Dashing through the stores, people every place
Up and down the aisles, sneezing in my face (achoo!)
There’s so much to choose, there’s so much to see
Wonder if what I got you cost more’n what you got me?
At Christmas in 1983 it was sixth-grade choir. We learned a number of songs and then found ourselves bused here or there to perform in December, one time at Western Hills Mall before it was written out of the pantheon of “acceptable white people shopping districts” in greater Birmingham. I remember the choke of the necktie, the pinch of the dress shoes, the discovery of the heretofore-unseen Discs of Tron standalone game in the mall’s arcade afterwards. And that Jingle Bells parody was, in fact, one of the songs we actually performed. And the bus rides to rehearsals, with that parody as the most popular song while other people chimed in with ripoffs of the Toys R Us jingle or similar, and a realization that something was happening.
Wrap your presents nice, pretty bows that shine
Take ‘em out to mail, gonna wait in line
Fight your way back home, and if you’re like me
Maybe by the twenty-fourth you’ll get to trim the tree!
I wasn’t in any sort of organized choir the next year, seventh grade, but I remember doing the same thing again somehow. This time I think it was Century Plaza, wearing more or less the same getup that I had sported as Chief Elf in my playwriting debut, “The Elves Go On Strike” – a Luddite celebration of anti-automation and industrial sabotage, in Alabama in 1984. (Never say the signs weren’t there.) And the van ride back, Duran Duran blasting as the girls all mockingly sang “Boys On Film,” and me more conscious than ever of…something. The obvious answer ought to be puberty, but that wasn’t it. It was the sort of moment that appears in memoirs as “when I realized I was gay,” but that isn’t it either. Just an awareness that there was a social structure here, and that I was on the outside of it – and for the first time, I was suddenly and acutely conscious of What That Meant.
I already knew I was different. I knew I didn’t have a hell of a lot of friends. I knew I was not exactly held in high esteem by most of my peers – awe at the freakish smarts and disgust at the smart freak, but not esteem – but leaking through in those Christmas seasons was the first ever realization that this might be turn into a problem for me sooner or later. That there were other things in life than just bringing home a report card full of A’s, and I had absolutely no idea how to do them. I had to learn to interact socially with people, and I had absolutely positively no idea how.
I learned. Slowly and painfully. I figured out that I had to sometimes just stop talking, swallow the point I had planned to make and let it go. I had to find things other people were interested in, which led to a decade of sports obsession out of nowhere. It took a long, long time, and if I’m honest it probably only really started to kick in at Vanderbilt, when I was thrust into a small clique that kind of had to take me in and willingly did so, and when I had the opportunity to hone my wit and repartee in a form that demanded cleverness at 70 words per minute and 33.6 Kbps minimum.
So now I can go out to one holiday party after another, with people I barely know, and I can find a way to hold my own. Find a hook, remember a name and a fact, spin a tale out of it or pull one out of someone else. Hop from pain management to the tax and finance issues around vertically integrated cannabis production to pedestrian tours and tales of band larceny, and in a pinch there’s always the ample ineptitude of American football, college or pro alike. I learned to finesse away that I must have met you at some point previously, it’s always nice to see you and not nice to meet you just in case, and years of trivia give me something to work with…
But it’s still a chore. It’s an effort. It’s something that I had to work at and struggle with and it doesn’t come easy at all, especially as I get older and ever more introvert, and it makes me wish I’d had this skill set in 1983 or 1984 or 1989. And it makes me ever more grateful for years like 1994 or 2006, when somehow I either magically had it or magically didn’t need it, and a glorious Christmas season just happened. But sometimes you can work your way into one too. I’m pulling for it.