787: Baby's First Christmas
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Alan is not the real Santa Claus, the guy in the North Pole. Obviously, I see the standing little kids who might be listening to me right now. That guy in the North Pole is amazing. Alan is not that guy. Alan's just a guy who dresses up as Santa sometimes. Alan doesn't have Santa's flying reindeer, Alan doesn't have regions of elves backing him up, and most of all, Alan doesn't have his years of experience. This is my first year as Santa, my first... oh, I'll go in the wrong way. He's driving to his very first chair gig. Okay, I'm so nervous. I'm nervous. I am really, really nervous. A chair gig, you're sitting in a chair, talk to kids about what they want for Christmas. One of our producers that he had to cornfout rode with him to this job. This was in Redlands, California, an hour or so east of Los Angeles. Alan is an earnest guy with the kind face who, and he would tell you this himself, tends to overthink things of it all. Really, he told Aviva, he's not sure what to expect at this gig, like what could go wrong. So he's just been trying to prepare for everything by making some lists, checking them twice. Last night, I made checklists on my phone for all the things that I would need and all the things that I would potentially need. I have a backup for almost everything that I wear. How come? Well, in case a baby spits up, I need another shirt. If the coat gets dirty, I need another coat. And you know, I have to have extra gloves, and I've been kind of manic about trying to anticipate all the catastrophes that could happen one way or another and prepare for them. He's also worried about his beard. He's 53-8, so his natural beard is still mostly brown. So I started bleaching my beard in June, and my beard started getting smaller. The bleach was damaging it. So it's breaking off. Yeah. He's tried some expensive hair products to stop the damage, but it's still a little shorter than he wants. And maybe his greatest anxiety going into this gig was the questions that the kids might ask him. Would he say the right thing? There might be, you know, a child with a real problem, like, you know, their mom is gone or somebody's incarcerated or something like that. And I can't bring anyone back that they've lost, and I really worry about being asked about that. I can't bring someone home who's on a deployment somewhere. He frets and drives on his way to the gig, two full Santa costumes in the bag. In a Christmas comes around every year, always the same, with the same songs and the same stage props and some specials on TV. You can get numb to it. It's so easy to lose the magical feeling that so many people had as kids around the holiday. But one thing you can say about Alan, he's not feeling numb, just the opposite.
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