A Passover Pageant

Jeremy: There are sections of the haggadah that, quite frankly, could use a polish.
Dan: You're gonna do a rewrite on the haggadah?
Jeremy: It's not written in stone, Dan.
Dan: Actually, some of it is.
- Sports Night

I wrote a Passover pageant, for the story-telling portion of my all-Gentiles seder. It went over rather well. Enjoy, and feel free to use/re-post, with credit.

NARRATOR: Previously, in Genesis:

GOD: It sure is dark in here... claps twice Hey, that worked!

ABRAHAM: Man, I can't keep track of all these gods, can't I consolidate all my worship into one easy deity?

GOD: Sure!

ABRAHAM: Yay!

GOD: Although, not so much with the easy. Go kill your son Isaac.

ABRAHAM: What??

GOD: J/k, j/k! Chill out, theologians.

ISAAC: I'm a pretty passive figure, overall. Jacob, Esau, what are you boys doing?

JACOB: Just stealing Esau's birthright, Dad!

ESAU: Do you have any idea how badly I want to kill you?

RANDOM ANGEL: Me too! I am so not on Team Jacob. Let's wrestle. On a ladder. Just because.

JACOB: Whatever, I am Israel, I can do whatever I want. C'mon, wives, let's get cracking on this “descendants as plentiful as the stars” business, if you know what I mean.

JOSEPH: Hey guys! I had this dream that you were all bundles of grain and you were bowing down to me! Isn't that funny guys? Why are you throwing me in this hole? Did someone take my technicolor dreamcoat? Hey guys? Guys?

POTIPHAR'S WIFE: You there! Slave boy! How you doin'?

JOSEPH: Err...

JOSEPH'S PHAROAH: Man, these weird dreams suck. I wonder if there's anyone locked in my dungeon who can interpret them for me.

JOSEPH: Me! Me me me! So either there's going to be 7 years of plenty and 7 years of famine, or you want to bone your mother. 5 cents, please.

JOSEPH'S PHAROAH: Such low rates!

JOSEPH: For you, I make a deal. Now let's talk royalties.

NARRATOR: And so Joseph became the Pharoah's chief of staff, and invited Jacob, Joseph's asshole brothers, and 70 other free-loading relatives to shlep down to Egypt and settle in the land of Goshen. Several hundred years pass, and the Hebrews, as we are now calling them for some reason, have been fruitful and multiplied. Then there came a pharoah who knew not Joseph...

PHAROAH: I know not Joseph, but I do know that all these pesky Hebrews are really ruining the neighborhood.

ROYAL BUTLER: You can't kick them out, sir; they've got rent control.

PHAROAH: Bah! Might as well make them useful, then. What are they good at?

BUTLER: Nothing very useful, sir. Comedy writing, standardized tests, and kvetching.

PHAROAH: Well, let's give them something to kvetch about. This view of the Nile would look a lot nicer with some big pointy brick things, don't you think?

NARRATOR: So the Hebrews became slaves, which wasn't exactly a picnic, so they just kept on having children so that they'd have someone to complain to.

BUTLER: Sir, the Hebrews still won't go away. They're just packing more children into their huts.

PHAROAH: They'll never give up a nice deal like Goshen as long as they have kids who can inherit it. Tell the midwives Shifrah and Puah to kill every baby boy born to a Hebrew woman.

SHIFRAH: What??

PUAH: This job blows.

SHIFRAH: I so didn't sign up for this.

PUAH: Let's tell Pharoah that the Hebrew women are unnaturally vigorous and give birth before we can get there. The ruling class always likes to hear that the disenfranchised are hardy and animalistic.

SHIFRAH: Sweet.

NARRATOR: Thanks to Shifrah and Puah, a Hebrew woman named Yochevet gave birth to a baby boy and was able to hide him from the authorities. But after a few months he was too big to hide, so with great sadness, she put the baby in a basket and floated it down the Nile. The baby's sister Miriam hid among the bulrushes to see what would happen to her little brother.

PHAROAH'S DAUGHTER: Hey look, a basket! With a baby in it! Aww, can I keep it?

MIRIAM: But you'd have to nurse it and take care of it and stuff.

P's DAUGHTER: Oh. Well, am I a princess or am I a princess? I'll hire someone.

MIRIAM: I know just the woman for the job.

NARRATOR: So Yochevet was hired to nurse her own son, which is a pretty great scam, and though Moses grew up in the court of the pharoah, he never forgot his birth mother's teachings. One day, Moses was slumming it in Goshen, and he saw a slavedriver cruelly whipping a Hebrew.

MOSES: Dude, relax.

SLAVEDRIVER: Relax? I've got production deadlines to meet, and these lazy Hebrews aren't meeting their brick-baking quota, and you're telling me to relax?

MOSES: Maybe if you were a little nicer to them...

SLAVEDRIVER: “Nice” doesn't get you bargain rate pyramids, mister. Or did you never think about where all your fancy papyrus comes from?

NARRATOR: He hadn't, actually, and so Moses did what any privileged young man would do when confronted with the source of his privilege – blamed someone else and killed the slavedriver.

MOSES: Uh oh.

NARRATOR: So he skedaddled the hell out of Egypt and had a nice long wander in the desert, before coming across a lovely shiksa named Zipporah.

ZIPPORAH: Hey, stranger. New to this strange land?

MOSES: Sure am.

NARRATOR: And Moses spent a couple decades chilling with the Bedouins. Meanwhile, things kinda sucked for the Hebrews.

ALL: Grumble grumble grumble grumble

NARRATOR: But God heard their grumbling. One day, Moses was chilling with his sheep at the foot of Mount Sinai, when the mountain went all lightning-y. When Moses reached the summit, he found a bush that burned with flame, yet was not consumed.

MOSES: Awe-some.

GOD: Moses, Moses.

MOSES: Here I am!

GOD: Take off your shoes. I just vacuumed the holy ground.

MOSES: Who are you?

GOD: I want you to go into Egypt and tell Pharoah to let my people go.

MOSES: Okay great, but who are you?

GOD: I Am Who I Am.

MOSES: But who should I tell Pharoah has sent me?

GOD: I Am Who I Am.

MOSES: That's... not very grammatical.

GOD: No, it's tetragrammatical! Zing!

MOSES: Oh god.

GOD: Yes?

MOSES: Listen, can't you get someone else to do this? I'm busy. I have to... shampoo my sheep.

GOD: Moses.

MOSES: No seriously. I am slow of tongue. I mean, sloooww offff toooongggguuuueeee...

GOD: Get your brother Aaron to talk for you. He was always the cute one.

NARRATOR: Moses went back to Egypt and found Aaron, who was in fact the cute one, and they marched in to Pharoah's palace and said:

AARON: Let my people go!

PHAROAH: No.

AARON: Oh. Please?

P's DAUGHTER: Okay!

PHAROAH: No.

MOSES: Psst, Aaron! Try the staff thing.

NARRATOR: Aaron raised his staff over the Nile, and the water turned to blood. Or red like blood. Depending who you ask. Either way, for seven days and nights it was pretty nasty stuff. But the Pharoah's magicians were also able to turn water into red stuff, so Pharoah was unimpressed.

PHAROAH: Moses, Moses, Moses. What else have you got?

NARRATOR: Next, Aaron summoned up a plague of frogs. Hundreds, thousands of frogs, hopping all over Egypt on their little frog legs. But the magicians could pull frogs out of their hat too, and Pharoah's heart was hardened. Next came gnats, which are really gross.

PHAROAH: Ew ew ew! Make them go away! Make them go away and you can leave!

NARRATOR: But God hardened Pharoah's heart, which is one of those problematic translation things that I'm just gonna skip right over, and everyone went back to the drawing board. There were flies, and cattle disease, and boils. Then shit got real. It hailed great big hailstones that burst into flame. Locusts came and nommed all the crops. And Moses stretched out his hand and--

MOSES: claps twice

NARRATOR: --drew a darkness over Egypt for three days.

BUTLER: Okay, sir? I'm covered in boils, there's nothing to eat, and I keep walking into frog carcasses because I can't see where I'm going. Let those people go.

PHAROAH: Sorry, my heart's been hardened. Out of my hands.

AARON: Alright, but listen. This last plague's not going to be pretty.

NARRATOR: God spoke to Moses and Aaron, and gave them a shopping list which has changed little in five thousand years, with the same old bitter herbs and unleavened bread, along with a nice dab of lamb's blood for the doorway so that the angel of death would pass over their house. And at midnight, the angel of death swept through the land of Egypt, and slew the first-born of all the Egyptians.

PHAROAH: Get out! Out out out! Scram! Beat it!

AARON: Kthxbai!

BUTLER: You're not going to harden your heart again, right sir?

PHAROAH: Well... I do have all these annoying unfinished pyramids... And that Sphinx could sure use a nose.

BUTLER: Which you'll want the Israelites for, obviously! ...It's funny because they have big noses.

PHAROAH: To the chariots!

NARRATOR: Meanwhile, the Israelites had reached the Red Sea.

MOSES: Huh.

MIRIAM: This doesn't look good. Do we ford the river?

PHAROAH: I'm coming for you, Israel!

MOSES: I guess we're not waiting to see if conditions improve. Onwards!

NARRATOR: And Moses raised his staff and parted the sea, and the children of Israel walked across on dry land. But when Pharoah's chariots tried to follow, their wheels got stuck in the mud, and when the last Israelite reached the bank the waters came crashing back down, drowning the Egyptians.

MIRIAM: Hurrah! Now what?

MOSES: I have to climb this mountain, brb.

NARRATOR: The Israelites, however, were not very patient.

ISRAELITE 1: Where's Moses?

ISRAELITE 2: I'm bored!

ISRAELITE 3: Can we eat yet?

AARON: Hey guys! You know what would pass the time? Why don't you give me all your gold and jewelry, and I'll build a giant shiny cow!

ISRAELITES: Yaaaaay!

MIRIAM: Why do slaves have gold?

AARON: We looted the Egyptians on our way out.

MIRIAM: Seriously? That doesn't seem very under-doggy of us...

AARON: Listen, do you want to hear one of the lesser-known stories where our guys forcibly circumcise our enemies? Or do you want to make a shiny cow?

MIRIAM: Moo.

MOSES: I am back! I am back and I have brought you these two stone tablets, which contain the – oooh, shiny! [drops the tablets] Uh oh. Hope I saved the receipt...

GOD: [face-palm]

NARRATOR: But God gave the children of Israel another chance and gave the law to Moses again. But as punishment, the corrupted former slaves had to die off before they could enter the Promised Land. Forty years of wandering later, they finally reached their new homeland. Unfortunately some other people lived there already, but that's not a very pleasant story and these four glasses of wine aren't going to drink themselves, so let's just pretend the Israelites made friends with their new neighbors and nothing troublesome or morally squicky ever happened in the land of Israel ever again. The end!

Today I learned about King Ludwig II of Bavaria. He built this:
Looks like Sleeping Beauty's castle, huh? That's because Disney based his castle on King Ludwig's, who based his castle on neo-Romantic German kitsch, which was based on cultural memory of medieval castles that never existed.

King Ludwig II liked to imagine that he was a fairy tale king, rather than the lame-duck monarch of a barely-sovereign state in the Industrial Revolution. Wikipedia says he was fond of wandering through the countryside, giving lavish gifts to commoners who were nice to him. His fairy tale castle broke the bank, but the Bavarians loved him anyway (who wouldn't love a deeply eccentric castle-commissioner?). His ministers loved him less, and they engineered a legal deposition by having him declared insane - not exactly a stretch, admittedly, for a man who wanted no more from his kingship than to canoe around his palace grotto while a soprano sang Die Walkure for him.

But still. The whitecoats came to get Ludwig and he balked - "How can you declare me insane?," he asked the doctor. "After all, you have never seen or examined me before."

The next day, Ludwig and the doctor were both found dead in a shallow lake.

How this is not yet a musical is beyond me.

Sometimes Liz Draws

My friends Emily and Bailes are getting married this weekend, and I am chronicling their relationship each day iin an xkcd-style web comic.

It can be found at:
www.xkcEB.wordpress.com

The beginning, Day One, starts here:
http://xkceb.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/4/

To view the alt-text in Internet Explorer, hover over the image. To view the alt-text in Firefox, switch to Internet Explorer.

We have overcome.

I am not in DC for the inauguration. I am not in DC for the inauguration, because my ride left without me. My ride was with my parents. How's that for pathetic?

But I went to BAM's screening of the festivities and watched in a big happy crowd of semi-employed hipsters, complete with enthusiastic cheering at every mention of Bush leaving, and mass waving at the departing Marine helicopter. Buh bye!

Anyway, some thoughts about the inauguration. Predictably(?), they are almost all about the music.

• It's a little bit sad that John Williams is the closest thing we've got to a national composer.
• That being said, his Simple Gifts arrangement was 1) less annoying than Copland, and 2) significantly better than that of Aretha's song. Seriously, wtf was that? The hat made it okay, though.
• Hail to the Chief ain't got nothing on Domine Salvum Fac
• and relatedly, anyone else notice that inauguration is just Harvard commencement on steroids?
• OMG playing reed and brass instruments in 11 degree weather. Ow ow ow.
• The folk who own Yo Yo Ma's cello probably weren't too thrilled either...
• I have an entirely irrational love of Stars & Stripes Forever. I know, wtf right? But I hope that, somewhere, John Philip Sousa is happy that his tunes are still the default for anything patriotic and/or outdoors.

Joking aside, it's so rare that we have an opportunity to actually feel patriotism - and even rarer if you omit patriotic feelings inspired by by 1776 or an episode of West Wing. Today, when the CNN camera swooped past an old black woman holding a WE HAVE OVERCOME sign, I felt that shiver of glee that's usually reserved for fictional or historical politics.

Thank you, President Obama, for making it okay to like our country again.

To thy jubilee throng

Excerpted from a letter I wrote to Quentin this evening (so, Quentin, don't read this or I'll have wasted 32 cents. everyone else, go ahead):

As you probably gathered from the date line, it is the Sunday of Harvard-Yale weekend. I shall spare you the gory details of the concert and the Game, as by the time you read this you will probably have been filled in on the Wookie, the 703rd rendition of "If You Could Only See," and the thorough if wholly uninteresting trouncing of the sons of Eli by the Glee Club.

That sentence's syntax got away from me a bit there - the intent was that you had been updated by members of the Glee Club, not that the sons of Eli had been drubbed by the same. But if you would prefer to imagine the combined forces of the Glee Club storming the gridiron with crimson in triumph flashing, then I won't hold it against you.

Suffice it to say, at this weekend's tailgate I learned that contrary to popular wisdom, you will not become magically warm if you try to combat the freezing cold by getting drunk - you will just be freezing cold, and drunk. As both involve compromising the ability to feel your feet, it should come as no surprise that combining these states makes a most admirable and praiseworthy accomplishment out of the normally mundane task of remaining perpendicular to the ground. I am pleased to report that my tailgate was a success in this regard, barring an unfortunate twenty minutes spent in Gordon Track trying to make my toes wiggle through sheer force of will.

The weekend also served as a reminder of what exactly I enjoyed about college life. Not the crowded and sweaty parties that I no longer feel remotely obligated to pretend to like; nor the social events filled with old friends who I would love to talk to for hours but who, when in a parade of obligatory five-minute catchups, inspire attacks of my usually latent social anxiety; nor, shock of shocks, the football.

Rather, I was happiest this weekend sitting in a Leverett common room with a pair of RCSers and their blockmates, watching a movie, and each of us on a laptop or knitting or otherwise going about our business in each other's company. It's that sort of background socialization - having friends in the same room to comment at occasionally without necessarily having a full blown conversation - that was a constant element of my college days, and that is almost entirely absent from my life in New York.

In short - I miss my roommates.

Follow up: Errata

Thoughts on 45 years in Time and Space

Had my second piece in io9 today - a news story on the recently released BBC documents detailing the creation of Doctor Who, 45 years ago. You can check it out here: The BBC Tried To Ruin Doctor Who - Before It Even Began.

45 years ago this Sunday, the first episode of Doctor Who was transmitted in Great Britain. This was the day after the Kennedy assassination - which is to say, by some measures, the first day of modernity. The beginning of The Present Day. Death of innocence and all that jazz - and no doubt the tendency of public school editions of history textbooks to cut off right around the Kennedy assassination has something to do with this as well.

For me, though, the dividing line is not about the socio-political implications of 1963. It's just the dividing line, that's how it is. Before 1963 is the past. After 1963 is the real world. And Doctor Who, fittingly enough, straddles that hazy line between yesterday and today.

Watching "An Unearthly Child" for the first time as strictly a 2005 revival fan, it's not immediately apparent that this is the same show we love and obsess over now. Sure, there's a police box in a junkyard, and a young girl is calling an older white dude "Doctor." But the control room is unrecognizably groovy, and William Hartnell bears little resemblance to our modern Doctors in both appearance and performance.

And more importantly, it just feels different - the pacing, the direction, the slightly horrifying moment when you realize that this Doctor prefers to kidnap his companions, rather than politely ask them aboard. It's old and creaky and dreadfully British. It is, essentially, alien.

But then this man called the Doctor hits the dematerialization circuit. And the moment you hear that unmistakable, unchanged groan of ancient engines - the familiar and fantastic thrill of the TARDIS, our TARDIS, in this program broadcast half a century ago - it feels just a little bit like time travel.