By Ellie Leonard

For the Sequim Gazette

I stepped out onto the stage, blinded by the spotlight and imagining a theater filled with thousands of people.

“The Herdmans were the worst kids in the whole history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars, even the girls, and talked dirty, and cussed their teachers, and took the name of the Lord in vain, and set fire to Fred Shoemaker’s old broken down tool house.”

Meanwhile, red-hot ants crawled into my nether regions.

In those days, children’s theater on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State was a little like the mafia. You could want to audition for the big parts, but you had to be invited. Plebs like us got chorus roles, marching back and forth for a five-minute stint in the second act, talent or no talent. Everything was word-of-mouth, but on the off-chance you got a trivial speaking role or tiny solo in some community theater no-name show, and a local theatrical mogul saw you from the back row, you might get the call.

But this time, the no-name show posted on the back page of the Living Section of the Daily News was one of my favorite Christmas stories. We watched every year on a blurry VHS, Fairuza Balk and Loretta Swit, an after-school special that no one saw. Except me.

So when the audition for “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” ran in the paper, unaffiliated with the local mob, I jumped at the chance.

I was half-chipmunk back then, still uncomfortable in my new body and unsure what to do with my hair, or my face, or the way I held my arms when I walked. But if someone handed me a script I could easily become someone else, if not myself. When the director, Jim Guthrie, called and asked me to play Beth Bradley, the narrator, the lead role, I thought I’d won the lottery.

It was a lot of lines, “But you can handle it,” he said. And if I couldn’t, he made me believe I could. Turns out, lines wouldn’t be my biggest problem.

Just before I’d stepped out on stage into the blinding light, I was alone in the dressing room, putting on a white button-up that smelled like mildew and B.O. Normally I spent a few minutes staring at myself in the mirror, looking for flaws: chub, zits, and hair that hadn’t quite discovered a straight-iron and flipped at the ends. Then I’d button up the smelly shirt and head out on stage. But opening night I just stared. I didn’t see the invisible fat I imagined. I didn’t care about the flip. I saw spots, everywhere, starting in my belly button and spreading up to my chest and around my back, marching in every direction like a colony of red ants. The Chickenpox.

A couple weeks prior a little kid in my ballet class was whisked away after barre warm-ups, but no one really worried about it; most kids our age had already had the chicken pox. And there was a vaccine for it now, but it was still new and mostly ignored. Instead our parents sent us to “pox parties” and spontaneous sleepovers on school nights, hoping we’d get it the old-fashioned way: sharing lollipops, coughing in each other’s faces, lots of hugs and weird body-rubbing on kids we liked, but not that much. And even after spending the night with that one kid who got a blister on the white of his eye, nothing. Maybe I was immune.

Except now I was about to go out on stage for an eight-show run, my first starring role, and the only opportunity I’d ever had to do something big, to get noticed, and maybe to get a call from the mafia don, himself. So I said nothing. But those little spots moved, and danced, and shifted, and made their way farther north and south into my sweating collar and downstairs. They didn’t itch yet, and the show could go on. And I could be the star.

But the next night everything itched, and I hid an army of rashy red pustules under layers of clothing that felt like they might burst, settling into every crease and crevice. I’d stood in the cold shower praying to God for a miracle, dousing myself with calamine and cortisone cream, and blending it with some of Mom’s powder. Now they were everywhere, and even the smelly white shirt couldn’t cover them as they broke out all over my face and up into my hair, my eyes, my ears, along my lips. I looked like a leprosy victim. Outside, the sound of heavy winter boots and conversation filled the theater.

I told Jessie’s dad first. He played Mr. Bradley and I knew him the best. Jessie was Imogene Herdman and my closest friend on set. He’d understand. And he did, after he stopped yelling at no one and nothing for a minute in the bathroom. Then he grabbed Jim.

“Well,” Jim sighed, then chuckled, “that’s never happened in one of my shows before. What do you suppose we should do about this?”

Dani, Mrs. Bradley, popped around the corner — “Oh dear, so it’s true.”

Behind her the cast of little thespians ogled, waiting for some kind of speech, or maybe that I’d inflate like Violet Beauregarde.

“Do you think we should call her parents?”

“No, they’ll kick me out of the play,” I begged. They wouldn’t.

“Okay,” Jim smiled, “what do you want to do, kiddo?”

“The play. Please? Can’t we just do the play?”

“Think we’ve got a turtleneck somewhere in the back?”

“On it!” Dani disappeared into the dressing room.

Twenty minutes later I was slathered, again, in calamine and pancake makeup, rouged a little to not look like a ghost in the lights, and standing center stage, imagining an audience of thousands in the tiny theater. The pox tickled in my butt where the calamine couldn’t reach, and I clenched, remembering my lines.

“And it came to pass in the days of … and there were shepherds abiding … a multitude, praising God … I bring you good tidings of great joy …”

That Christmas Jim sent me a bell with a little painted angel on it — that still hangs on our tree — and a copy of the real honest-to-goodness-not-photocopied script of “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.” “Don’t tell anyone,” he wrote, “these are just for you,” also something about “don’t make fun of my socks.”

He passed away a few years ago, and people said “his (B.S.) meter had a hair-trigger,” but I never saw that part of him. To me he was always the guy who let me walk out on stage with the Chickenpox, and do the biggest and best thing I’d ever done. And even though “there are no small parts, only small actors,” that night I was neither.

And yeah, I joined the mafia.

Ellie (Leinart) Leonard was born and raised in Port Angeles, and graduated from Port Angeles High School in 2001. She participated in PALOA (Port Angeles Light Opera) and the Children’s Theater for many years. In middle school she was recruited to Olympic Theatre Arts, under the direction of Jim Guthrie and later Mary Ann Trowbridge.

She moved to Seattle, and later Missoula, Mont., and now lives with her husband and four children in East Rutherford, N.J. She is an author and transcriber, and under her Red Pencil Transcripts, she works as a small-business contractor for the New York and Los Angeles Times, many podcast and film production teams, and academic institutions.

Read more about her at redpenciltranscripts.com and ellieleonard.com.

After playing Beth in Olympic Theatre Arts’ 1996 show “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever,” director Jim Guthrie gave Ellie (Leinart) Leonard an ornament that she still hangs on her Christmas tree each year.

Photo courtesy Ellie Leonard/ Olympic Theatre Arts offered “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” in 1996.

Photo courtesy Ellie Leonard/ Ellie (Leinart) Leonard now lives in New Jersey with her family and works as a transcriber under her Red Pencil Transcripts with major newspapers, podcast and film production teams, and academic institutions.

Photo courtesy Ellie Leonard/ Some of the cast from OTA’s 1996 show “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” included, from left, Ellie (Leinart) Leonard as Beth, Cara LaChance as Alice, and Jessie Young as Imogene Herdman

Photo courtesy Ellie Leonard/ Director Jim Guthrie gave Ellie (Leinart) Leonard a copy of the script for “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” with a note after she found out she had chicken pox.