Trivia -- Mormon polygamists, Anabaptists.

Someone was telling me that they went to the son of a family friend's high school graduation in Montana a few years ago in this community with a huge Mormon polygamist population -- he said you'd drive by a house and there'd be nine trailers in a line set up down the yard next to it, one for each wife -- and at the graduation, they kept saying the name "Jessup" forever, and it seemed like most of the class had at that name. He thought at first that someone in the class had died and the high school kids were paying tribute in the way that high school kids do like when someone dies in a car crash, but then he realized that it was actually all the polygamist kids, or at least the school-aged portion of them that had made it through graduation.

On another note, someone else was telling me about their experiences with reclusive Hutterite communities in North Dakota, Hutterites being a less well-known Anabaptist group who live in separated communities like the Mennonites and the Amish in the northern great plains by the U.S.-Canada border. They still speak German, and they pretty much just eat potatoes and fatty German recipes that were brought with them from the Old World when they emigrated. I guess when the older community members give blood, you can see a layer of fat floating on top of the blood in the syringe once it settles. Their bread is supposedly kick-ass -- best bread ever, it was described to me -- but when the person who I was talking to got the recipe, she found out that for one batch (and remember, the whole community is fed off of a batch) the secret ingredient is the fat of twenty-nine chickens.

Also, all Hutterite couples have sex at least once a day -- structured into community life is a post-lunch "nap time", only school-age kids are in school then, and older folks take care of babies, so pretty much everyone who's left who's eligible for naps is married, so not much sleeping happens then, apparently.

Additionally, I heard about this one guy's friend, and they stopped by a roadside Mennonite stand to buy pies, and as soon as the teenage girl stepped out of the farmhouse in her bonnet and smock to come help the customers, the one guy's friend was like, "Oh baby," and as soon as she stepped into the stand, he proceeded to hit on her, which was the most awful thing ever. I guess his opening line was him leaning on the pie counter and being like, "So, what do you do?"