Hi and thanks for landing here. It might seem a bit backward, but I decided to start blogging only because I've been enjoying Twitter so much. While I love the 140 character limit of tweets, I realised that a blog would give me a place where I could have the luxury of saying a bit more. I've also set up here because I have a blogging project in mind... but more on that later.
Right now my face is stuck in the following books...
As part of the Ship of Fools Roll on Christmas project, which has been live on Facebook for a few weeks now and picking up increasing levels of players, I put a new video (above) online yesterday. Steve Tomkins and I shot it at the Greenbelt festival, asking women if they ever played Mary in nativity plays when they were kids.
Alongside that, we published the results of a survey about nativity plays, which backs up the video. It turns out that only 12% of women played the role of Mary when they were children. The reason? The women said that Marys were chosen because they were pretty (27%) well behaved (22%), or teacher’s pet (16%)... which shut the stable door on everyone else.
My partner in crime on Ship of Fools, Steve Goddard, commented about this: ‘We’ve unearthed a simmering tension among the tea towels.’
‘I wasn’t pretty enough to be Mary,’ said one woman in our video, who then added tartly: ‘That’s alright though. I didn’t want to, she was always a bit wet.’
‘There was definitely a hierarchy going on in churches about who could be Mary,” said another non-Mary. “She was always the good girl in the church, whereas the reality was that the original Mary wouldn’t have been perceived as a good girl.’
