A musical theater troupe of razz-ma-tazzing showkids is practicing a play in the Session House of the First Presbyterian Church this month, singing and dancing on the ceiling above the office where I conduct my church administrator duties. I am making Xerox copies and using a three-hole punch to collate applications for the college-textbook scholarship program and, directly above my head, they are singing “Sparklejollytwinklejingley” from “Elf the Musical”:
Put some cheery folderol on ev’ry wall and ev’ry nook
Tinsel up each corner till it’s Christmas ev’rywhere you look
Give the world a holiday that’s bright as can be
Make it sparkle jolly twinkle jingle
Shiny showy cheery kringle
Razzle dazzle ringalingle
I can’t lie, it makes me tingle
Sparkle-jolly-twinkle-jingley!
The overhead rehearsals create a much more positive work environment than you might expect. To employ an essay-writing cliché of the first (worst) order: There are two kinds of people in this world . . . people who enjoy tinsel and tap-dancing and people who shudder at the sight of tinsel and would prefer to break a beer bottle over the head of anyone caught singing a showtune whilst wearing character shoes. I’m — obviously — among the former. Make it sparkle jolly twinkle jingle!
My own career in the theater was not illustrious. The Young People’s Theater Workshop staged fantastic plays at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater in my middle school years, in which I always enthusiastically participated, even though I never got to do anything more showstopping than to tap dance a Charleston among the chorus girls in spangly hotpants and sequined sailor caps in Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes.” I still remember the lyrics from that number: “In older days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, now — heaven knows, anything goes! Good authors, too, who once used better words now only use four-letter words printing prose. Anything goes!”
My two older brothers always took leading roles: Charlie Brown in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” the Stage Manager in “Our Town,” J.B. Bigley in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” As I recall, one of the directors of an East Hampton High School production, confessing to one of my brothers that he reminded her keenly of the actor Montgomery Clift, gave him a hardcover copy of a biography of that star of “The Skin of Our Teeth” and “Fly Away Home.” My brother does not, and never did, bear any resemblance to Montgomery Clift, in my gimlet-eyed opinion! I guess hope springs eternal among youth theater teachers that one day, maybe one day — “It’s gotta happen, happen sometime! Maybe this time I’ll win,” to quote Liza Minnelli — one of their budding matinee idols will go on to Broadway fame.
Meanwhile, I sat in the middle row of tombstone-seats in the cemetery scene in “Our Town,” playing one of the minor local departed. My character’s not-even-a-name in “Our Town” was “A Woman Among the Dead” and I had three lines (to be delivered in a poignant voice, letting the words hang sadly in the darkened theater), including: “I always liked that hymn. I was hopin’ they’d sing a hymn.” In our kindergarten production of “Babar,” at the age of about 6, I played Babar’s Mother, grudgingly and feeling sorry for myself. Another one of my non-starring roles was to dress — grudgingly and feeling sorry for myself — as a frumpy-dumpy middle-aged matron in a hat and tweedy skirt-suit to deliver a hectoring lecture on Cold War civil defense (whatever that was) in the Jules Feiffer play “Feiffer’s People.” The entirety of “Feiffer’s People,” with monologues from the 1950s and 1960s about white collar crime and the Berlin Wall, flew over the heads of the entire cast, but other than that, those John Drew Theater shows were scented magically with greasepaint, gilded with Peter Pan and Tinker Bell fairy dust, and shall live in memory forever in the amber warmth of white footlights colored with yellow “gels.”
I’m sure there were good reasons why I was always cast in the minor role of grandmother (with a cane and three lines) and never the starry-eyed princess. Glancing backward at my childhood self with a charitable heart, I would assess the primary reason — beyond an evident lack of talent — to have been my obvious tendency toward introversion and introspection. I’ve always been extremely self-conscious and was born, for whatever reason, overly concerned with authenticity: As a kid, I was not infrequently paralyzed into awkward silence because I didn’t want to seem artificial or insincere. I didn’t really care if other people were, as we said then, “affected,” but I could see you looking at me as I was looking at you, all of us mutually judging one another for signs of artificiality — or so I thought — and I refused to perform the expected fakery. A resistance to insincerity and artificiality does not a great actress make! (Side note: The word the kids use today isn’t “affected,” it’s “performative.” I nominate the word “performative” as the official word of the year for 2026.)
Some of my classmates — when I was the age of the thespians upstairs performing “Never Fall in Love With an Elf” just now, as I was reordering paper towels and coffee packets for Sunday coffee hour — spoke about wanting to go into the Theater. Of course, I heard that siren calling, the Lullaby of Old Broadway, too. Who didn’t want to be a working actor on the Great White Way? But I never articulated the ambition to myself because, well, everyone wants that life. Who doesn’t? Of course a life of three-act plays and summer stock, Barrymores, traveling trunks, fishnet stockings, all-night rehearsals, whip-cracking choreographers and wisecracking chorines, understudies, Stage Door Johnnies — I’d seen “Gold Diggers of 1936” and read “Marjorie Morningstar,” too — seemed like an ideal life, the happiest, most communal, and least boring life. But I didn’t perceive this calling as special to myself because we all felt the same thing, even if we were the sad sack called upon to play Stewport the sailor rather than to sing “Younger Than Springtime” as the handsome Lt. Joe Cable in “South Pacific.” Wanting to be an actress was like wanting to grow up to marry a prince and live in a castle: Better think of another plan.