rivka

unodelman's Christmas pageant dress rehearsal pictures are here. And they're awesome.

If you are going to be in Baltimore, or near Baltimore, on Christmas Eve, I really hope you'll consider attending our Christmas pageant, at the First Unitarian Church on Charles and Franklin Streets, at 6pm. Because it is going to be purely amazing. Really. It's going to be magic.

( Read more... )

After church today, I met with families whose kids want to be in the Christmas pageant I wrote. ( Read more... )

Okay, by request: the script for the Christmas pageant I wrote. ( Read more... )

I just walked out of church in the middle of the service because there was a child dedication for an infant and I suddenly found that I couldn't handle it at all.

This is all part of the process. I know that. But you know what? The process SUCKS.

I do, at least, have awesome friends at church. One of whom followed me out of the service and one of whom just happened to be walking bythe portico at the right moment. Thank heavens for awesome friends, because right now I don't have a whole lot else to hold on to.

This really, really bites.

This morning Alex and I went out to brunch with roozle and jonsinger and several of their friends. A good time was had by all, I think. Jon brought lots of pottery for show and tell. The Reed College grading system came up in conversation for the second time in two days, but this time I didn't rediscover a long-lost friend thereby.

Afterwards I took Alex to the mall for a massive Shopping Expotition. She got two pairs of sandals. What can I say, they were buy-one-get-one-half-price, and it does kind of make sense to have one sport pair and one slightly dressy (but still eminently run-and-playable) pair. She became aquainted with one of my few rigid rules about gendered clothing: she can try on anything she wants, but I will not buy shoes that don't permit running. "I'll just walk slowly, Mama," she assured me as she shuffled along in slippery-soled hard-plastic Barbie thongs with electronic light-up thingies. Yeah, no kidding. That's why you can't have them.

We bought invitations for our housewarming party and cards for Alex's thank-you notes. I bought a pair of khakis and two V-neck T-shirts. I failed to find shoes at the Clark's outlet. We bought some cloth napkins for everyday home use, because we aspire to make that transition. And! I bought the absolute best new purse ever, which is to say that it's almost exactly like my old purse, with the only changes being slight improvements.

I don't think I'm hard to satisfy when it comes to purses, except that I must be because I have a hell of a time finding them. Here's what I like: black, structured, large enough to hold a paperback book and/or a couple of small toys in addition to my regular equipment, and plain. I don't want flashy fittings or little doohickeys hanging off it or a pattern on the leather or, well, anything. That's hard to find.

I've been carrying the same black, structured, extremely tailored and sleek Liz Claiborne purse for at least five years now. It's held up beautifully, and it's just exactly what I like, so I was pretty traumatized when the straps began to fray where they hang over my shoulder. I tried a few stores, including the Liz Claiborne store at the mall, with no luck. But then! There was a "Liz Claiborne shoe outlet," and I noticed that they had purses. And there, in a corner, on a rack labeled "take an additional 40% off"... one that was almost exactly like my old purse, only newer. They've moved the external PDA/iPod pocket to the inside, which strikes me as a good idea. It's slightly larger - big enough to hold a small trade paperback, not just a mass-market paperback. And the lining is a sort of a dull red color, which I think will make it easier to find stuff inside. But otherwise? It's my old purse. Observe the restrained black structured lack-of-decoration. Yay.



We finished off the shopping trip with ice cream and came on home. I took a nap. Michael and Alex weeded the yard. Then we had sushi to celebrate Michael's final night as the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore's treasurer. And Alex? You know, Alex the underweight and picky toddler whose favorite words at the dinner table are "I don't liiiike..."? Twenty-eight pound Alex? Ate eight pieces of nigiri and a piece of salmon roll. They weren't the biggest pieces of nigiri in the world, but they weren't the smallest, either. Three pieces of shrimp, two pieces of maguro tuna, one piece each of salmon, red snapper, crab stick, and salmon roll. The only thing she turned down was the eel. This is a kid who won't eat potatoes. Or hamburgers. I don't think she was supposed to have been born to Americans.

Tomorrow's schedule: church, church annual meeting, church Seder. Due to my unwisdom in posting to LJ about being able to cook well, acceberskoorb assigned me a complicated recipe to bring. I guess I'd better hit the supermarket and get right on that. It seems unlikely that there will be time to make it tomorrow.

I don't think I've mentioned here before that I'm helping put together the early Christmas Eve service at my church. It's a short 5pm service which is principally designed for families of young children; there's another service at 8pm which is more suitable for adults and older kids. (And a potluck in between, which I think is a fabulous idea. I remember how tense my mother always used to be about squeezing Christmas Eve dinner between the early church service and early bedtimes.)

The 5pm service is a new innovation by our RE director. As usually happens in these cases, I suppose, she was put in charge of running it herself. The problem: she doesn't personally celebrate Christmas. Because I love Christmas, I volunteered to give her a hand with the planning and arrangements.

I think it'll be a wonderful service. Tons of singing: every reading or spoken element will be followed by a carol. We've chosen to do the first verse, or first two verses, of several carols rather than complete versions; that way even pre-readers will be able to participate in most of the singing. The centerpiece of the service will be one of Becky's justly famous stories, a folktale she's adapting for the occasion. And we're going to end the service just the way the adult service ends: making a circle around the sanctuary, lighting candles, and singing "Silent Night." I persuaded her that even small children deserve a taste of that magic, and that parents are perfectly capable of deciding whether their children can hold a candle themselves.

I haven't contributed much beyond general ideas, except that I wrote the litany. It's based on one I remember from my childhood church, in which the minister would evoke the joys and excitements of Christmas and the congregation would respond, "We can't wait!" I don't remember anything that our minister used to say, but I remember the fun of being a small excited child shouting out "We can't wait!" on Christmas Eve. So we got some of the kids in the congregation to contribute the things they look forward to most about Christmas, and I wove them together with ideas of my own into a litany. I'll be reading this on Christmas Eve, while a first-grader friend leads the congregation in their response.

( text is below the cut )

I'm not happy about how some elements of our Christmas holiday have fallen out, but one thing I have absolutely no regrets about is that we'll be in our own church, celebrating in our own faith tradition, on Christmas Eve. In recent years it's felt increasingly weird to not be with our religious community then.

As our ministers prepare to retire, they're re-delivering some of the sermons they consider to be their greatest hits from the past. On Sunday, Phyllis preached a sermon she'd given on the fourth anniversary of the Ecole Polytechnique massacre, ( disturbing violence-against-women material below the cut )

Yesterday, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that gays and lesbians have no right to marry. Their justification: gays are too successful and powerful to need protection from the courts.

No, really. ( quotes from the ruling under the cut ) The ruling also made some kind of twisted argument that the existence of permanently childless heterosexual relationships and gay and lesbian families with children didn't have any bearing on the state's assertion that marriage is for procreation. Straight couples apparently need the right to marry because they might procreate accidentally. (No, really! That was in the ruling. What a fucking joke.)

Last Sunday, our ministers let us know that the ruling was expected any moment and that, whatever happened, we would be rallying on the steps of the church. So last night we made our way down there - not to celebrate as we'd hoped, but to mourn, comfort each other, and strengthen our resolve.

Maybe 60 people showed up - a mix of church and community. The one that hit me hardest was a forlorn little boy holding a sign that said, "But WHY can't my moms get married?" I was proud to recognize every member of our staff, to see our full Board of Trustees (including Michael) standing on the portico, and to have our ministers, John and Phyllis, be the opening speakers. John encouraged us with a quote from eminent early Unitarian Theodore Parker: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." Phyllis said that, as the ruling approached, she and John received multiple calls from couples who wanted to start planning their marriages... and that the most heartbreaking thing she had to do yesterday was call them all back. In the middle of her speech a car slowed down and someone shouted out the window, "Heeeelll, no! Heeeelll, no!" Without missing a beat, she shouted back, "Hell, YES!"

We heard from some of the plaintiffs in the case, from an adult daughter of two gay dads, from a PFLAG mother, from the ACLU and the Equality Maryland lawyers and from a straight married member of the Maryland House of Delegates who wanted to be the first legislator to go on record as supporting a legislative solution. An older African-American woman who described herself as "the wife of a Baptist preacher" led us in a stirring chorus of "We Shall Not Be Moved." The rally closed with a fiery sermon from the minister of the Presbyterian Church which houses Alex's nursery school (I didn't know that Presbyterians did fiery), in which he reminded us that we hadn't come to bury the movement but to resurrect it.

It was a great rally, but in such a bitter cause. I'm so deeply disappointed. Come January, I expect I'll be spending a fair amount of time fighting with the forces in Annapolis.

Today was our church's Annual Meeting. Michael was, unsurprisingly, elected to serve another year as the church treasurer. And we voted on a budget.

I posted about the budget process a while back, and the differences of opinion people have over how tightly we should hold onto our money. The budget presented today was a stripped-down version of the one discussed at the budget meeting two weeks ago - the Board of Trustees had cut it back almost to the bone, in an effort to make the thing balance without taking out more than what's considered a "reasonable and prudent" amount of 5% of the investment and endowment fund. (We anticipate that our funds will grow by about 9% annually.) They didn't quite manage it - Michael's projection is that we'll have to take 5.6% out instead of 5.0%.

The penny-pinchers are apoplectic. Not just over the 0.6%, but also because they think Michael's income projections are too generous. They came to the Annual Meeting prepared to fight. One of them brought with her a sparkly, sequined purple bowler hat filled with fake money. In the period for public comment on the budget, she brought her props up to the microphone and gave a long, harranguing performance about how people seemed to think we had a magic hat full of money. She was sarcastic, scolding, and nasty. She would purse her mouth up and say sourly, "Michael thinks we're going to be able to raise $210,000 in pledges and I certainly hope we can. But that's very" - and here you could tell that she practically wanted to spit - "optimistic."

She spoke at length. Then her husband spoke at length in the same vein. Then a soft-voiced woman spoke up and talked about how the church was starting to bring in a lot more young families, many of whom can't pledge at the same level as the more established folks who filled up the meeting. She pointed out that we are building for the future of the church, that the financial rewards of growth will come in time, and that we should be more worried about our mission statement than our bottom line.

Then it was my turn. I brought forth a lot of the questions that I struggled with in my last post about the issue. What makes us successful as a congregation - having a bank balance that always rises, or having active and growing programs that enrich people's lives? Yes, we need an endowment to support our crumbling physical plant and to provide a cushion for future lean times - but isn't there a point at which we say that our cushion is big enough, and that we're going to put more of our money towards fulfilling our mission?

Michael announced that he was asking the Board to create a task force charged with working out how big our endowment should be - what is a reasonable amount to hold in the bank against future needs. He invited anyone interested in the topic to sign on for the task force. A few other people made thoughtful comments (for example, pointing out that the overage was less than 1% of the I&E funds, and praising Michael for the transparency of the budget process). When it came to a vote, the budget passed by about 70 to 3.

Afterward, Hatful of Money Lady ripped into me. In the same huffy, pursed-up, sarcastic way that she described Michael as being optimistic, she accused me of being "eloquent and persuasive." (One of the nicer backhanded compliments I have received.) She said that she thought I was unfair to her and didn't give her arguments any credit. She - I mean, the person who brought props and waved fake money around at the podium - lectured me about my offensive "tone." "The same thing happened at the budget meeting," she said angrily. "I spoke, and my husband spoke, and we were very practical and realistic, and then you got up and said all of these idealistic things, and you're very persuasive and eloquent, and it's VERY UNFAIR."

I lost my cool once, when she lectured me on my tone. I pointed out that, given her sarcastic comments and sparkly hat, she had no call to speak to me about my tone. After that, I managed to keep calm. I told her, calmly, that it was clear that we held very different opinions, and that I didn't agree with her. I pointed out that it's good for the congregation to hear both points of view fully expressed. She fulminated about how I had made her feel bad, and "as a therapist" something that she's probably lucky I didn't catch. "I intended no personal offense," I told her. "I'm still going to feel the way I feel," she said huffily. ...Okay. I think I was supposed to feel more responsible for that than I do.

I'm still kind of shocked by the whole exchange. As far as I can tell, her only quarrel with me is that I didn't agree with her, and said so in a public meeting. I still can't believe the song-and-dance she pulled with that freaking hat. Adults who are supposedly in community with one another simply shouldn't behave that way.