He shoots a glance and sums it up for the group with a wave of the hand.
“Ah phooey.”
Everyone seems satisfied with that and we move on.
Moving on means getting in line at the Will Call window. I’ve made reservations but there wasn’t time to mail the tickets, so we have to pick them up. It’s a long line.
I place myself in the middle of our group, all of us single file. I’d have them wait for me separately but there’s no telling where these sheep will go if the good shepherd ain’t among ’em. I’m a little self-conscious about having brought them all to the Guthrie. A ballgame or bowling alley is one thing. But a squad of Specials is more than a little unusual at a chic cathedral for the performing arts. (Not that the management wouldn’t be thrilled at this unplanned diversity moment. Play it right and we could end up in an ad campaign—“Differently Abled Enjoy a Night at the Theatre.”)
I’m looking back toward Judy and Ralph holding hands at the back of our little group when I hear a familiar voice and sounds of commotion in front of me. Bonita has gotten tired of waiting and is suddenly pushing her way through the people ahead of us in line toward the ticket window, Jimmy right behind her.
“Let us through, we’re retarded,” she yells, her head down like a running back plowing into the scrimmage line, looking for a hole.
People are parting like the Red Sea.
“Let us through, we’re retarded!” she repeats.
My God, the R word. In public. And in the mouth of one of my charges. My career with the Specials is hanging by a thread.
“Bonita! Jimmy!” I bark. “Get back here!”
I take a couple of big steps and grab the back of Jimmy’s shirt. Bonita continues pushing ahead, delighted with how well things are working out. I am trying to reach for her with my other hand when a purse bounces off the side of my head.
It’s an old woman.
“Young man, you leave these people alone! It’s wonderful that they are here, and I will not have you bullying them!”
Others nod and shoot me Medusa looks. They all step aside and wave for the rest of us to pass up to the front. I am speechless but caught up in the tidal movement of our group toward the window. When I get there, Bonita is waiting for me with an expression of patient resignation.
“Stick with me, Mote.”
We’re in the cheap seats, though none of the seats are actually cheap, which I assume Cassandra will be happy about. Oink. Oink. I wasn’t able to get us all in the same row, so J.P. is by himself in the row ahead of us, right in front of me, so I can keep an eye on him. We’re early and there’s no one else in his row at the moment.
All is well. Everyone localized in a seat. Everyone having gone to the toilet before we left the group home. Bonita calm and satisfied after her Pickett’s Charge to the Will Call window. Jimmy peering all around, sizing up the possibilities. Ralph and Judy blinking rhythmically. Billy starting to hum.
I see a young woman standing in the aisle at the end of J.P.’s row, looking at her ticket and then at the row number. She’s a good twenty seats away from J.P., but hasn’t looked up either at him or at the rest of us in the row behind. She starts walking down the row, marking the number on each seat as she passes it, holding her ticket out in front of her. I see J.P. spot her. His eyes get big. A new friend, which, despite his natural reticence, he collects like baseball cards.
She takes a surreptitious glance at J.P. as she sits down in the seat next to him, but then looks straight ahead. J.P. is looking directly at her left ear, a smile on his face that would shame the Cheshire cat. He twists his head around further and looks at me.
“I’m a lucky guy!” he says loudly.
She shoots out of her seat like a pilot ejecting from a burning fighter jet and flees down the row.
“Oh well,” says J.P. with a shrug.
“Can’t win ’em all, buddy,” observes Jimmy the Man-About-Town.
I can’t tell whether the residents are understanding anything in the play or not. Judy certainly figures out Scrooge in short order.
“He . . . I should say . . . he is not a very nice man.”
And Tiny Tim presents no mystery.
“He’s like Don,” says Jimmy. Don is a kid on the boy’s floor back at New Directions who has cerebral palsy and uses crutches.
“Hello, Don!” Jimmy calls out with a wave. The other residents laugh and Jimmy beams. He’s got this trick down and repetition only burnishes it.
But they don’t seem to know what to make of the ghosts in the play.
Bonita is suspicious.
“I don’t like ghosts,” she says under her breath. “Ghosts are dead people and dead people are yuk.”
This gets nods and general agreement. I try to get everyone to keep quiet, but they are figuring this out together and ignore me.
“They are not . . . are not ghosts, Bonita Marie. They . . . they are called act . . . actors. They are just pre . . . pretending to be ghosts.”
This stumps the group.
“Like on Scooby-Doo,” suggests Jimmy.
“That, that’s right, Jimmy. Like on . . . on Scooby-Doo.”
The troops seem content with that answer and they noticeably relax.
Long before we get to Christmas Future, the residents have lost their zip. After I reject Bonita’s call for popcorn all around, she crosses her arms and sulks silently. Ralph is asleep. Jimmy is snapping his fingers and kicking the back of the seat in front of him. J.P. hasn’t moved a muscle in an hour, sitting straight, shoulders back, staring at the stage but giving no hint that he is following the action, such as it is.
At intermission we are out of there.
The residents offer their usual post-game analysis. Sometimes they are amazingly perceptive, in their Special Kind of Way. After we watched a rerun of Rocky on television one night, J.P. had said, “That was filmed in black and blue.” I couldn’t tell whether he was confused about a statement of fact or trotting out a sly word play. These guys keep you on your toes.
With A Christmas Carol, they seem content to simply catalog the good guys and the bad guys. Maintaining a clear moral order in the universe is important to them, a legacy, no doubt, of the simplified world of the nuns. I got my fill of Sister Brigit quotes when Judy lived with me on the houseboat in St. Paul. Now that I’m working with the older ones at New Directions, I get them in stereo.
As when Jimmy observes thoughtfully, “Sister Brigit would not have let us see that. Christmas is not about ghosts. Christmas is about Jesus.”
Van-wide approval. See if I take you guys to the theatre again.
four
That
