Flashbacks to Babylon

Our third week in the Lion's Den was a bit chaotic... My wife, who seemed to be getting over the flu on Monday had a major relapse on Tuesday, and I had to step up to the plate and handle the homeschooling for the day. Consequently, I didn't get my planned day off to prepare for that night, and around 3:00 decided to go with a "music video" approach to telling the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. I had sort of hoped to do something musically (probably the title song from *Cool in the Furnace*), but what was at hand was a song on a Beginner's Bible CD Pam loaned me. It was fun, involving sound effects of a fire chief and dispatcher's radio communication, had a female vocalist and a bit of a rap. It required purchasing four additional puppets to play those roles (the fireman actually was designed to be a fireman, but the dispatcher was a queen I redressed in a discarded policeman's uniform, the rapper was a knight that I converted to an angel (left the shiny suit on and just replaced the helmet with a starry halo and added wings) and the lead singer was a cowgirl (no reason she should be, but no reason she shouldn't, so I left her as she was, for lack of a better idea). We ad-libbed a short intro with Daniel and the Lions, in which Daniel explained he was away on a diplomatic mission when this happened, and so he had to read the story from official transcripts (he rolled out a scroll which was the cue for the music). Interestingly enough, the Bible doesn't tell us WHERE Daniel was when his three friends were thrown into the furnace, but the rabbis came up with some VERY interesting possibilities in the Talmud (one of my favorites was that he was in the Valley of Dry Bones with Ezekiel, helping to raise the dead).

I of course couldn't see how any of this went down (the fire department and space for the singers were in front of the kitchen window we use for the Den, out of my view), but I'm told the kids were into it, and the puppets danced appropriately. The only major problem was my puppeteer for the angel Azmaveth, Daniel's guardian, went AWOL, and the fearless prophet of God had to run away in order to end the scene.

Also out of my view was the doorway we filled with red, orange and yellow streamers to serve as the fiery furnace. Four child volunteers and one of my adult leaders acted out the story as the puppets narrated in song. This followed a pattern established the week before, involving live actors (including some of the kids) in the flashback scenes. That week we had combined the leftover part of the first script (involving Daniel's refusal to eat the king's food) from chapter 1 with the story of Nebuchadnezzar's dream in chapter 2 for an extended flashback to his early days at court. Surprisingly I did not do much with the character of Nebuchadnezzar, but the young actress who took the role really played it up, turning him into a childish egocentric (giving me a good idea for how to develop the character for next week!). The standout in that week's script was Ashpenaz (who actually was a composite of the chief eunuch in chapter 1--I didn't bother explaining that--and Arioch the chief guard in chapter 2). I wrote him as annoying and annoyed, fearful and sarcastic, all at once. He couldn't understand why his young charges refused the finest food in the empire for the sake of a God who, if he cared anything for them, would not have allowed them to be conquered in the first place. He tried mocking them, reasoning with them, and eventually begging them, fearful that if they didn't do as they were told HE would lose his head. When they ended up being the most impressive new students, rewarded with high positions in the king's court, he had to admit maybe they knew what they were doing, and there "might be something to this God of yours after all!" As I tried to imagine this character, what came to me was a voice from one of the "Fractured Fairytales" in an old *Rocky and Bullwinkle* episode, the one in which Prince Charming is a crooked schemer who, instead of kissing Sleeping Beauty and waking her up, decides she's more interesting asleep, and turns her into a tourist attraction, building "Sleeping Beauty Land", charging admission, and making a fortune off of merchandise tie-ins. I don't know who the voice talent was, but he was very familiar and I'm sure had a lot of the work back in the day.

The challenge for the coming week is to write the script for King Nebuchadnezzar's "Beastly Time" (when he is humbled and eats grass like an ox), and to get the lions' mouths moving.