No, those aren’t the names of three of Santa’s reindeer that will pull his sleigh tomorrow night.
But if you were one of more than 100 singers, dancers, and musicians on stage–or any of the 900-plus jubilant audience members who attended three sold-out shows–you felt sparkle, magic, joy and a lot more positivity, lush music, spectacular solos, and elfin storytelling pulse through your bloodstream at the Herberger Theatre (Stage West) in Phoenix over the weekend.
What you see here is the culmination of Recycle the Fruitcake, just breaths away from the end of act one of Lights, Camera, Elves!
I think it’s fair to say this number brought the house down in laughter, music, and mayhem.
Squint and look to the far right. That’s me wearing a giant gingerbread man costume. (My chorus pal Ezra played the other gingerbread man on the left side of the frame.)
Billy and Michael (two other dancers and chorus members) helped me perform a quick-change backstage.
They inflated my costume in about thirty seconds, so that I could return to bounce on the apron of the stage.
I waved my arms like a seven-year-old … not the sixty-seven-year-old guy I am … for twenty seconds. It was exhilarating and as close to skydiving as I will ever get.
Moments before I marched across the stage–arms extended carrying an enormous tin of toxic fruitcake, wearing a full-body orange hazmat suit, and teasing the dancers and the audience–“cause you never really know where fruitcakes might have been.”
Today–the day after our final holiday performance and an exuberant and playful cast party around Dale’s and Jim’s rainbow Christmas tree–I give thanks to the entire experience.
Even a slightly pulled right calf muscle didn’t deter me from hitting the gym with Tom at 9 a.m. and looking ahead to a quiet Scottsdale Christmas Eve with him … followed by a low-key Christmas Day with my older son Nick and his family.
Because as Derik (another second tenor, who played our Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus Santa) proclaimed near the end of our performance with a pink garland wrapped around his neck and the twinkle of Darlene’s piano keys over his shoulder …
“The magic of Christmas isn’t just in the gifts or decorations. It’s in the stories we share, and the music that brings us together.”
See you here in 2025 for more stories and more music.
In the theatrical world, it’s a good problem to have.
Every seat for all three of our Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus performances of Lights, Camera, Elves!, December 21 and 22 at the Herberger Theatre, has been sold.
While we are turning people away who might have bought additional tickets, we are also turning up the emotions, music, mayhem, excitement, and energy for two final rehearsals Thursday and Friday night.
***
This will be my fifteenth consecutive year singing in holiday concerts with my LGBTQ friends: 2010-2016 in Chicago with the Windy City Gay Chorus; and 2017-2024 with the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus.
Of course, I don’t remember every holiday tune, wondrous moment, or distinctive venue relating to those performances. But the net effect is the sense of belonging–the ever-widening space that occupies my heart, which is rooted in this collective community experience.
It’s difficult to explain, even for a wordsmith like me. If you have sung with a chorus, you understand.
If you haven’t, there is something inherently magical and healing that comes with standing side by side and contributing your voice to the greater good of a beautifully blended piece of choral music.
Nearly one hundred of us will sing, laugh and dance on stage this weekend. I will probably cry a little too as we perform captivating arrangements of Do You Hear What I Hear? and Pure Imagination.
But the tears will be mostly joyous and thankful ones as I channel the smiles on the faces of friends and family–past and present–who have surrounded and supported me on the risers and in the audience for fifteen glorious years.
What I share here always comes from my heart and the firing (sometimes misfiring) synapses of my brain.
Lately, I have been drawn to writing more poetry. It helps me to process the pain–personal and national–which I have been wearing like a cape that shrouds my best impulses and intentions.
Today, as Christmas and the end of the year approach, I am taking a different path.
Before I take the stage next weekend for my holiday concert with the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus, I want to reflect on bright-and-shiny moments–present and past–which have been tempered by devastating-and-unavoidable losses in 2024.
***
Tom and I are among the dwindling few, who continue to send Christmas cards in the mail to our closest friends and loved ones.
It’s something that brings both of us joy, and in my book that means it’s something worth doing–no matter what other Americans do.
I know that practice places us in the minority (rather like the disastrous outcome of our presidential election), but I don’t care.
Since childhood, I have always identified as “different” or–more specifically–as an outsider. Maybe it was my brain’s subconscious attempt at preparing me for the obstacles I would face as a gay man.
At any rate, conformity is for the faint of heart. It takes courage to stand by your differences, and I have a feeling I will need to muster a boatload of courage as we head into 2025.
Maybe that approaching storm is why I have taken comfort recently in an old Christmas memory.
For several years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before Dad had his first heart attack, he took Diane (my sister) and me in our old, green Plymouth to search for our family Christmas tree.
We didn’t have much money, so he usually drove us to a tree lot adjacent to a Site filling station. Strangely, I remember the price of gas was 29 cents a gallon on the sign that swayed in winter’s wind.
Dad was a tall man–six feet, two inches. One day I would reach that same stature, but going back sixty-five years, I was a little tyke with a wool stocking cap covering my crew cut.
Dad wanted to select a natural tree (usually balsam, because they were cheaper than Scotch Pine) that was at least his height, so when it was placed in a tree stand all of us (he, Mom, Diane, and I) could gaze up at the beauty of its lights, ornaments, and tinsel hanging on every branch.
In the cold and damp St. Louis air, it usually took us several rounds up and down the aisles of the tree lot to find the best shaped tree. But we always found one to our liking and–with heavy twine–somehow tied it to the roof of our sedan.
When we got home on December 4 or 5, our family practice was to cut a small notch off the bottom of the tree trunk, then deposit it into a metal bucket of water to keep it fresh.
Inevitably, the water in the bucket froze, but with a little heat from the Midwestern sun, around the middle of December we were able to pry it out of the bucket, screw it into our stand, and decorate our family Christmas tree in our living room.
***
Back to reality. We lost a few friends in 2024. Peggy’s passing in mid-November is the most recent.
I was touched and honored when Glenn–our dear friend, neighbor and one of the kindest and most dependable people I know–asked me to write his wife’s obituary.
Peggy’s memorial service last week was a beautiful reflection on her meaningful life as a teacher, wife, mother, grandmother, animal-lover, and upstanding citizen. I will miss her.
In general, I am aware of the “shrinkage” (and greater vulnerability) that comes with age–the loss of friends and family one by one, the institutions that close their doors, the connections that fray (literal or otherwise), the visits to the dentist to replace crowns and teeth that wear down and require repairs.
I experienced all of those in 2024. But there were inspiring moments, too.
Tom and I traveled to Minneapolis in July for the quadrennial GALA chorus festival. The singing, listening, bonding, and carousing with other LGBTQ friends and chorus members filled our cups and our hearts.
It was also a privilege to share England and Scotland with my husband in late September. That week-long tour–from London, to Bath, to Lake Windermere, to Shakespeare’s home, to Liverpool, and the cobblestone streets of Edinburgh–was our tenth wedding anniversary gift to each other.
And 2024 was the year I began to teach again. I had fun in October and November coaching a dozen aspiring and diverse writers in my first memoir writing workshop at the Scottsdale Public Library. I will do it again in January 2025 with a new batch of students.
***
It feels like the best way to end this meandering post is on a high note. So, why not share a photo of the pre-lit artificial Christmas tree Tom and I decorated and adore in our Arizona home?
On Christmas Eve, we will sit together in front of our tree, open our presents, and give thanks for the love we share and the diverse branches of family and friends in our lives who adorn our world.
For me, one of those branches is sharing ideas and stories with all of you.
My mother loved fruitcake. I think making and eating it reminded her of her Carolina roots.
As a teenager and young adult, I remember seeing her and many of my older relatives consume fruitcake.
The thought of munching that dark, rich, moist, nutty, fruity, and rummy consistency repulsed me.
Anyway, she liked having fruitcake around during the holidays. I didn’t.
In the early 1980s, when Jean (my ex) and I lived in the Chicago suburbs, Mom hadn’t caught on to my fruitcake aversion.
Every December, she ordered a rather expensive variety of fruitcake, made by the Trappist monks of the Assumption Abbey, and had it delivered to us.
(Assumption Abbey is a monastery tucked in the foothills of the Missouri Ozarks.)
Jean and I didn’t have the heart to tell Mom to stop sending us fruitcakes. So, every year, we received another tin of it, which sat unopened on the bottom shelf of our refrigerator.
We never found a way to recycle or share it with others, because no one else we knew liked fruitcake either.
Inevitably, year after year–sometime in May, June, or July long after the last presents were unwrapped–Jean or I extricated the fruitcake from the back of our fridge and dumped it in the garbage.
***
If you follow my blog, you know I sing second tenor with a gay chorus–to be precise, the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus (PHXGMC)–and have written several librettos for PHXGMC.
For the uninitiated, we are a joyous, talented, and rambunctious LGBTQ-plus organization, comprised of more than one hundred singers and musicians (who also wear multiple hats as artistic consultants, dancers, actors, writers, marketers, costume designers, stagehands, sound technicians, and lighting crew).
At times, the switching of hats from one day, week, or number to the next is a dizzying process. But when you volunteer for an arts’ organization you believe in, it comes with the territory.
As I write this, we are entering the heavy lifting phase of Lights, Camera, Elves!, our holiday show coming December 21 and 22 to the Herberger Theatre in Phoenix.
Anyway, as I swam laps on Tuesday and considered what to write this week, thoughts of my mother’s love of fruitcake and a coincidental plotline in our concert popped into my head.
You see, like my mother, Rudy–a character in our concert–adores fruitcake. He can’t get enough of it, and that obsession leads him into trouble and a terrible trap.
In fact, Act One ends with a hysterical, rousing number–Recycle the Fruitcake.
In the mix, I should back up and tell you that Scott, our choreographer, has asked me to play a bit role in the fruitcake number.
For about 15 seconds, I’ll be crossing the stage wearing an orange hazmat suit, while carrying a toxic fruitcake in this holiday tin. Meanwhile, the chorus will be singing this lyrical line:
“A fruitcake can be wide, a fruitcake can be thin, a fruitcake can be toxic, so they keep it in a tin. So, when you get a fruitcake, never let it touch your skin, ’cause you never really know where fruitcakes might have been.”
Brandon and Mike (two other chorus members) and I had loads of fun co-creating the libretto for Lights, Camera, Elves! … and we are coaching the cast as they prepare for our performances.
The show is a story of redemption, featuring Santa’s love for holiday movies, a misfit security guard named Rudy, and three recalled-and-mischievous elves (Spike, Ginger, and Eddie) … all told against the backdrop of gorgeous and fun holiday music.
We’re excited, because we are expecting full houses for all three of our holiday shows.
Though my mother has been gone for nearly twelve years and was never able to see me perform in any of the fifteen holiday concerts I’ve appeared in since 2010, I know she would have loved the spirit and beautiful music in this show … along with my creative impulse to recycle my fruitcake memories.
Albert, Louise, and their three adult children–Thelma, Violet, and Walter–led ordinary lives.
In the fall of 1944, they were a big-hearted, hard-working, working-class family–living in a flat on Labadie Avenue on the north side of St. Louis.
To be precise, Thelma and Walter lived with their parents. Violet and her husband Harry lived nearby.
At any rate, they were a close family with strong opinions, loud voices, and a propensity to gather around the radio for FDR’s inspiring Fireside Chats.
Like all patriotic American families of that era, they planted a Victory Garden to grow their own vegetables, rationed household supplies, and bought war bonds to support American troops fighting overseas in Europe and the Pacific.
They did it all for the sake of protecting and maintaining freedom in a war-torn world.
Walter, Albert, Thelma, Louise, and Violet in late 1944.
When Walter was drafted and deployed to Europe (Harry, too) you might say the family had extra skin in the game of war.
He left New York Harbor–aboard the Queen Mary ship with hundreds of other soldiers–on New Year’s Eve 1944.
Five days later, he landed at the Firth of Clyde in Scotland … and, in short order, he found himself on the front lines scurrying from foxhole to foxhole in the Battle of the Bulge in the forested Ardenne region of France.
As the war in Europe wound down in 1945, he marched with the first group of US army personnel who met with the Russian army on the Elbe River on the eastern front of the war.
Walter survived the ordeal–in part because of the regular flow of love letters and encouragement he received from his sisters and parents.
Walter returned to the US on the U.S.S. Monticello in July 1945 … for a thirty-day leave prior to going to fight in the Pacific.
He was supposed to depart in mid-August, but on August 6, the US dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan and the war ended shortly thereafter.
Walter’s fighting days were over. He was discharged from the service on October 11, 1945.
A few years later–sometime after he met his future wife Helen in January 1948 at Westminster Ballroom in St. Louis–he confided that the Russian soldiers were some of the roughest, battle-hardened men.
At any rate, despite the “shellshock”, nightmares, and frozen feet Walter brought home with him, he (and Harry) came home in one piece.
***
I’ve thought a lot about Walter and Helen (my dad and mom), Thelma and Violet (my aunts), Albert and Louise (my grandparents) … the Johnson family … since the election last week.
All of them have been gone a long time, but in a sense–today–I feel I am grieving my own loss of freedom, as well as their legacy. The one they fought so hard to uphold.
I’m not giving up, but that is how I feel on Veterans Day 2024.
Early this afternoon, I pulled out Dad’s World War II army trunk.
It contains pieces of his uniform–including the wool hat and golden medallion he wore eighty years ago as he was preparing to preserve freedom on behalf of his country.
Finding it there with his few remaining possessions gave me strength.
In the coming days, weeks, months, and years, I’m going to do my best to draw from the resiliency in my family’s DNA to find specific ways to uphold democracy in my Arizona community.
You can be sure I also will continue to exercise my voice–through prose and poetry–and influence others in a positive fashion as we head into an uncertain and potentially ominous period in our country’s history.
Mark Johnson Stories 