I fell in love with winter when I was an adolescent, a “youth”, coming of age in Canada – and to experience a Canadian winter is, so to speak, to enter the Church: it is full-time, full-blown, hardcore winter. But my first fine memory of winter is from when I was a smaller child, in Philadelphia, when a snowstorm came to save Christmas from cruelty.
I should explain, first, that ours was a family of Christmas Jews – the kind of Jews who celebrate Christmas with an intensity owed to the sheer materialism of the feast, and its deep pagan glamour of lights and trees and presents. Christmas is, anyway, in all of its interesting festive elements, a pagan solstice feast on to which a nativity celebration has been added – the renewal of the sun paralleled by the renewal of life. (It is no accident that in Catholic and Coptic Orthodox countries it is downgraded in relation to the far more theologically potent celebration of Easter, when the really big show took place: anyone can be born; it takes a living God to die and be reborn.)
As it happens, I was, at the time, the child star of an avant-garde theatre in town (the only avant-garde theatre in Philadelphia, then and now) – the Shirley Temple of a company devoted to the Brechtian theatre of alienation and, even more, the Grotowksian Theatre of Cruelty. Under the direction of the avant-gardist Andre Gregory – who remains a friend all these years later – the particular production that year was of a play called Beclch, by a writer named Rochelle Owens. Beclch, I realise now, was meant to be a sort of anticolonial piece about a white ruler, the eponymous heroine, and her abuse of the local people, openly called natives, as I recall.
Owens went on to a certain fame only a few years later with her follow-up play, Futz, about a farmer infatuated with his pig. But the greatness of Futz was built on the daring of Beclch, as one might say the comedy of The Importance of Being Earnest was built on that of An Ideal Husband. In Beclch, the chief cruelty of which, many thought, lay in being asked to watch it, a group of blue-skinned natives fought with each other I, playing a young native, got stoned to death in an early scene. Then I lay there, my body presumably festering, for the rest of the play. (The irony is that Owens’ plays would be far more stringently condemned now than then – not for the erotic excess, but for the cultural appropriation. Only Africans should write of Africa, we’re told – that blue paint was a form of blackface, extended outwards.)
There are no small parts, although there are bad plays, and even if this one called for a certain insouciance in the death scene – having been hit with a series of Styrofoam rocks, I had to register, in rapid order, surprise, shock, concussion and loss of consciousness – the liquid makeup used to turn your skin blue made you feel as if your entire body had been squeezed into a suit two sizes too small. Barely tolerable when moving, when forced to lie still for two hours it was truly agonising. To make matters worse, the boulders on which I met my blue demise, although made of Styrofoam, which certainly softened the fall, didn’t end the pain. They stuck up in sharp edges all around.
Night after night, matinee after matinee, I lay there in pain and boredom. Nameless acts of unspeakable horror were enacted around me while I remained there, blue and still. The only mental break I could find was in trying to remember the lyrics of Beatles songs, which, miraculously, were then mostly so new no one yet knew them as we do now, as if by second nature.
One day, coming into the theatre, I noted that the play had been extended into Christmas week – we would even have a performance on Christmas Day, presumably for a select group of penitents. This news hung over me, week after week, a guaranteed way to ruin the day before as much as the day of. And then, on Christmas Eve at around 2pm, just after my death scene, it happened. A snowstorm, out of the clear blue – well, grey – Philadelphia sky. It snowed perhaps once a year in that mid-Atlantic city, but this was a kind of snow we never got. Kind Andre Gregory, with a face more Pickwickian than Grotowskian, said backstage: “The theatre is closed! No matinee tomorrow.”
I have never been reprieved from a death sentence, but I know what it would feel like if I were. A world sunk in gloom and tight-skinned misery suddenly lit up bright as day, and what had been a desert became a Christmas card. My father drove me home through the falling snow, and then the drifts piled up outside our house – not inch by inch, but foot by foot. With each falling snowflake, I felt the Grotowskian complexities fall farther away. I had never been so happy. The next day we woke our parents at 6am and I found three flat and beautifully wrapped presents: Help!, Revolver and Please, Please Me, all in one fell swoop. Life had begun. The following week, I had to go back to the blue death and the long wait – but I had enough material to work my mind on. And with the money I made from the play, I bought my first guitar.
• Adam Gopnik’s most recent book is At the Strangers’ Gate (riverrun).
