This year we watched the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special, which should be one of everybody’s Christmas traditions. The thing I was most struck with this year is how timeless it seems. I tend to think of it as a time capsule of peak 1990s television, even though it was released in 1988.
I also tend to think of it as this bizarre little one-off gag, making fun of traditional Christmas specials. My 80s brain said that it was a cute joke that they have Frankie and Annette in the cast, and that the locals like Chairy and Conky are given top billing over Oprah and Cher.
But now I can recognize just how much love they put it into it, as if they fully intended for it to still be watched and beloved over 30 years later. Part of that is that the camp — even the playhouse annex being built by buff, shirtless construction workers using fruitcake — isn’t just a sly wink, sneaking gay stuff into a mainstream TV holiday special, during the Reagan era, when the anti-gay “family values” culture war was still in effect. Instead, there’s a real sense of “this is stuff that we love, and eventually, the rest of you will catch on.”
How else do you explain Grace Jones’s fantastic performance of Little Drummer Boy? It capitalized on Jones’s persona as way too outre for the mainstream, made fun of that (“Sorry, Grace, back in the box!”), and then gave it the space to be a show-stopping highlight.
Not to mention defiance of the attempts to gaslight the entire country into believing that it’s always been a Christian Nation of Straight English-Speaking White People, by having Charro perform Feliz Navidad and bringing in Miss Rene for “the Hannukah portion of the show.” (Along with Jewish dinosaurs playing with a dreidel).
The part of the show that I’ve had “a changing relationship with” over the years: kd lang’s wonderful over-the-top version of “Jingle Bell Rock.” (Still the best version of the song ever recorded, IMO).
Back when I first saw the special, I thought it was awkward and tone deaf. Surly teenage me said, “Yeah, kd, we all get that the show is campy, but it’s supposed to be cool as well. You’re a little too on-the-nose.” It was corny, or had I had the word back then, cringe.
Now, of course, I can recognize what an uptight little bastard teenage me was, bundling everything up tighter and tighter for fear of looking uncool. In my defense, it was the 1980s. (And I was still very very much in the closet). Now of course, I can recognize it as someone who was defiantly and confidently asserting her own style, just as much as Grace Jones was, but who’d just recently burst into the peak of her mainstream popularity.
In other words: she understood the assignment exactly, and she delivered a performance that she knew people would still be watching over thirty years later. Or if not, then at least she’d give it everything she could, all while having fun with it.
So I’m wishing everybody Happy Holidays and a very Merry Christmas, and my wish is that we can all live our lives with the unchecked, fearless enthusiasm and joy of kd lang in the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special.