Festivus (10 page)
EROTIC PERFORMANCES
Enter the Alwun House, a nonprofit art space in Phoenix, Arizona, for the February 2005 edition of the annual Erotic Poetry and Music Festivus and be greeted by three women dressed as Playboy bunnies with bright pink hair.
Promising. Continue into a large bottom-floor room and find performers beating tambourines, stroking guitars, and reading sixteenth-century erotic poetry in a show called “Mystic Rapture.”
Flit to another gallery, where it’s best to avoid getting too close to the Ritual Fire dancers. They are smeared with flammable gel that titillates them as they play erotically for a transfixed audience.
The art includes a man with his hand in a sock that he argues with as if it’s an unruly part of the male anatomy. It is an old fight that many have had before. Can love follow lust or must the order be reversed?
This is not
Seinfeld’s
Festivus, explains Kim Moody, director of the Alwun House. This Valentine’s-season Festivus harkens from the holiday’s original inventors. “I always liked ancient Rome,” Moody says. “It might have something to do with the men running around in black leather thongs.”
Above the bar, a troupe of fifteen Kama Sutra dancers called “Of the Earth” writhe.
“To me,” Moody concludes, “the word ‘Festivus’ means ‘refined hedonism.’”
MISS FESTIVUS
“I felt very important,” Julie Manker of Pleasant Plains, Illinois, says of the moment when the Miss Festivus sash, cobbled together from newspaper clippings and oddly shaped letters, was laid across her shoulders at a Festivus bash in Springfield, Illinois, on December 18, 2004, also the day of her 30th birthday.
Julie Manker in all her glory
It’s true there weren’t actually any other contestants. Julie simply decided she was Miss Festivus and crowned herself—a nonconformist criteria she suggests all future Miss Festivuses follow.
As a model for future queens, Julie stands tall.
When she was just 20 months old, Julie was already earning celebrity status. She was written up in a local bowling magazine as the youngest bowler ever in Illinois.
“My father owned three bowling alleys,” the bespectacled Julie, ever not-demure, says.
After she broke her leg playing volleyball on a scholarship to Butler University, doctors said Julie would have trouble playing any sport again. The future Miss Festivus scoffed at the diagnosis. She headed to Winter Park, Colorado, to take up snowboarding.
Before long, she was bored with living the life of a shred-betty: by day flying over death-defying snow jumps and by night talking about flying over death-defying snow jumps. She set out to find a new challenge.
The Springfield Fire Department was looking for a few good women, and Julie took their test. She dragged dummies, worked hoses, flaunted her skills mouth-to-mouth, and aced it.
Miss Festivus’s boyfriend’s magazine
The department hasn’t yet had an opening for her, so in the meantime she works as high school technology teacher. Miss Festivus also helps out her boyfriend, Chris Nickell, editor in chief of
Impala SScene, a
magazine for people involved in souping up and racing 1994-199 Chevrolet Impala SS and other GM B-Bo models.
Suggested Categories for Judging a Miss Festivus Content
by Chris Nickell, boyfriend of Julie Manker, the original Miss Festivus
• How she looks laying down in the backseat of an Impala
• Bowling talent (in the 170 neighborhood is nice)
• Mechanical bull riding aptitude
• How shapely she appears in a firefighter’s outfit
• Experience serving in pit crew at drag races
• Ability to fashion her own Miss Festivus sash
Julie comes from a family of beauty pageant winners. Her sister was Miss Fourth of July in Jacksonville, Illinois, in the 1960s, and her niece won Miss Greene County in 1993.
But unlike her forebears, who had to parade their bodies and flaunt their personalities in front of judges to win top honors, Julie decided for herself she was a queen.
Using these un-rules, there need be no
wannabe
Miss Festivuses. Anyone who feels deserving can buy a sash and crown herself.
“It’s about being well-rounded,” Julie advises future queens. “You’re not just stuck inside the box, you have to try new things and be adventurous.”
Spontaneous Festivi
They didn’t know they were having Festivus in Frankenmuth, Michigan, until they were halfway through it.
One night in December 2001 Elizabeth Zill’s teenage daughter Kelty was whining about the family not having a Christmas tree. She had reason to whine—there were trees all around. In fact, Frankenmuth, population 4,838, is home to Bronner’s CHRISTmas Wonderland, which claims to be the largest Christmas store in the world. Bronner’s, which is across the street from the Zill house, carries more than 150 different types of nutcrackers and sells 1.3 million glass ornaments a year. The store has billboards as far away as Florida, and two million people visit annually.
Elizabeth was sick of Frankenmuth dolling itself up for Christmas. “They start before Halloween,” she gripes. Nor was she was in the mood to shell out $40 for a tree just to please Kelty.
The Zill holiday feast was a fend-for-yourself deal from whatever could be found in the fridge. There was tension. Staring. Grievances about “cheapness.” Countergrievances about how some people could benefit from seeing the wisdom of “thriftiness.” Amanda Morse, Elizabeth’s other daughter, had traveled to the house with her husband and 2-year-old son. The tot started wrestling with a squeeze toy.
It was like an undeclared Festivus was happening.
Kelty kept whining. And then it struck Elizabeth like a frying pan to the noggin, something she’d seen on TV once.
She rushed onto the back porch, grabbed an empty coatrack that had been standing there, dragged it into the living room, and told Kelty, “’This is your Festivus pole. Enjoy it,’” Elizabeth recalls. “Oh my gosh, Kelty didn’t see the humor in it.”
“The rest of us were in tears we were laughing so hard.”
But soon the tension popped and disappeared like a pine needle in a living room fire. Elizabeth strung some lights around the coatrack. A pile of presents formed under it.
Across the street, a permanent seventeen-foot-tall statue of Santa Glaus stared at the Zill home from atop one of the three fake mountains of dirt Bronner’s had built to simulate alps in Frankenmuth.
“It wears on you after a while,” Amanda says. “That coatrack made me immensely happy.”
Elizabeth remembers the accidental Festivus fondly, too. “We’re warped,” she says.
Festivus Yes, Fake Snow No! A Tale of a Cold Festivus at the Office
by Sarah Garland, former staff reporter at a community newspaper
I
hated my boss, my coworkers, and my job as a reporter at a weekly newspaper in Queens, New York. More than anything, I hated that the cheap bastards wouldn’t install heat vents in my back office.
Every morning I settled into my desk in the editorial department without removing my hat and scarf. I exchanged my coat for a ragged, grandpa-style sweater and slipped on a pair of gloves with the fingers cut off for typing. With high-pitched Long Island accents, the ladies from sales would occasionally come back to our frigid office lamenting that the lack of heat forced me to dress like a homelss person.
Right at the moment when a well-sharpened pencil plunged into my boss’s aorta was a tempting scenario despite the potential jail time, Festivus came to save me.
A day after Thanksgiving the publisher of the newspaper—a vision in a pastel fur hat and heavy jewels—sailed through the door to announce the commencement of the annual Holiday Decoration Contest.
The salesladies went to work. Soon, twinkling lights, fake snow, and tinsel waved in the stuffy air flowing from the heat vents up front, and I was inspired.
Under a poinsettia that, in the bitter backroom cold, had turned brown and dropped its leaves into a pile none of the reporters bothered to pick up, I taped up a sign in red marker: “Happy Festivus.” Smiles twitched on the faces of the other downtrodden editorial staff. Pictures of the Grinch and Scrooge McDuck were soon tacked up on bulletin boards.
When we were scolded and ordered to take down our decorations, the spirit of Festivus only took stronger hold in my heart. I aired my grievances at my boss, telling her she was stingy and journalistically corrupt. I quit and have been happily freelance-writing, somewhat warm, and relatively grievance-free ever since.
Dad Doug and son Elian Rubin raise the pole in Princeton, New Jersey. “Festivus makes sense,” Doug says.
Festivus at the Office
The need for office workers to enjoy at least one evening a year in which they drink together, complain overly loudly about their superiors, and drunkenly make good on a year’s worth of flirtatiousness by kissing sloppily behind the photocopier will likely continue to necessitate the annual office “holiday” party. What has caused problems in recent years is deciding what to name the party and how to decorate for it. The requirement of complete tolerance of
all
religions—including
no
religion—in the workplace has ruled out even the potential triple-inclusiveness of a Hanu-Ghristma-Kwanzaa party.
Enter Festivus. Devoid of religious connection and yet somehow affiliated with the idea of celebrating something or another, Festivus is the perfect nothing that avoids excluding anyone. Plus, it comes with a cheap decorating scheme: Buy a pole, make it stand up, and the party is good to go.
“You know how places are,” says Tatiana Hinosotis, who, as social chair of the Student Engineering Council at the University of Texas at Austin, threw a successful Festivus-themed banquet complete with Grievance Airing and a pole. “They don’t like things with religious connotations.”
Best of all, for many employers, supervisors, and insurers, a Festivus party does without that most feared of all potential sexual-harassment magnets: the office mistletoe.
The Songs of Festivus