The Skinniest Roman Soldier

Every year the Taipei English Ward puts on a Christmas Pageant as their service/missionary effort. It is a huge production; just about every person in the ward has a job (you should see the organizational chart of responsibilities--it's longer than many that I saw as an auditor). The Nativity is performed four times in one weekend, the immaculate set was built by one of the senior missionaries, sound and lights are hired out, one of the two narrators tells the story in Chinese, and Mary even rides in on a horse.

My job was costumes. Sounds like a big task, but really it wasn't. The show has been performed eight years now, so they already have all the costumes and the people in charge of them last year organized them really well in the storage boxes. All I had to do is make sure every character had the right costume and help them put it on right if they needed it. Cody needed it.



Cody's job was to be one of the Roman soldiers. This is what the costume bags read: "Roman Soldier #1 - tall and skinny," "Roman Soldier #2 - not as tall and skinny." Of course we figured Cody should have the tall and skinny one.

After Cody was asked to be the soldier, we were walking home from church and he made the comment, "Aren't the soldiers supposed to be big and buff? I'm going to be the skinniest Roman soldier ever."

As it turns out, Cody was too tall and not skinny enough. We had to add an extension to his "skirt." It was that or the audience would get a soldier wearing plaid shorts or, better yet, Cody would be showing off his nice thighs. Twoot Twoo.


The Pageant went great. I was amazed at the turn out; supposedly over a thousand people watched the show between the four performances (read about it here). For the parts I was able to sneak out from backstage, I was incredibly touched. It was a really neat experience reflecting on how a lot of the Chinese do not know the story of Christ's birth and we were able to present it to them in such a beautiful way. I really hope they felt the spirit and warmth as I did. I know they at least liked Cody's costume.