Daily Breeze, Dec. 7, 2001
INSANITY CLAUS
Playing Santa is scary business for our Kringle wannabe
BY COREY LEVITAN
PHOTOS BY SCOTT VARLEY/DAILY BREEZE AND MICHAEL ROSS WACHT/DAILY BREEZE
Santa and Satan are similar names. Just slide the "n" two spaces to the right.
I brought this correspondence even closer recently by portraying jolly old Saint Nick at a busy L.A. mall. Nearly half of my 20 visits were with little boys and girls who could not stop shrieking in profound horror.
This made no sense to me. I came thoroughly prepared. I had the all-wool red suit that screamed anti-fungal powder, the curly white beard that smelled like some other Santa's lunch, and enough padding to qualify for onsite angioplasty. (Enjoy the preview, ladies. This is how plan to look when I get married and stop jogging.)
I even graduated with honors from Mall Santa School, taught two weeks earlier in a a storage room of the Del Amo Fashion Center by Anthony Scovotto. He's the owner of San Pedro's Chris Cringle Special Events, which has run the Torrance mall's live holiday attractions for 20 years. Scovotto showed me and five other Santas how to extend the knee for easy lap access, how to cradle infants, and how to address the average toddler.
"For a boy, you say, 'Boy, you are sprouting up like a weed,'" he said. "For a girl, it's, 'Isn't that a pretty outfit?'"
Before taking my throne, I worried about my fake beard getting tugged off, my fake nose getting tugged off (because I wasn't wearing one) and being asked to name all my reindeer.
What do I know about Santa lore? The only authority figures from my childhood with beards, curly long hair and funny hats were rabbis. So I taped a crib sheet beneath my left red sleeve: Dasher and Dancer, Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid, Donner and Blitzen. And, from the New Testament, Rudolph.
As it turned out, the only thing necessary for me to know was how to stop children from screaming like unanesthetized oral surgery patients.
"Smile, Julian, smile!" pleaded 46-year-old
Margarita Mendez of Wilmington of her 2-year-old grandson. Behind her, Peter
Contreras, 16, of San Pedro, desperately rattled a teddy bear with bells on as
Julian's tantrum only grew louder and more furious.
Contreras and Santa's other helper, 19-year-old Corina Torres of Harbor City, tried to create a break in the hysterics as child after child was deposited in my lap, then inevitably pleaded not to be left there. Their job was to snap three pictures with a digital camera, the best of which the parent chose to print out. (The charge was $10.99 per photo, part of which covers the $8-$9 hourly salaries of the actors.)
In my case, they found themselves looking for the picture in which the child looked least like he or she was being kidnapped.
"You're not supposed to scare the kids," Contreras said.
I wasn't trying to.
"Tell them you're a friend of Skully's from 'Monsters Inc.,'" suggested Michael Amundson, 30, of Gardena, who played Santa immediately before my shift but stuck around because he sensed there might be trouble.
Alas, Julian would not cheer up, even after my photographer Michael Ross Wacht left his post to try reasoning with him in Spanish. (This Santa may cross all national borders on Christmas Eve, yet he's fluent only in English and pig Latin.)
Zachary Falkner, 2, of Redondo Beach was so adamantly against sitting on my lap, or anywhere near me, that his parents posed him for a snapshot on my throne ALL ALONE. Santa was proving a liability to sales of his own photos.
Another boy wandered up to Contreras -- whose outfit consisted of only a Santa cap and red vest -- and began telling him everything he wanted for Christmas. But he wouldn't tell Santa! It was enough to make me want to go ho-ho-home.
"I think your voice is scaring them," Torres told me.
It fell somewhere between Jabba the Hut and Billy Crystal's Jewish old man character. But I had little choice. I couldn't use my real voice. Santa doesn't suck helium.
My amazing ability to transform happy children into blubbering messes wasn't contingent upon the lap visit, either. I had a scaring range of 30 feet, I discovered in between visits, as I waved to pint-sized passersby.
I'm going to make a wonderful father one day. And by wonderful father, I of course mean someone who scares the urine out of his kids.
Santa never frightened me when I was little. Of course, I was never thrown on his lap after being repeatedly admonished to never approach or talk to strangers.
"We don't believe in Santa Claus," my parents told me. It wasn't only the fact that they were Jewish. They were also on this "level with your child" kick. When I was four, I asked them how babies were made and they told me the truth. This could explain many of my later problems.
Clowns did scare me, though. They still do. (We'll save that issue for another column.)
Frightening little children works up a tremendous thirst. Back at Del Amo, Torres brought me a cup of water. Refusing to drink it through my smelly, spittle-caked beard, even with a straw, I pulled the white thicket off my chin for a minute.
One little girl's eyes caught Santa in the act. She poked her parents, who were trying to decide whether to get on line for a photo.
"Look it!" she said, pointing out that I'm a fake fake Santa.
"Ignore the man behind the curtain!" I told her as her parents' decision suddenly got easy.
My first brave visitor not convulsing with dread was a little boy. All my Santa skills were vigorously put to work.
"Why, young man, you're sprouting up like a weed!" I said. "It's been about a year since I've seen you, hasn't it?"
He smiled and nodded.
Being a good Santa is not just about looking fat and keeping your lap open. It's about goodness. It's about giving. It's about lying. Lying like the rug onCharles Grodin's head.
I learned the "about a year since" line from Scovotto, whose fulltime job is playing the organ at Nativity Church in Torrance. From Amundson, an industrial engineer, I learned the appropriate response to how there can be two Santas at Del Amo. (His dad, Albert, manned the throne at the opposite end of the mall.)
"Santa's really busy and can't be everywhere at once, so he sends out his helpers," Amundson told Brandon Tranberg, 7, of Redondo Beach. "But you never know which Santa is the real Santa." (That beats the answer I would have used: that I'm the good Santa of the north and the other guy is the wicked Santa of the east.)
But what really messes with a fragile young mind is when the helpers get the child's name from the parents, then whisper it to Santa just before the lap trip. The trick so overwhelmed one 7-year-old girl, Michelle, that I could do no wrong afterward. And I decided to get cocky.
"Well now, do you know the names of all of my reindeer, Michelle?" I asked.
"Rudolph," she said, unable to expand the list.
"That's the easy one," I responded. "You don't know the names of the others, do you?" She shook her head then asked what they were.
I slipped my sleeve up to read, but my list was gone. I was sweating so much under my fake fat and wool, that the tape had loosened. (I found the list on the bottom of my shoe the next morning.)
"Well," I said, "you mentioned Rudolph, and of course there's also..." I pretended to choke. Then I announced, "My, isn't that a pretty outfit?"
Needless to say, not every nuance of Santa politics was within my grasp. After visiting with one boy, his mother brought him back and complained that he forgot to tell Santa what he wanted.
"Oh, no, he did tell me," I assured mom. She shot me a troubled look.
"Oh yeah, he didn't," I said, catching on. The boy then repeated his list so his mother could hear: a remote-control plane and a remote-control car.
"Well, you be a good little boy and Santa will see
what he can do," I said. Scovotto had warned me never to promise anything,
"because you don't know what the parents' income is." (My suggestion to ask kids
whether their folks pull in over 50 thou a year was not given serious
consideration.)
At the end of a long and tiring night, Santa got his very own Christmas present when four not-so-little girls, aged 18-20, showed up to share his lap just before 9 p.m. closing.
As Crystal Catellon, Adrienne Macias, Alison Traina and Rachel Anderson assumed their positions, I inquired as to whether they were naughty or nice.
Hey, Santa can't be that much older than Hugh Hefner, and that guy can get away with it. Besides, Mrs. Claus was a far enough sleigh ride away.
As usual, however, my flirting displayed an uncanny ability to elicit no response. The girls were more interested in Santa as a photo backdrop than a dinner guest.
"I'm not really fat," I whispered in Alison Traina's right ear with my sweaty lips. "And I'm not really old." Well, I'm not more than twice her age anyway.
"And I'm not really a guy who plays Santa in a mall."
The final part of my argument would probably have been more convincing had I not been a guy playing Santa in a mall.
I was ignored as the girls peered into the computer terminal at how their photo came out.
I think I liked it better when my vistors screamed in horror.