Once upon a time I wrote a story that was almost real.

It was my story—sort of.

 The girl’s name was Sarah Benjamin and the question the book rested on was what’s a nice Jewish girl like Sarah doing in an exclusive gentile school in the mid west? Well, one thing she was doing was playing a shepherd, by default, in the school’s annual Christmas pageant for four damn years.  

Those years happened to be the Kennedy years of the early 1960’s. While the rest of the country was marching toward the New Frontier, Sarah was stuck in “Bethlehem” with a cardboard star swinging over a manger with a plastic baby doll Jesus. This being an election year I’ve been recalling those years of hope and dreams. Sorry to say I’m not dreaming right now. That’s the bad news. But I’m not a shepherd either. I’m an author, and I decided I wanted to bring Pageant back as an ebook. I am haunted by some of the stories I have written and this is one.