearing on stage again, at least not this year.

Today I attended the final performance (of three) of the Pennsylvania Regional Ballet’s 2025 production of The Nutcracker. It was, as predicted, splendid. My friend appeared as a party guest early in the production, on stage at the same time as her daughter, Soraya, who in that scene portrayed one of the children attending the party. She was, in a word, amazing, moving effortlessly (it appeared) around the stage in a choreographed pattern that had to mesh seamlessly with the more interesting and difficult movements of the older members of the corps de ballet. A dramatic moment occurred near the end of the first act when the audio stopped. It just stopped. And no one on stage moved. No one broke character, No murmuring erupted. It was probably less than five seconds, an eternity if you don’t know what to do next, but when the audio returned — who knows how many bars, if any, had been skipped) the assembled dancers took up exactly where they were supposed to be. I was impressed. I am not easily impressed in fields where I have some knowledge and experience.

I came to the performance today with Madeleine L’Engle’s poem already in my consciousness. This is an irrational season. Many of the narratives that fill our awareness in these weeks are made of legend, tradition, imperfect memory, or flat out fiction, even the scripture. Maybe especially the scripture. As Pastor Cathy always said, the Bible contains a lot of truth but not necessarily a lot of facts. The infancy narratives have a shaky position between invention and revelation. The kings, or the magi, or whoever they were (and however many there were) were not at the stable (or cave, or outbuilding of a hostel) at the same time as the shepherds were, sheep maybe but no camels (probably). My daughter at the age of four would begin the Christmas story with, “Mary Joseph come a long long way on a reindeer.” She was not wrong.

Today in church we were encouraged to make way for the one greater than John the Baptist (whose diet of locusts and wild honey may have had an effect on any message he wanted to deliver). In a few weeks we’ll ne told to go home by another road.

Put on your character shoes. Let’s go.