Esoteric Bowl

As part of celebrating Christmas at elementary school, each class was to sing a Christmas song in the auditorium/cafeteria before the entire student-body. My third-grade class was to sing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

As you may remember, there’s a line in the song where Santa asks Rudolph if he will guide the sleigh. Rather than have the entire class sing the complete song, the teacher had the idea that one of us should sing that line solo. The teacher told me that she would like for me to be the one to sing that line. She said that I would make a good Santa because I was tall, and as a fellow student pointed out, I also wore a black belt like Santa. Not exactly ringing endorsements for my singing voice, but being a team player, I agreed.

Each day there was time set aside for practicing the song. We would sing and sing, and in between our singing we could hear the other classes practicing their songs as well. The teacher told me that when the line came up in the song where Santa asks Rudolph to guide the sleigh, I should make my voice as deep as possible to sound just like Santa.

The teacher outfitted me in a red jacket and Santa hat. She told me that she had a white beard at home and that she would bring it for me to wear. She assured me that I would be a great Santa Claus. On the day that we were to sing, I put on the red jacket and Santa hat, only to learn that the teacher had forgotten the beard.

How, we all wondered, can I be Santa Claus without the white beard?!?

The teacher sensed panic and feared a possible holiday mutiny. She went to the art closet and grabbed an opened jar of white paint and proceeded to brush a beard on me. The white paint wasn’t exactly white, rather it had a pinkish hue to it. Instead of resembling Santa Claus, I looked like a kid with a rash with Calamine lotion on his face. The show went on as planned, but for a while there I was known around school as the worst Santa ever.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 9th, 2005 at 7:09 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.