Good Friday

Guess who forgot Easter was this weekend? This girl. Gulp. It's true. I was the one confused as to why school was not in session today. I was also the one subsequently flying to the store for Easter basket fillers for Ryan.

I think I forgot, in part, because I'm working ahead on so many writing and speaking projects that I lost sight of what's right in front of my face. But I also forgot, in part, because Easter never felt the same again once the Easter Pageant was no more.

I've talked about it on here before, but the Easter Pageant was an annual community passion play that my family participated in long before I showed up on this earth. And for the first twenty-some years of my life, I was in it every single year. It made Easter...Easter.

Several years ago, they stopped producing it, and then they brought it back in modified formats. The most recent rendition I saw was, in some ways, better than the original, I thought, but it was still different. And my memories are tied to the original pageant. The one where we got up at 3 in the morning on Easter and got in the car by 3:20 to drive a half hour, park a few blocks from the building, and run in the early morning cold into an equally cold and musty-smelling gym. We'd gather in our dressing rooms and apply thick costume makeup. Kids guzzled milk and adults guzzled coffee, and neither one helped anybody wake up. Only the cold splash of makeup jolted us into reality.

By six in the morning, we'd be in full makeup and costume, and the lines of people who had waited in the dark and cold outside were thawing in the bleachers, awaiting the first strains of music.

I loved that pageant. I loved seeing the scenes of Holy Week reenacted. I loved a better-than-front-row seat reminder of Jesus standing quietly before His accusers. I loved hearing the Hallelujah chorus sounding loudly as my parents and I escaped the building at the very end. (Our part was over before the Pageant ended, and if we didn't get back to our car before the crowd filed out of the building, we would never make it home in time to undo all the theater makeup and get ready for church.)

I miss all that. I have a DVD of it and if I didn't hide it somewhere in the move, I'll be watching it this Sunday.

But until then, I remember through these pictures, collected here and there throughout the years.