A Carnival skit that gets real with our youth

In a skit on Carnival, one young man of an all-boys’ school was brave enough to act out getting involved with a woman in a ‘little’ Carnival costume. He smiled and examined the picture I held in my hand as I pretended to be her jumping up in a pretend-Carnival band.

She/I skirted around but kept her/my eyes on him and eventually introduced herself/myself as ‘Shenaynay’ in between taking sips of alcohol straight from the bottle. He looked at the bottle; he looked at me with the picture and the bottle but he was happy to meet her.

Shenaynay commented that where we were in the band (in front of over 100 young men in reality) was so noisy (the boys were screaming and laughing all trying to get a good look at the very attractive, yet scantily dressed model in the picture). She suggested they go somewhere quiet where they could be alone.

He readily agreed (the boys cheered him on!). I walked with him toward the side of the stage and was called back to the centre of the school hall by my co-presenter Jason Jackman. I hid at the side of the stage and transformed until I heard Jason say “…a few months later walking down Frederick Street”. I then emerged with a pillow over my abdomen, hidden under my clothes. All the boys railed in disbelief!

My brave actor wanted to run out the room but didn’t. Confronted by ‘Shenaynay’, he looked confused and gasped when she cried out that she looked for him for so long. She was so happy to have seen him and greeted him with love and affection.

He probably held his breath when she said that he was the ‘Daddy’ of the little one in her womb. Then this—he said he was leaving the country ‘tomorrow’ and that he was only here for a while, so she would have to take care of ‘it’.

He quickly reminded her that she had the option of ‘Plan B’, an abortion, to which she looked horrified as she reminded him of the really good time they had “that Carnival night” and that the baby was the product of their “love”.

He responded that she was with many men that day and she must have gotten him confused with someone else, as “you were hitting that bottle real hard” suggesting her drunken state had given him the excuse of the “mistaken identity”. The play went on, but the truth of what happens to some persons at Carnival time came out.

The next week in an all-girls’ school, when the play at the all-boys’ school was discussed, the girls shook their heads and commented about the lack of “manliness” they saw in this young man. How could he not own-up to “his” actions they questioned.

Every year, we ask ourselves the same questions. It’s time to be “real” with our young people and share the message of chastity or pure love. “Love can wait to give but lust can’t wait to get”, is a sentence that we borrow from International Chastity Speaker Jason Evert. It succinctly spells out the difference between ‘love’ and its imitation ‘lust’.

At our ‘Is Love Forever?’ seminars we let young people know that love wants what is best for the beloved and that chastity is the “art of loving”. The virtue of chastity calls for respect for everyone and in particular one’s beloved or future beloved.

Everyone is called to be chaste: single, married and even religious persons. To say that one ‘loves’, there must be sacrifice involved and the sacrifice these youth are called to as single persons right now is abstinence until marriage. We remind them too, that it is never too late to start over! #SharingIsCaring

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