Passion

Every year during the season of Lent, our parish dads produced “The Passion Play,” which dramatized the arraignment, death, and resurrection of Christ. In the 1972 production, something so big happened that we kids figured it might be the greatest story ever told.

The planning meetings each year for “The Passion Play” were routine. The same men gathered in the church basement to drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, gripe about hippies, and discuss when to hold the two or three rehearsals. But in 1972 a handsome young snapper showed up and nothing was ever the same again.

I’ll call him Mr. Duncan. New to the parish, he was a clean-cut fellow in his mid thirties with a sexy wife and a lot of handsome kids. Not only did Mr. Duncan volunteer to play the role of Christ, but he insisted on being scourged, just as Christ had been.

I can only imagine the response he got in that room. I’m guessing it was like the pivotal scene in “The Godfather,” when Michael Corleone offers to kill the corrupt police captain. There must have been dropped jaws, hyperactive brows, nervous titters, spilled coffee. As the enormity of the notion sunk in, some of the men may have seen Mr. Duncan as a heroic figure. Others probably thought he was just a nut.

Of course, these were the days before kids were inundated with sensational news. Other than rumors of Mo-Mo the Missouri Monster, there wasn’t much for kids to get worked up about. So, predictably, news of Mr. Duncan’s proposal buzzed through our classrooms and playgrounds. Some kids claimed the man was actually going to be crucified, on the same stage where our third-grade class had performed “Willy Claus” just a few months earlier. The nuns quickly began damage control. They tried to explain things in terms we’d get, calling his gesture “charitable” and “friendly” and “Christlike,” which it almost was.

When you’re a kid, unless you’re having fun, the minutes and hours always just snail past, but I cannot describe how insufferably long it took for that Saturday morning to arrive. When it did, my parents and brothers and I got to the church hall early and found good seats about five rows from the stage. In the back, Boy Scouts were carting in extra folding chairs from the school basement.

A half-hour before curtain, every seat was occupied. The spill-over crowd gathered in the rear and along the sides. I’d like to say that some public-school kids were outside, peering in from the ground-level windows, but that may be wishful thinking on my part.

Like everyone else, I wanted to rush through the Last Supper, Gethsemane, the kiss of betrayal, and the arraignment. And, like everyone else, my attention was fixed on Mr. Duncan; the rest of the cast may as well have been other kids’ dads, which they were.

After Jesus was finally sentenced to death, the curtain dropped and the lights dimmed even further. All eyes strained to see in the darkness, for we knew that at any moment the flogging would begin, and none of us wanted to miss a single lash.

A disturbance erupted from the rear of the hall. Mournful spotlights washed the center aisle, where the character of Christ was staggering toward the stage, a big cross caving his shoulder. Mr. Duncan was now shirtless, his waist and legs concealed by the tangle of a robe. Upon his head lay a crown of thorns, or something appearing to be thorns. Each step he took was marked by the horrible, thrilling sounds of twisted palm branches slicing the air and whipping his skin. As he passed, I saw that his back was a bloody mess.

Under the weight of that cross, Mr. Duncan continued his terrible struggle to the stage. A few robed, sandaled dads helped him upon it. Others erected the cross at center stage. He was carried there, his limbs limp, his eyes downcast, his false beard dangling. The men tied his wrists and ankles to the cross while others taunted him, their hearts not really in it. Then, mercifully, the curtain fell, to thunderous applause.

No doubt Christ was resurrected a scene or two later, but I don’t recall that.

Free Verse

When I was ten or eleven I learned of a beguiling opportunity. A local university press was putting together a poetry collection to be called For Kids By Kids. As the title suggests, kids (like me) would be the authors. Those days, even though I didn’t enjoy the company of kids, I was a vocal proponent of what you might call Kid Power. In short, I wanted grown-ups to respect, if not be influenced by, the talents and wisdom a kid (me) could have.

Within an hour of learning of this rarest of opportunities, I composed a four-line ditty, which I titled “Mondays.” It reads thusly: The dog is chewing the paper/The baby is hungry, crying/As I get in the shower the phone rings/Oh the Mondays are so tiring.

If you want to know why a kid would communicate such an adult scenario to an audience of other kids, then get in line behind me. Even I cannot say how or why I landed so quickly on such discordant subject matter. We had no dog. We had no baby. And we had no showering facility; in our house, we took baths and nothing but.

No doubt you’re also assuming the esteemed editors and contributing editors and associate editors rejected that poem outright.

But they did not.

Apparently they gave the piece of work an uncommon amount of scrutiny because roughly three years passed before the rejection slip arrived. It included the most heartfelt, impassioned apology this side of Jimmy Swaggart. By all accounts, the editors had really, really wanted to include “Mondays,” but in the final analysis they went in another direction and gracefully wished me the best of luck in placing it in my scrapbook.

Still more years passed before this poetry compilation was published. The kids who wrote the verses that comprised this collection were by now wearing their hair to their shoulders and drinking tall boys and grooving to ZZ Topp and driving second-hand Camaros, as was their intended audience.

Well, that may not be entirely true. Many of them, like me, were probably still camped out alone in their bedrooms on weekend nights, scribbling free verse, and if these teens were anything like me, these lines were chaotic, Ginsbergian, semi-Beatnik, semi-angry lines about phonies and bullies and capitalists and Ed Meese.

Anyway, I never looked at For Kids By Kids, but I hope its poems at least rhymed.

Today, even while I’m still hostile to phonies, bullies, and Ed Meese, I uphold the opinion that poetry should rhyme and scan. This judgement goes counter to everything that was taught in the universities when my forehead last rested on those desktops.

Likewise, the book editor of our local daily sees fit to publish a poem each Sunday in his section, but he has one abiding rule for the submissions: they must not rhyme. For the longest time I wondered what kind of wrongheaded motivation fueled this rule. Not long ago he solved the riddle by asserting that no contemporary mind could dare write a rhyme that rivals the greatest rhyming poetry in the Western canon.

I suppose he’ll be pleased to know that I can meet him half way. He’s right that he’s unlikely to discover the next Alexander Pope. But how dreadful it must be to open those submissions day after day and see nothing but agglomerations of pretentious words that gather with a seeming randomness on the page. How can he possibly determine what to publish and what to ashcan?

In 1984 I finally published a piece of free verse, in our college newspaper. I present it here:


Poetry

Made like

T
H
I
S

Takes

up


SPACE


That, for the record, best sums up my stance on this very important issue.