Week 3 of Bein’ Undercover Brothers (and sisters) In Christ

Typical Wednesday Night Choir Rehearsal:

6:45 Turn into the pitch black, empty neighborhood street on which the boxy house of God stands and add our car to the handful already parked next to it.

6:50 Eavesdrop on Winzdee naight pruhyr meetin (trans: Wednesday night prayer meeting) as we enter and head for the stairs. The following was overheard the first Wednesday night, word-for-word:

The Wolf: I have the acid reflux, you ever have it? Oh, I have it so bad.

Nose Hair: Yayus, so does Lois. You know, she slipped off of her pillow and her acids started comin’ back up.

Why would pillow slippage cause the return of the acids?

6:51 Descend the stairway into the musty, damp bowels of the church and begin picking our way through the bizarre maze of corridors in attempt to reach the choir room. Make one wrong turn and you’re in the bathroom, a dreadful little hole in the wall with linoleum flooring and cracked, mauve, laminate countertops. Head for the sink and you behold a small dingy vase holding a bouquet of fake daisies (that have managed to wither and yellow like a fresh bouquet) and a basket containing two bottles of lotion, both of which are just about ¼ full and covered in that congealed and hardened lotion mass  that gathers on rarely-used containers. Somehow this whole scene is upsetting, reminiscent of an old nursing home or dentist office bathroom, and you run away as quickly as possible.

6:57 Locate the little choir room just in the nick of time and enter to be greeted by radiant, elderly faces and exclamations of “Voltron!” and “Nelson!” and “We are SOOOO happy to have you!” This inordinate praise began from the first moment we entered this space. Before they even had a moment to discern our relative worth or godliness, this group of nearly-dead were heaping upon us all manner of praise. After the very first rehearsal during which Nelson merely sightread some alto jams and Voltron hammered out some accompaniments, back row bass singer Jabba (yes, as in the Hutt) stirred from his idle position, opened his watery eyes wide and bellowed, his giant belly expanding and contracting exaggeratedly as he spoke, “You have breathed new life into this kwahr (trans: choir). We thank yuh.”

7:00 Take my seat next to the only other alto, Laughtrack, and exchange our regular greeting, “Altos are the best.” This apparently is a joke that we share. After the first rehearsal, when she was laughing and gushing about my existence then laughing some more—“Oh it’s so good to have another ayul-toh (trans: alto) in this kwahr—I responded, “Yeah, altos are the best!” and I put my hand up for her to give me a high-five. At the time, her giddy laughter did not indicate to me that she found this comment any more amusing than she did the myriad other things to which she reacted in the exact same manner. Laughtrack, a lady in her mid-sixties and always dressed in scrubs, received her blog-moniker in the most predictable way possible: by guffawing, giggling, chortling, and chuckling CONSTANTLY at everything that is uttered. However, apparently my comment about altos struck her as particularly hilarious, because the following Sunday after church, an avuncular energetic, balding man approached me and introduced himself as Laughtrack’s husband, saying, “Laughtrack told me ALL about that ayultoh joke you told! Heh! Ayultohs are the best! Whew! That’s a good one!”

7:05-8:00 John Arbuckle, our choir director, instructs Voltron to bang out the SATB parts and drags us through spotty reading of the 10 pieces we are working on for the Christmas program. (J. Arbuckle—openly gay to the secular world but has yet to come out of the sacred closet—shall be profiled at length soon.)

Laughtrack and I sit to the far left on the middle row, right in front of Jabba and his bass posse, perfectly positioned to hear him come in whole measures too early or howl out notes that have long since ended according to the music we have in front of our faces. Close to Jabba is a cohort of lady tenors, among whom is the Oracle, the wise-est and most venerated of the entire group, who I have yet to hear utter a contraction in conversation. She recently brought Voltron and Nelson an entire pecan pie inside a ceramic dish. When I assured her that we’d return the vessel in which it had been delivered to me, she insisted, “No! I shall not be wanting that to be returned! I will not be accepting it! It is yours to keep!” The rest of the crew is sopranos, including Big Geezy. Between the 13 or so of us, I’d wager that about 9 know how to read music, and of those 9, 5 may be able to do it with any kind of accuracy at any given moment.

8-8:15 J. Arbuckle opens the floor for prayer requests, and all manner of illness, injuries, and impending deaths amongst the group’s acquaintances are discussed. Bottom line: everyone is dying in the church, like, tomorrow.

8:15 Prayer and wrap-up. Usually Oracle leads the prayer, wowing all of us with her grandiose Georgia-southern drawl and her complicated and esoteric but powerful grammatical constructions. However, on rehearsal night #1 of our Methodism, J. Arbuckle insisted that we create a circle with our bodies, hold hands, and enact a kind of open-mic prayer, to be concluded with the joint singing of a verse of Amazing Grace.

I. Am. Not. Kidding.  

It was at this point that Voltron and I were both living on the verge of bursting into explosive laughter and ruining our characters entirely. As we gripped one another’s hands tightly, squeezing at every moment of hilarity, one of the bass posse members prayed, “And Lord, watch over my granddaughter, who was hit in the head with a twirlin’ flag as her marchin’ band was presenting a musical piece to the football crowds.” My body ached with the need to expel the humor from my breast as this solemn pronouncement was followed up by the warbly strains of “I-I wuuuuuuuuunce wuuuz laaaaaawst! But nooooooooooww, Ahhhhhhh’m found.”

 8:15-8:20 Return our music to our little designated cubby holes and listen to the ever-resounding pronouncements of “We love you, Nelson and Voltron!” or, as they like to call me, “Voltron’s better half,” as if I were the half of him that contained the vital organs such as the lungs, heart, and liver while he carries useless things such as the appendix, cuticles, the belly button, and an extraneous toe. We grope about in the hallway-maze, find the stairs, hop in our car, let out a good chuckle and a well-placed expletive as if to cleanse the palette then head home only to return on Sunday.

Day 1 of undercover atheism

Before entering the hallowed halls of Jehovah for the first time, Voltron and Nelson had to not only practice our reverent facial expressions (which we did much in the way that a movie protagonist amps him or herself up in the mirror before asking someone out on a date, trying out potential introductory phrases or coy smiles, except for in our case, we were workshopping the patented praise-song hand-raise accompanied by the serious head-nod and upward gaze) but also had to nail the wardrobe. Voltron opted for a Ned Flanders, khakis-and-green sweater look while I went more in a teacherly direction: ever-so-slightly high-waisted (in other words, not high enough to be high-waisted on purpose thus falling somewhere in the mom-jeans fit area) black pants that billow out awkwardly in the hip/mid-thigh region and an innocuous, cream-colored sweater. Perfect attire for not only avoiding a display of sexuality but for also actively repulsing others around me with my body.

It was in these getups that we first infiltrated the new scene of our undercover atheism, ready to get to the bottom of this institution. Unfortunately, I did not immediately get a chance to test out my character as, upon arrival, Voltron was whisked away by a stalwart, no-nonsense woman who we shall refer to as Frau Blucher, and I was left in the parlor to wait as Frau and other members of the committee interrogated him to ascertain his godliness and piano abilities. From the parlor, however, I was able to come to several immediate conclusions about the nature of this establishment. For example, two tiny, tacky chandeliers on an enormous ceiling bespoke the failed attempt at cultivating an atmosphere of grandiosity and luxury for the lord; the card table on which the Operation Christmas Child pamphlets were fanned out foretold a neediness-only-exists-far-away-and-neediness-consists-of-lacking-toiletries philosophy of service; and the claw-foot, rigidly upholstered, rock-hard divan on which I sat prophesied that the mean age of these particular churchgoers was probably something around 70.

The latter hypothesis was bolstered by the subsequent arrival of Big Geezy. Coming in at a solid 4 foot 10, this ancient woman ambled into the parlor as her ride to and from church that night, John Arbuckle (the choir director, yet to be introduced…will come later), sped quickly through the sitting area, waved a hello, and darted away to attend to official, secret church business. She introduced herself and plopped down next to me on the divan, and within 5 minutes I had learned the bulk of her life story. Here’s the upshot: everyone she’s ever known or loved (two husbands, 9 brothers and sisters, other relatives) is dead. She lives in a 5 bedroom, 3-car garage home of loneliness. She can barely see 5 feet in front of her, yet somehow succeeded into getting her driver’s license renewed. As she told the story of that most recent trip to the DMV, her weak, bony legs dangled off the couch not reaching the floor, and her shiny gold slippers fell off one by one onto the carpeted floor revealing gnarly toes withered and bent to one side as if a great wind had blown them permanently in the same direction. Fearful of seeming rude by staring, trance-like at her feet, I concentrated now on her face, but was seized with the desire to run my finger over the deeply corrugated skin of her upper lip. HOW CAN SKIN BE SO LOOSE?

We spent an hour together waiting for the great pianist-finding-committee tribunal to end and choir rehearsal to begin, in which time I developed a warm feeling for Big Geezy. Between her lamenting having prettied-herself up for her driver’s license renewal appointment, insisting that “the man in the DMV would have treated me better had I spent all night drunk in a car and walked in that morning stinking of alcohol” and her singing an ode to the beauty and excellence of rocking chairs (“I could rock and rock and rock all day.”), I decided that she needs to be our church friend. Think of the amazing parties we could throw in that giant house and how grateful she would be for the company of whomever in the world decided to show up. We could paper the whole town with invites, open the doors, and watch magic unfold. The objectives for our undercover operations are shaping up, but number 1 on the list is to befriend Big Geezy in a serious way.

In the coming installments: recap of the sermon entirely based on the movie Gravity, get-to-know-the-choir, and hunting out the insidious shadow people.

From one snake-charming institution to another...

It’s been over two years since Nelson blew his cover at Podiatry. Two years since I’ve had a front row seat to the circus of consumerism. Two years since I played usher to the clambering crowds coming to worship at the altar of material goods. Two years since I submitted my body as a pawn to the gods of capitalism, becoming the fitting room snake charmer and luring others to bend to the gods’ wills and purchase, purchase, purchase! And oh what delights, wonders, and horrors did I discover. It is only right, then, that Nelson’s next persona be in an equal position of wooing others, of appealing to emotions, of using rhetoric to persuade the masses to join in a great and influential machine that is over and above them with a force seemingly too great to counter. Thus Nelson, no longer a Podiatrist, stripped himself of the chunky jewelry, grew out the edgy haircut, and hung up the color-blocked tees only to don the billowy, ankle-length, skin-covering sack-like garb of the righteous. Nelson Mandela is a Methodist.  

Just as Podiatry was at the same time a social experiment and a means of cash-getting, Methodism currently serves as a source of income for my household. My spouse, who will henceforth be known as Voltron, has recently wrested a Methodist church pianist position from the cold, bureaucratic, nearly-dead fingers of the pianist-finding committee. In an act of solidarity, I have agreed to not only attend this institution but lend my snake charming voice to the alto section of the church’s choir. Just as he did at Podiatry, at church, Nelson will play a part; this time, Nelson shall play the part of the devout, crafting a character with the right dress, turns of phrase, and, of course, the perfect prayerfully communing with Jesus face. 

Stay tuned to the next post for the introduction of a few of the cast members: Big Geezy and Nose Hair.