Christmas in Wonderland
Iris P. Concepcion


In his short story A Municipal Report (I love this piece a lot since it parlayed a sleepy town in an edgy narrative, confirming the fact that no place is ever boring if people generally appeal to you as digested subjects---this is where Adlair, subject of my previous entry, was invented), one of O. Henry’s characters visits remote towns in America, Nashville as an example, and takes notes of its details.

This character said in one line:

“Your town seems to be a quiet one. What manner of entertainment, adventure, or excitement have you to offer to the stranger within your gates?”

In mine, I shall put curves to my town’s alleys and creeks in the form of a reachable tale---dreamy but properly grounded.

Here goes:

The climate came, went by, and got stuck with the blinking stars. There was a dampened mood in the morning because words did not converge into paragraphs and instead, crawled up tree barks to join a barbecue party, forming “we do not like putting up a tent in your brain right now.”

The narrator then tried watching the news where body bags flashed like walking coffins.

As night fully consummated its own cycle, a J. Satriani riff turned up in a nearby hall. “Speak Softly Love” heavenly stringed. Like power lines connecting electrical posts---linear but with a yielding voltage that one is never pardoned if he failed to hear it. Limb shattering if hyperbole be your forte. Like an occult inside your body.

It was the grandest manner of inviting and the narrator, faithfully too, blinked her eyes, in unison with the stars above.

Narrator noticed the vocalist, he who had done several portrayals in the past: commanding elegance when he rendered Bacharach in a new light, a frayed Pilate in another.

So there must be glamour to a basketball court where no curtains were drawn up for him to show his pipe wares. His falsetto was the kind you do not pit against the thick-maned guy of Air Supply. It was croaky. The narrator felt obliged to issue a mental apology for having dragged that voice when it should have rested. His pipes emitted tones like a stranded nightangle in a siren mating call—it was reassuring as a gentle, blown wind.

For the minor fine points.

The hall. Narrator was reminded of the times spent facing this edifice when a zoo, circus and men with long hair (who knocked on houses to politely ask if they could borrow the records they had heard), were the first unlocally instigated social events the locals gravitated to with gusto. The group who brought in the animals and guitars had an exceptional name : Lamplighters. They ate fire, fed the animals in cages and performed songs. Like gypsies. There was no electricity on the hall yet, in fact, there was no electricity in the whole map this side of the setting. Straight off from the pages of Grimm’s stories, narrator had slipped cents in the pocket to watch the mini zoo and the night performances of singing and was always aesthetically revived after, thrilled by the fact that a giant python was crawling just across her room.

What the narrator is pointing out: this is not just simply a hall. Its history has a great bearing on what was about to erupt.

Once upon a time, there was really an elephant hauled in that ground, bringing a splice of India to someone who did not know yet where India was. Even back then, magic was at a grasp.

Returning to the present, as if flickering images conspired to rush to this particular night, a presentation came : the Artist Specials.

1. Queen. Singer Consummate Theater sang the repertoire like how the Greatest Hits album (black background with bandmembers looking like vampires---Freddie Mercury in bushy moustache in that long history line of lip hair, from Chaplin to Stalin to Rico J. circa promenade in the park) had sequenced it so that intuitively, the attentive listener knows exactly what comes next like the scratchy vinyl needled in rotation for Freddie Mercury to pass by the Radiowealth stereo speakers. Everyone in the narrator’s house loved Bohemian Rhapsody in the past.

2. Pink Floyd. Like Queen, narrator holds the view that rock bands before have deep, theatrical quirks. You can find it in the variations of their chords—they were immense and diverse. When Off the Wall was opened with great promise, a commotion sprang from the end of the block where the hall was facing. There were gulping yells. The slight fracas, according to a walking radio, begun when two close friends exchanged fists. It ended before the song reached its operatic chorus and guitar solo. Floyd and Fist. Everything worked so well in the end.

Then, a marvel afterthought from the narrator. Somehow everyone knows about the band members who were said to have routinely performed at a closed down joint named after a boy with a growing nose. Narrator kept silent because nobody ought to miss great things by establishing nose connections.

3. Michael Jackson. Ben is latently an androgynous vocal song. I’ll Be There was segmented with a guitar solo and narrator thought of the stunt as a lifesaver. The duets pulled out the act from okay to incredible and in that measurement, that was quite a leap.

4. Narrator normally does not care about Starship songs but since this was an opulent revisit to the rock and roll past, including the dissed hall of famers, there was so much to express joy and sit by for.

5. Bee Gees. Everything was falsetto, the narrator realized upon absorption of the playlist range. To make it alien compatible.

Of course the crème de la crème was the legendary whistle to drown all lip tunes. It was more of a melodious call. A wind where sound texture was determined by teeth. The great one had arrived bringing a lip chord that was bridged to the narrator by indelible words. Redemptive. Jesus, as if, went down to sanctify the ground. A lot of people claim they know the whistle blower (used strictly as a musical tool) but narrator thinks nobody really does unless one is a follower and a believer. One will never realize the significance of truly great men unless you live and share air space, even for just an hour, with them. The opening of change is so John Wayne, a western of a dusky time with the lone cowboy returning home after a rodeo game. Only, he wielded a mightier weapon.

Everything wouldn’t come up as cathartic if not for the several—narrator had lost count how many----guitar solos rendered. They went on and on like newly sprung wells (you see this in cartoons, woodpeckers blown off by bursting water) that such amalgamation, putting chords in sweet mounds, were deliberately meant to astound. It was strictly a professional affair and anyone with weak fingers needn’t even try surpassing that mastery. The speakers can go bust but never the source of studied riffs and wails.

Narrator sensed an aggrupation like the world was one giant guitar, scaling up heavens through those strings (let the narrator’s feet stomp by Dm, Ab, F#m, Eb floors as if they were highways). Upon reaching her destination, narrator realized that even angels do killer piccolos. Or mandolin. It totally ripped open narrator’s heart because that dream was laid on a field where up high, the sky vomited twilight stars. Never once did she receive both phenomena in one serving until this. Narrator felt like a kid again, trembling with adventure. She knows where India is now and it kicked like dynamo.

The hall was not a stadium nor even a strict hall. The Who did not resurrect itself; strings got disentangled; the speakers were a feeble rusty (but that, by itself, was great attitude)---nobody wore leather and black masks; the lead looked pregnant; a kid thought this lead was the grandfather of a playmate ---everyone got by and walked like about to purchase pork leg at the market. The rest thought that display as plain and normal.

Yet, it was all superbly odd but only to the narrator because in some cultural ground before where an earsplitting band manufactured waves, everyone was dressed to yowl and the attire mattered.

Only the narrator knew that heaven dropped (with all those riffs, and the narrator’s chord ladder, how can it remain snobbish) to be picked up this time around.

Making mention of the triumphant chops and riffs that went on in full four hours and more (Christmas songs were rendered in sagacious fits of Band-Aid fashion, current hits falling off from their original chord brackets, out of key but absolutely fun), no cent was even given the ticket teller since there was no ticket teller involved in this kind of situation, only faith in invisible affinity. Narrator let out strong claps from the sideline because that was a form of appreciation; that the kindred habitat need not even go cheek-to-cheek to acknowledge each other.

Comfortably sat in a varnished bamboo sofa in a true out-of-work posture, narrator was given popcorn, sofdrink and egg sandwich. It was not a movie house but it felt THX surrounded, complete with pizza stalls. The atmosphere was even better.

If there is something to be understood in the ways of the world and the alignment of planets perhaps, sight and sound would make all come out in vivid colors.

That one bizarre, filling, spectacular night, narrator dreamed of something, a wish thought of before as never to materialize grandly.

Instead of Plasma television which narrator could never afford in her lifetime ( she browsed a catalog and one series costs close to seven hundred grand), she imagined sleeping on her bed and in front of her-------all these kindred people whom she thought existed only in glorified set-ups, came out alive and did what they do best (even if one’s best is in column inches).

It was so close that night. Only the stars and walls intervened for its full realization.

Narrator thought : That should be the new lifestyle. Customized acts that suddenly appear in the kitchen or the living room.

Only, it really did happen to her.

When the reality sequence was over, narrator pulled out her magic wand and said, off I doze now. Pause, then a series of hissy okays.

Alas, it was never to be the end.

Suddenly, a quotable quote whimpered, gallantly, victoriously :

“After this, good night.”

Narrator giggled before dreaming of starfishes and shoes. That was a line fit in any classical play, Chekovian even.

Clicked. Everything simply clicked.

Like O. Henry’s story ascribed above, the character inquired after having discovered gothic things in a Nashville town : “I wonder what’s happening in Buffalo?”

If narrator were to be asked that, in this setting, the reply would be : “A lot Sir, a lot.”