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Bring it home, King Antiochus
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Students and staff at my daughter’s school have started practicing for the annual Hanukkah play. Or, semi-annual, as the case may be, because last year it was canceled due to a bad snowstorm. To avoid another massive disappointment, it’s scheduled two weeks early this year. The play is a Big Event, aside from graduation, perhaps the biggest: practice occurs daily, lines have to be screamed at home, songs need to be learned; Isabella is going to be a busy little bee over the next few weeks.
This year’s preparations come with a little surprise: She gets to play King Antiochus, the notorious bad guy in the Hanukkah story. There will be a crown (or a helmet, I’m not sure), a robe, and impressive lines that need to be delivered: all in Hebrew, and with a built-in evil snarl. She’s already played Pharaoh in a Passover story earlier this year, so she’s more than ready for this sort of typecasting.
We are, in spite of our jokes about being “the bad guy” once again, very proud of her. As we’ve been during every school play, ever since her first, at the age of five. One would have to be a pretty cold-blooded parent not to feel that way. Whether she can actually act, whether her Antiochus impersonation sounds more like a six-year-old’s hissy-fit than an angry King, is irrelevant: she’s our little girl, and she’s going to be on stage. A standing ovation is the least she should expect.
She’s hardly the only one: I imagine hundreds of thousands of parents every holiday season, waiting anxiously in various theaters for their kids to perform in Thanksgiving pageants, Hanukkah extravaganza’s, and Christmas plays. It’s a rite of passage, when all children are stars, enjoy the applause, and experience the awesome afterglow that follows a job well done.
Before we had kids, I thought it would be hilarious to watch them be something incongruous, like a beet, or an ear of corn. Maybe that was inspired by the movies, in which children always seem to be dressed as vegetables. Lucky for Isabella, this doesn’t happen at her school; instead, she gets to be a warrior with a spear, and a really bad one at that.
King Antiochus, oppressor of Jews, narcissistic ruler of the Greeks, arch enemy of the Maccabees, and unwittingly the one responsible for that slightly annoying Dreidel song. Of course, this means that by the end of the play, she has to go down; after all, we do have a script to stick to. However, I don’t think it will stop her from giving it her all. She’s not sure if she’ll be run off stage, or die violently, because she hasn’t practiced that part yet.
I know my daughter, and I know she’s secretly hoping for a larger-than-life death scene. Something melodramatic, with tragic music, and not a dry eye in the house. With that in mind, I think I’ll put in some volunteer hours to make sure those swords are made from very, very soft materials.
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