A Long Overdue Thank You To Someone Who Clued Me In About The Mormon Church.

I've never thanked Dianne for the wonderful thing she did for me.

March 31 2009: As I guess I have mentioned before, I spent over 13 of my formative years as a good, loyal, active Mormon. This information has surprised many people.

But I never thanked Dianne. She, probably more than anyone else, turned me around. If anyone deserves my gratitude for Time and All Eternity it would Dianne.

There were two sisters, Joyce and Dianne. Joyce was one year older than me, and Dianne was a year younger. Joyce was one of the best Mormon girls ever. She believed with all her might. As she got ready to move to Utah and attend college at BYU, she encouraged me to go there too. "I don't think I want to go to a school that won't allow me to wear jeans," I said.

"Oh," she replied enthusiastically, "they let girls wear slacks in the library now!"

That was Joyce. Yeah, I didn't hang out all that much with Joyce.

Dianne was different. She was hilarious. She was secretly sacrilegious, just like me. She once tricked Joyce into drinking a cola Slurpee by telling her it was a new fruity flavor of the much more Mormonly root beer. Oh, how we laughed when Joyce fell for that -- and on a Sunday, no less!

It was Dianne who taught me the best I-gotta-sit-in-church game EVER. THIS IS THE COOLEST THING EVER and I urge, nay, IMPLORE you to try this if you ever get stuck in church:

As in,
"Come, Come Ye Saints ..."
"I Know That My Redeemer Lives ..."
"I Saw A Mighty Angel Fly ..."

This game has given me hours of amusement that would otherwise have been completely wasted. For this trick alone I owe Dianne a car or something.

When I was 16 and Dianne was 15, we were both at Mormon girls' camp and we enjoyed getting away from the younger girls and just talking. We had great conversations. And that's how I found out that the other Mormon kids were doing all kinds of interesting things. I heard about my peers having sex and drinking alcohol and doing all kinds of funky things that were a million times more interesting than anything I had even thought of doing.

All those kids having all that dubious youthful fun had parents who were warning them not to associate with me because I wasn't a good kid.

Oh HELL yeah. I made jokes which I would probably STILL find hilarious. I couldn't keep all that fun to myself.

I was also waiting to hear the punchline. I had long figured out that they'd been feeding me fairy tales for years, and I just wanted to know what these Mormons really, truly believed -- the truth, not the silly stories they tell children.

Dianne's revelation about the relative holiness of the kids around me prompted me to begin the realization that there WAS no punchline. They actually believed the fairy tales they'd been telling me. Joseph Smith really did rap with the Angel Moroni at age 14. Those plates were made of gold, I tell you.

It all came tumbling down around me, a house of cards held up by nothing, nothing at all. Dianne was a friendly gust of breeze that came along just when I needed it.

Thank you, Dianne. I can never adequately thank you.

Unfortunately, this story does have a punchline. The last I heard -- which was very, very long ago indeed -- Dianne had come back to the Church and was a devout Mormon.

But Joyce, I heard, had had a crisis of faith. She even went out and bought a pair of jeans.