“Three or four years ago tryouts were being conducted for parts in the Nativity Play to be staged by the children of the Second Presbyterian Church. There was brisk competition for all the roles except that of the innkeeper who told Mary and Joseph that he didn’t have room for them.
For some reason the kids seemed to think the innkeeper was a sort of bad guy and no one wanted to be saddled with the part.
‘But he wasn’t really mean,’ one of the teachers explained to the four-year-old boy chosen for the role. ‘All the rooms in the inn were taken and he just didn’t have a place for Mary and Joseph to stay.”
That appeased the boy somewhat, but when the play was staged he felt constrained to underscore the innkeeper’s innocence by ad-libbing his lines just a trifle.
‘I’m sorry I don’t have room for you, I’m really sorry,’ he said when Mary and Jospeh stopped by, ‘ but won’t you come in and have a drink?’”
(Excerpt from the book Crossroads and Coffee Trees, a Legacy of Joe Creason, 1975, The Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times, page 21. Joe Creason was born in Benton, Kentucky in 1918, and wrote “Joe Creason’s Kentucky”, a popular local column in the Courier-Journal, Louisville, KY, from 1963 until his death in 1974.)
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
