Sundee Marnin' Service

Some has been said about the choir rehearsal, but nothing has been noted about Sundee marnin service. Here’s a run down of the day.

10:30 The choir gathers in our frigid underground lair to don the flowing white robes and shiny stoles that serve as our costumes for the production.

10:33 High five Big Geezy, receive my weekly cheek kiss (always so wet), and compliment her on the latest fashion creation she’s sporting. Last week, it was a bedazzled off-white sweater trimmed in thin, gold rope which apparently belonged to her (long since dead) mother in law. Flashy ladies they be. 

10:35 We almost always hear an anecdote about J. Arbuckle’s new dog, Lonelynomore, the only creature he has in his life to comfort him during his battle with gout. Yes, J. Arbuckle has gout in his knee. No, J. Arbuckle is not a 17^th century pirate; he is a 30 year old music graduate student. According to Mayo Clinic’s online compendium for hypochondriacs and self-proclaimed physicians, gout can be caused by an over consumption of “organ meats, anchovies, herring, asparagus and mushrooms,” so I’m assuming we can check those things off of our what-to-get-J-Arbuckle-for-Christmas list.

10:40 Without so much as singing a do, re, or mi in attempt to warm up our voices, we jump right in and rehearse the day’s anthem. No one remembers it from the thousand other times we rehearsed it before this moment, and it sounds like a bunch of people, disoriented from just having woken up from a nap in the middle of the day, moaning in time to a coherently performed piano accompaniment. But that’s okay, because Voltron plays our parts again, J. Arbuckle gives us a few little tips, and before we know it, it’s show time.

10:55 I ride with Big Geezy in the elevator—instead of walking the one flight of stairs—and we book it to line up with the rest of the choir who has long since queued up outside the sanctuary, lookin’ fierce in our official God gear, ready to make our grand entrance. Every week there is bickering about the various arrival times of each member—who waited for who to close the elevator door, who should have taken the stairs, etc.

10:57 We file into the sanctuary to the glorious and powerful strains of…Frau Blucher sightreading a hymn on the piano (with the occasional timidly improvised flourish). The day is good when everyone successfully mounts the THREE carpeted stairs that stand between us and the choir loft. We have had good days and bad, the most notable bad day being when Big Geezy face-planted IN FRONT OF THE WHOLE CHURCH on stair number 2 of 3. One moment we saw Geezy upright, and the next, she was down, limbs-a-flailin’. There was a gasp from the congregation and the classic momentary flub in the live piano music as a host of robed figures crowded her to offer assistance. Moments later she was on her feet, clearly embarrassed, but miraculously unbroken. 

11-12 Church happens. Prayers are prayed. Songs are sung (EVERY LAST VERSE OF EVERY HYMN). Laughtrack laughs. Sermons are preached. My favorite sermon is detailed below.

Special UMW (United Methodist Women) Service: A few Sundays ago, the laydees of the church took control and led our hour or worship, sprucing up our mundane moments (such as boring ole pastoral prayer time, where the name of every ailing, bruised, scraped, slightly headachy, and terminally ill church member is called out and wished a speedy recovery) and turning them into wildly out of control hootenannies. Behold, the UMW “Women Through the Years Slideshow Remembrance,” during which 1,000 pictures from the late 80s to mid 90s were displayed, flipping at a snail-like pace from one to the other, all with captions reading “Women Fixin’ Refreshments, Dottie Hawkins and Suella Mae Clark, 1991,” “Eating refreshments with Mildred Chancel and Frankie Simmons, 1987!” or perhaps, “Women love to eat! Cakes and pies with Susan Doyle and Dottie Mae Duncan, 1994.” The name Dottie appeared countless times.

The most amazing part of this particular service was the sermon, delivered by Roz, as in the slug-like secretary from Monsters Inc. famous for constantly chiding Mike Wazowski and droning, “Don’t forget to file your paperwork.” UMW Roz resembled the movie version insofar as they share the same stretched facial features—a wide mouth with giant, sleepy eyelids—and they both inch along laboriously, barely moving the upper body. The rest was a bit different.

Imagine, if you will, Grandpa Simpson being given the platform of the pulpit and allowed to speak for an indeterminate length of time.

We can't bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell 'em stories that don't go anywhere - like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Give me five bees for a quarter, you'd say.

Now where were we? Oh yeah: the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones... (Grandpa Simpson, Last Exit To Springfield, Season 4)

Now imagine William Faulkner narrating Grandpa Simpson’s inner monologue/stream of consciousness narration of this sermon. This barely comes close to expressing how entirely obfuscating, psychedelic, and impossible to follow Roz’s rambling words were.  Essentially, she strung together patchy remembrances of her time in UMW, never giving us the context for these experiences nor wrapping them up in any kind of definitive way, rather transitioning hazily into the next. Here is a partial reconstruction of one of these moments:

And then I went to the prisons. I didn’t want to go to the prisons, but I felt I needed to,    and I had a meetin’ the next town over in that prison, and in my house were SEVEN GIGANTIC boxes. SEVEN! Can you imagine? And they were open, all of ‘em. Opened up in my house when LOW AND BEHOLD, the children’s home done called. And I with SEVEN boxes in my house, well, I just about had a fit, but that’s just the way it is. And another thing I did was…

And so on. 30 minutes later, without warning or signal that things were wrapping up, she said, “Well thank you for listenin’ to my stories, and sorry for muh raspy voice,” and began her eternal descent of the 3 stairs.

On the next episode, tune in to find out who won the Academy Award for Best Actor or Actress in a Religious Mole Project. It may not be who you think!