www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall David Sedaris humor article (yes it vaguely has to do with Orthodoxy)

This is kind of irreverent and the total wrong liturgical season, but I had to share what I think is the funniest humor article I've ever read:

"And what does one do on the fourteenth of July? Does one celebrate Bastille Day?"

It was my second month of French class, and the teacher was leading us in an exercise designed to promote the use of "one," our latest personal pronoun.

"Might one sing on Bastille Day?" she asked. "Might one dance in the streets? Somebody give me an answer."

Printed in out textbooks was a list of major holidays accompanied by a scattered arrangement of photographs depicting French people in the act of celebration. The object of the lesson was to match the holiday with the corresponding picture. It was simple enough but seemed an exercise better suited to the use of the pronoun "they." I didn't know about the rest of the class, but when Bastille Day eventually rolled around, I planned to stay home and clean my oven.

Normally, when working from the book, it was my habit to tune out my fellow students and scout ahead, concentrating on the question I'd calculated might fall to me, but this afternoon we were veering from the usual format. Questions were answered on a volunteer basis, and I was able to sit back and relax, confident that the same few students would do most of hte talking. Today's discussion was dominated by an Italian nanny, two chatty Poles, and a pouty, plump Moroccan woman who had grown up speaking French and had enrolled in the class hoping to improve her spelling. She's covered these lessons back in the third grade and took every opportunity to demonstrate her superiority. A qeustion would be asked, and she'd race to give the snwer, behaving as though this were a game show and, if quick enough, she might go home with a tropical vacation or a side-by-side refrigerator/freexer. A transfer student, byt the end of her first day she'd raised her hand so many times that her should had given out. Now she just leaned back and shouted out the answers, her bronzed arms folded across her chext like some great grammar genie.

We'd finished discussing Bastille Day, and the teacher had moved on to EAster, which was represented in our textbooks by a black-and-white photograph of a chocolate bell lying upon a bed of palm fronds.

"And what does one do on Easter? Would anyone like to tell us?"

It was, for me, another of those holidays I'd just as soon avoid. As a rule, my family had always ignored the Easter celebrated by our non-Orthodox friends and neighbors. While the others feasted on their chocolate figurines, my brother, sisters, and I had endured epic fasts, folding our bony fingers in prayer and begging for an end to the monotony that was the Holy Trinity Church. As Greeks, we has our own Easter, which was usually observed anywhere from two to four weeks after what was known in our circle as "the American version." The reason had to do with the moon or the Orthodox calendar - something mysterious like that - though our mother always suspected it was schedueld at a later date so that the Greeks could buy their marshmallow chicks and plastic grass at drastically reduced sale prices. "The cheap sons of b's," she'd say. "If they had their way, we'd be celebrating Christmas i n the middle of damn February."

Because our mother was raised a Protestant, our Easters were a hybrid of hte Greek and the American traditions. We received baskets of candy until we grew older and the Easter Bunny branched out. Those wh o smoked would awaken to find a carton of cigarettes and an assortment of disposable lighters, while the others would receive an equivalent, each according to his or her vice. In the evening we had the traditional Greek meal followed by a game in which we would toast one another with blood-colored eggs. The symbolism escapes me, but the holder of the table's one uncracked egg was supposedly rewarded with a year of good luck. I won only once. It was the y ear my mother died, my apartment got broken into, and i was taken to the emergency room suffering from waht the attending physician diagnosed as "housewife's knee."

The Italian nanny was attempting to answer the teacher's latest question when the Moroccan students interrupted, shouting, "Excuse me, but what's an Easter?"

It would seem that despite having grown up in a Muslim country, she would have heard it mentioned once or twice, but no. "I mean it," she said. "I have no idea what you guys are talking about."

The teacher called upon the rest of us to explain.

The Poles led the charge to the best of their ability. "It is," said one, "a party for the little boy of God who call his self Jesus and...oh shucks." She faltered and her fellow coutnryman came to her aid.

"He call hiself Jesus and then he die one day on two...morsels of...lumber."

The rest of the class jumped in, offering bits of information that would have given the pope an aneurysm.

"He die one day and then he go above of my head to live with your father."

"He weared of himself the long hair and after he die, the first day he come back h ere for to say hello to the peoples."

"He nice, the Jesus."

"He make the good things, and on the Easter we be sad because somebody makes him dead today."

Part of the problem had to do with vocabulary. Simple nouns such as "cross" and "resurrection" were beyond our grasp, let alone such complicated reflexive phrases as "to give of yourself your only begotten son." Faced with the challenge of explainging the cornerstone of Christianity, we did what any self-respecting group of people might do. We talked about food instead.

"Easter is a party for to eat of the lamb," the Italian nanny explained. "One too may eat of the chocolate."

"And who brings the chocolate?" the teacher asked.

I knew the word, so I raised my hand, saying, "The rabiit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate."

"A rabbit?" The teacher, assuming I'd used the wrong word, positioned her index fingers on top of her head, wriggling them as th ough they were ears. "You mean one of these? A rabbit rabbit?"

"Well, sure," I said. "He come in the night when one sleep on a bed. With a hand he have a basket and foods."

The teacher sighed and shook her head. As far as she was concerend, I had just explained everything that was wrong with my country. "No, no," she said. "Here in France the chocolate is brought by a big bell that flies in from Rome."

I called for a time-out. "But how do the bell know where you live?"

"Well," she said, "how does a rabbit?"

It was a decent point, but at least a rabbit has eyes. That's a start. Rabbits move from place to place, while most bells can only go back and forth - and they can't even do that on their own power. On top of that, the EAster Bunny has character. He's someone you'd like to meet and shake hands with. A bell has all the personalty of a cast-iron skillet. It's like saying that come Christmas, a magic dustpan flies in from the North Pole, led by eight flying cinder blocks. Who wants to stay up all night so they can see a bell? And why fly one in from Rome when they've got more bells than they knwo what to do with right here in Paris? That's the most implausible aspect of the whole story, as there's no way the bells of France would allow a foreign worker to fly in and take their jobs. That Roman bell would be lucky to get work cleaning up after a French bell's dog - and even then he'd need p apers. It just didn't add up.

Nothing we said was of any help to the Moroccan student. A dead man w/ith long hair supposedly lviing with her father, a leg of lamb served with palm frons and chocolate; equally confused and disgusted, she shrugged her massive shoulders and turned her attention back to the comic book she kept hidden beneath her binder.

I wondered then if, wihtout the language barrier, my classmates and I could have done a better job making sense of Christianity, an idea that sounds pretty far-fetched to begin with.

In communicating any religious beleif, the operative word is "faith," a concept illustrated by our very presence in that classroom. Why bother struggling with the grammar lessons of a six-year-old if each of us didn't beleive that, against all reason, we might eventually improve? If I could hope to one day carry on a fluent conversation, it was a relativley short leap to believing that a rabbit might visit my home in the middle of the night, lesing behind a handful of chocolate kisses and a carton of menthol cigarettes. So why stop there? If I could beleive in myself, why not give other improbablilities the benefit of hte doubt? I told myself that despite her past behavior, my teacher was a kind and loving person who had only my best interests at h eart. I accepted the idea that an omniscient God had cast me in his own image and that he watched over me and guided me from one place to the next. The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and the coutnless miracles - my heart expanded to encompass all the wonders and possibilities of the universe.

A bell, though - that's messed up.

I am sure a couple of your words will be edited in due time...

In the meantime, the thing I find most _____-ed up about that story is menthol cigarettes...

Logos Teen

this is one of the most hilarious stories by David Sedaris and it is even better when you hear him read it to an audience!

Dear Posters,

Please be aware that obscenities are not allowed on this forum--even if they are someone else's obscenities, as was the case in Lasha's posting of David Sedaris' article.

In this case, I took the liberty of replacing the offensive word with a suitable substitute.

Alice, Moderator

Granted that it is irreverant, the whole scenario is in many ways so believable in the context in which it's presented, that one cannot help but laugh. Sedaris almost never fails to amuse me.

May God grant David many years in health, happiness, and the exercise of the holy gift of bringing joy and laughter to folks.

Neil

David Sedaris is one of my favorite authors--I'd recommend anything he writes!

Alice,

I found a couple of other words and made similar substitutions.

In IC XC,
Father Anthony+