The Book of Mormon Girl (8 page)

I hung on to my seat and waited for the pizza to run out.

•   •   •

But of all the indignities one could suffer as a thirteen-year-old Mormon girl, the worst to me by far was the fact that a movie called
The God Makers
was making the rounds of all the local churches.
The God Makers
was the work of a disgruntled former Mormon, who depicted our heaven as a realm of faraway planets with funny names, where double-talking men had celestial sex with polygamous goddess wives who wanted to be eternally pregnant.
The God Makers
even made a mockery of what happened in our Mormon temples, lampooning the choreography of promises our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents rehearsed behind closed doors. They made fun of our parents’ underwear too.

For months I watched church marquees across town feature the words
THE GODMAKERS
or the phrase
MORMONS: CHRISTIAN OR CULT?
I desperately hoped the movie would not make it to Trinity Presbyterian, the church attended by hundreds of kids at my junior high school. Every week, on
my way to piano lessons at Sister Collier’s house, we passed by Trinity. Every time I’d brace myself to see the marquee, just as we rounded the corner on 17th Street.

And then it happened. My mother put her hand on my knee as we made the turn. There they were, those words—
MORMONS: CHRISTIAN OR CULT?
—on the Trinity marquee. Anger burned between my temples again, and tears stung my eyes. “I heard they held up garments in church last Sunday too,” my mother told me, pityingly, reassuringly.

Why us? What did they want from us, those born-agains? And what was it, exactly, besides the talk about us being a cult, and the underwear, and the temples, and the planets, and the fact that they said Joseph Smith was in league with the devil, and we worshipped the wrong Jesus, what was it they needed to battle?

“We’re growing,” my mother explained in a calm, super-rational voice. “We’re taking converts. They’re threatened.”

Threatening? Us? Mormons? With our family vans, ten children apiece, our tins of vacuum-packed wheat stored up against the apocalypse, our homely calico pioneer bonnets, our heavy books of genealogy, our home-baked bread, our Utah, our world-famous choir, Gordon Jump, and Bachman-Turner Overdrive? Us?

•   •   •

Early on dance festival morning, thousands of us Mormon youth across the Southland packed our sateen spangled
costumes in our duffle bags, climbed into our family vans, and trekked up the freeway to the world-famous Rose Bowl. Mormon kids from farther-flung California places arrived in yellow school buses. Standing in the dusty parking lot, I watched bus after bus pour in, the names of their home cities posted in the windows: San Luis Obispo, Blythe, Bakersfield, Ventura, Poway, Poway, Poway.

What heaven Poway must have been, I thought, with so many Mormons there.

Natasha, Charlotte, Shayne, Shirley, and I cruised around and around the Rose Bowl parking lot in our modest knee-length shorts and Brigham Young University T-shirts, giddy at the sight of so many Mormons in one place, riding what felt like a red-punch-and-sugar-cookie high. In the morning we rehearsed our moves in dusty quadrants of the Rose Bowl grounds—umbrellas swinging left, then right, then left, then right. After lunch, we moved out onto the legendary Rose Bowl turf to experience the wonder of thousands of “Singin’ in the Rain” dancers moving in precisely choreographed circles, zigzags, and lines.

After our final run-through, in the late afternoon heat, the dance festival organizers herded us all into the Rose Bowl stands and set up microphones on the grassy gridiron, so that Mormon youth from all over Southern California could bear testimony of the truthfulness of the gospel, expressing to one another our love for the Mormon Church and the teachings that kept us safe and together in these latter days. A young
man in his twenties, one of the older dance festival participants, a returned missionary fresh back from Chile wearing modest knee-length shorts, stood at the microphone and proposed marriage to his girlfriend in the stands.

As the sun set over the smoggy San Gabriel Mountains, our master of ceremonies materialized: beloved Mormon television star Gordon Jump of
WKRP in Cincinnati
.

Gordon Jump rode out onto the field in a little jeep, greeted us, and then gave the word. We all deployed to carefully segregated bays of the great concrete Rose Bowl to change into our spangly, sateen dance festival costumes sewn up in some faraway subtropical factory town.

That’s when the first of the fifty thousand Mormon spectators began to arrive at the Rose Bowl parking lot. Wood-sided station wagons loaded with kids and coolers of cold cuts, Jell-O salads, and supermarket-brand grape soda started to clog up the freeway off-ramps to Pasadena. When one station wagon broke down, exhaust swirling around its tires, almost immediately another station wagon or, better yet, a family van would pull up alongside. “Can we help you? Hop on in!”

Lost a wallet at the Rose Bowl? It would come back in the mail, intact, postage paid.

Small children who wandered away from parents into the festival crowds? Safe as lambs.

Will you go a mile with me? Heck, I’ll go an extra mile.

That’s the sort of thing that happened when sixty-five thousand Mormons got together.

Of course, the born-agains couldn’t resist, and they sent an especially brave delegation to do battle against all sixty-five thousand of us. About a dozen anti-Mormon picketers stood at the Rose Bowl gates, looping their signs in the air. In those days there were always a few picketers outside our churches or temples, telling us that we didn’t believe in the right Jesus. But with sixty-five thousand Mormons on the Rose Bowl grounds, fifteen thousand of them young people trained as precision dancers, the ragged little deployment of born-agains didn’t have a chance. A group of Mormon kids encircled them and began to sing our beloved hymn, “I am a Child of God,” the very sound of which so confounded our tormentors that they withered and vaporized into thin air.

At least that’s what my best friend Natasha told me she heard from a girl in the cha-cha number.

There were other Mormon and Mormon-friendly celebrities on hand for the festivities: football great Merlin Olsen (now of
Little House on the Prairie
), star quarterback Steve Young (great-great-great grandson of Brigham), Mrs. America 1984 Debbie Wolf, America’s Sweethearts the Lennon Sisters of Lawrence Welk fame, and at least three Osmond brothers.

First number up: one thousand couples in hot pink and orange Carmen Miranda dresses and matching suits dancing the cha-cha.

Next came a thousand couples in silver-and-gold sateen to do the Charleston and the jitterbug to the sounds of the Glenn Miller Orchestra.

A thousand more couples in neon yellow-and-green sateen with suspenders bopped to Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” and the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA.”

Then one thousand couples in orange and royal blue danced a Virginia reel–style tribute to our Mormon pioneer ancestors, who, history tells us, danced their troubles away round the campfires during their trek across the plains.

My number was next: “Singin’ in the Rain,” a thousand thirteen-year-old girls like me and Natasha in rainbow-colored (and precision sequenced) sateen dresses with clear plastic raincoats swinging white umbrellas—
right, then left, then right, then left
.

After we cleared the field, a thousand couples in black tuxedos and white bridelike dresses waltzed in to take our place.

Then came a thousand male and female cheerleaders in striped red-and-white jumpsuits, with pom-poms, bouncing about to the fight songs for our Brigham Young University and the University of Utah.

A thousand couples in dirndls and lederhosen, looking like Disneyland employees, did the polka in tribute to immigrant America, under the watchful gaze of a miniature Statue of Liberty stationed on the sidelines.

Finally came the four Lennon Sisters, all wearing green sequined dresses, crammed into a little red sleigh, on a white sheet, in the middle of the Rose Bowl field, to sing a Christmas song surrounded by a thousand swaying Mormon youth in white tuxedos and red velvet dresses.

“Isn’t it wonderful that as Americans we have the freedom to celebrate religion as we choose?” said one of the Lennon Sisters, as the rest chimed in, “Oh, yes.”

“And isn’t it wonderful that as
Christians
, Mormons celebrate the birth of our
Savior
Jesus Christ?”

Oh, yes: Take that, born-agains!

•   •   •

We were just thirteen, my skinny friend Natasha and I, but we understood the power of the moment when we crowded with fifteen thousand Mormon youth in the dark tunnels of the Rose Bowl, ready to burst onto the fields for the dance festival grand finale. As went the words to our beloved Mormon hymn:

Shall the youth of Zion falter

In defending truth and right

While the enemy assaileth,

Shall we shrink or shun the fight? No!

True to the faith that our parents have cherished

True to the truth for which martyrs have perished

To God’s command

Soul, heart, and hand

Faithful and true we will ever stand

We were proud Mormon youth of Zion in the last days, none of us shrinking or shunning the fight, a legion of amateur
Osmonds primed to appear in paradisiacal glory, and so we would ever stand.

And as the sun set deep behind the smoggy San Gabriel Mountains, as I felt the bodies crowding in the tunnel around me, I thought to myself:

I’d like to see the born-agains pull this off.

I’d like to see them muster this degree of regimentation.

They couldn’t even coordinate the made-up names of their franchise churches: Calvary, Melodyland, the Rock.

What did these people know about discipline and commitment?

Did they go to church at six a.m. every morning before school, as Mormon kids did?

Had they disciplined their minds for the possibility that God would ask them to take a second wife into the family in order to get to heaven? No, all they had to do to get to heaven was read a prayer from a mass-produced Tony Alamo pamphlet about accepting Jesus into your heart. All they had to do was say, “I accept you, Jesus, as my savior,” just like that. Poof.

Had they drilled the stories and teachings of four—that’s right,
four—
books of scripture into their heads? No, just one, just the Bible.

Had they carefully sealed up tins of rice and textured vegetable protein against the great and final days? Were they ready to live through the end-times? No, while they dreamed of being transported up into the clouds like
Star Trek
, we were ready to live out the nuclear winter that would follow
the second coming of Christ, to rebuild a kingdom from the charred timbers of leveled forests.

Those born-agains could never do what we did. Cross the plains. Track down and baptize our dead ancestors by the millions. Fan out all over the globe two by two, knocking on doors. Precision coordinate fifteen thousand teenage dancers.

What it all came down to was this: those born-agains were soft.

I felt clean Mormon bodies encased in flammable sateen, bodies raised on casseroles, bodies free of caffeine and other worldly abuses packed in the Rose Bowl tunnel around me.

Maybe
he
is here tonight, I thought to myself.

Maybe
he
is here, wearing a neon green-and-yellow sateen outfit.

Maybe
he
came on one of those buses from Poway, my someday love, my future Mormon husband.

When the signal came, fifteen thousand of us rushed through the tunnels and down into the stadium. We roared fifteen thousand strong, and fifty thousand Mormon spectators roared back. Red pom-pom, now blue pom-pom, a sea of patriotic precision: “From everywhere around the world, they come to America . . .”

Natasha and I shook our blue pom-poms in the warm July night, feeling the triumphant legacy of the great concrete Rose Bowl, feeling too the strength of our Mormon nation, gathered in from every corner of the world. We waved our pom-poms for Utah, for pioneer grandmothers, for wheat
sealed in tins against the apocalypse, for our sacred temples on killer real estate all across California, and broken-down station wagons rescued tonight in the swirling smog of the Pasadena freeways. We waved our pom-poms for Gordon Jump, calico bonnets, and Bachman-Tuner Overdrive, and against
The God Makers
, and the anti-Mormon stand-up comic in his rumpled khakis, and Jeannette, and all the born-again Christians who said they wanted to be my friends, and their pastors too. I waved my pom-pom because I was not afraid of polygamy, sacred underwear, or the idea of eternal godhood, and neither were the fifteen thousand youth in flammable sateen outfits moving in majestic precision on the field around me. I was not the only one who believed in worlds as numberless as the stars in the sky. Why not?
Why the heck not?

“Today!” The voice of Neil Diamond burst overhead like fireworks.

“Today!” A stadium of Mormons came to their feet.

Today! I felt a burning in my heart. Somewhere under these lights, on the Rose Bowl field,
he
was here: my future husband,
the One
, he who would understand my Mormon world without my defending or explaining.

Tonight, true to the faith, he was here just like me, dancing in flammable sateen to the sounds of Neil Diamond and Kool and the Gang.

sister williams’s tampons

S
ister Tucker stood almost six feet tall, with short white hair and sharp eyes in a pretty face. Sister Larsen was five foot two, quick tongued, smart-alecky, and redheaded. Sister Williams had wide hips and soft hands; her short hair was feathered like the wings of doves and her accent was Utah gentle. Sister Barnes had thick ankles and thick glasses, her face lined with deep intelligence. Between them, they had born and raised twenty-four children. None of them foolish, weak, or neurotic; all of them uncomplaining bearers of sixty-pound packs—these were our Girls Camp leaders.