...update...

Like an hour ago I ran into a friend who's on the fence for going to karaoke. I told her I was planning to do standards or try something new like "Umbrella", and as soon as I said that, her face lit up and she was like, "Oh, you should try something new!", and I think she's more stoked for karaoke now (though we'll see if she makes it out).

Addendum Addendum -- "Umbrella" performance details.

I've just been watching "Umbrella" on YouTube a few times. Two _huge_ performance details:

1) The way she says "baby" as a triplet intro the second half of the first verse is crucial; it rhymes the just-said "maybe" but in an elegant way that drives the song forward.

2) You have to have your timing *down* to go from the "ella ella ella/ eh eh eh" right into the bridge and make it feel natural; the bridge lyrics come quick and since the orchestration completely clears out, you have to have full confidence when you start to sing the bridge, since if you're not there and meaning it, it shows in a major way.

These are the places where you sort out the flyshit and the pepper.

Addendum.

If I knew it better, tonight'd be the night I did "Rainy Days and Mondays"! But, I don't, so it won't be.

rainin' rainin' / ooh baby it's rainin' rainin'

I think I'm going to karaoke tonight with friends to a bar I've never been to and probably won't be going to frequently, so this is my chance to do a song that could come off awful, or songs that I do well and want to repeat but can't since you shouldn't repeat songs at the same place in front of the same friends if you can help it. So, in the latter set, I might do "Superstar" or "Ready to Take a Chance Again" -- two of my biggest hits ever! -- or, in the former, Rihanna's "Umbrella", which I kind of want to try out at karaoke.

"rainin' rainin'/ ooh baby it's rainin' rainin'..."

More flirty fishing for the weekend: Hans.

From Chancellor's Life in the Family, pp. 119-120, the testimony of Naomi, a Canadian disciple:

The first fish I got close to was Hans, an elderly man. He was missing one arm and one eye. He was very lonely. He lived alone in his apartment, the kind of person who really needed us. I established a friendship with him, going over to his place every week, twice a week for a while. We would read the Word together, spend time together. Because of his age, he was not always able to make it sexually, but he still needed someone to give him affection. He was so sweet. Every month we would meet and he would go out and buy the groceries for the home, and give us donations, too. He loved the Lord, he loved Dad and The Family.

I remember our first time together. When he took off his artificial arm, it was quite shocking for me. I fled into the bathroom. There I just prayed "Lord this is a little *hard*!" As I was praying, I had a vision of this man in Heaven, with a *whole* body. I never had a problem after that. That vision showed me it was the Lord's love. The Lord gave me a real love for him. It was totally unselfish. There was nothing in it for me, certainly no sexual attraction. I didn't care about that. He needed to be loved, cared for. And the more I loved him, the more he loved the Lord.

I might put up more excerpts next week.

Too much.

Yesterday I had a little wine at an after-lecture reception, then a Guinness and some whiskey at a bar afterwards with a friend, then more beer later that night when I was meeting up with some people. I got back to my apartment at like 1pm totally hammered (no dinner) and ended up microwaving a shawarma sandwich and eating that and a hardboiled egg in my 1950s dining room in my boxers (have to have boxers or my ass sticks funny to the chrome-and-black-vinyl chairs) and reading the Chronicle of Higher Education on English lit collections and their role in canonizing authors and their works, or not.

Anyhow, at one point a piece of shawarma fell on my chest and I went to pick it up, and I realized the shawarma had fallen onto my chest and then (which I hadn't realized) onto my lap, and what I took for shawarma when I went to go pick it up was actually my nipple.

A scene from "Heaven's Harlots".

From Miriam William's Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years as a Sacred Prostitute in the Children of God Cult, regarding how before she joined Children of God she flirted with the counterculture and as a senior in high school end up going to meet her middle school-aged little sister's new history teacher at his house because of his similar countercultural leanings:

I walked into a living room similar to ours. There were two other older boys sitting on the couch watching television. One motioned for me to sit next to him. He was a big fellow with curly black hair, and he smiled as he put his hand on my shoulder...

I was beginning to feel very uncomfortable around these boys, who obviously were more sophisticated than I was, and I hadn't been prepared for a roomful of older males.

A man with shoulder-length, brown wavy hair was coming down the steps. He had a slight build and wore a full moustache. I remember thinking that he had a nice smile.

"I'm Sonny," he said as he extended his hand to welcome me...

I was glad to stand up and move away from the bear grinning at my side. I introduced myself and then sat on another chair, feeling tension inside me caused by indecision on whether to stay or run away. However, Sonny looked safe...

I followed Sonny upstairs to the front bedroom. He had music playing and a few albums lying out on the floor. I looked at his collection...

"Do you like Carole King?"

"I never heard her."

"Well, you'll have to listen."

I sat down on the floor while he put on an album called "Tapestry". He sat behind me on the bed with his knees touching my back while he told me about his musical tastes, his graduation from elite Franklin and Marshall, his work as a teacher, and his desire to go back to graduate school. He was twenty-four years old and from Massachusetts...

My own vision included a major societal shift from war to peace, from hate to love, from bondage to liberation. I don't know if Sonny felt the same way, but I saw him as a fellow freedom fighter. When he offered me a pipe of marijuana, I took a hit. I still wanted to believe that smoking pot was a ritual between the enlightened, and maybe love would secure the connection. I let him take me to bed without any resistance.

I like the period feel of this excerpt. It reminds me a lot of the description of the last hours of Karen Carpenter from The Carpenters: The Untold Story, which I meant to type up a few months ago, but have never gotten around to.

Memoirs of abused female cultists.

I started reading "Heaven's Harlots" yesterday, a memoir of an ex-Children of God member who talks about her time flirty fishing and being a prostitute for The Family. I found the intro confusing -- it's about being in Monte Carlo and bedding a Lebanese Christian in this historic old hotel only to be paid for sex for the first time ever in her life - he stuffs some francs in her jeans-pocket for the cab ride home after she gives him an erotic massage, only it's way too much for the cabride, as she realizes as she sits at an outdoor cafe having a cappucino brought to her by a stylish waiter -- only the style is very weird... With the setting and her attention to what she and the guy were like, it's like a romance novel, almost, only it's not, and there's not the level of literary contrast you'd expect to make this a horrifying memoir with the trappings of a romance novel, so it ends up being more long-winded and overwrought than affecting, especially since her account goes on for like twelve pages.

In a way, this reminds me of the one memoir of this one ex-Mormon fundamentalist polygamist wife I started, whose first chapter dealt with how she as the sole tomboy in town would be going down to the river in her overalls and be flyfishing with all the boys in town, who all had biblical names and blonde hair and were tanned and had strong arms, and how something was horribly, horribly wrong since no love could blossom in a place where everyone knew the women were saved for the older men and they'd force you into a long dress and crush your the life of your soul as you gave yourself again and again to these respected but awful old men who ran the community and who were in fact the fathers of most of the children who she played with and who all looked alike and who would give her daughters that she would see grow up and be given to men like her husband and father, if not actually her husband and father... When said in short it's compelling, but at about twenty pages it's pushing it.

I think that overall the most compelling memoir of abuse I've read is "I, Tina". Tina Turner is very matter-of-fact, and her abuse is that much more horrific for it. To quote from memory, every once in a while she'd talk about a night out after a recording session, and then end her story with, "And then we went home and Ike beat me with a shoetree." I think everyone should read "I, Tina".

Addendum.

I forgot -- after I said that to that guy yesterday, the girl was like, "What did he say?", and then he said something to her sheepishly as he walked away. I can't figure out if he was embarrassed or they thought I was nuts.

Library noise -- my new strategy.

The trouble with the main library on campus is that the public computer terminals where you can work on papers are on the first floor, and that's also where there's tables that groups can use to study, and also where there's foot traffic and people run into each other. If everyone whispers it's fine, but if not, you find yourself having to listen to all manner of loud bullshit, like just now when I was working on some school shit and everyone on the entire first floor is quiet, and this chick walks up to a guy at a computer right near me and is like, "Hey there," and hits him flirtatiously, and then they start talking loudly about whatever and flirting and he takes his time packing up and they stare into each other's eyes and bullshit like that, so I was like (as I am usually), "Hey, can you guys please whisper?"

The guy, then, did the standard retort (which I've gotten it a few times before), which is giving a "what the fuck's up with you" look and condescendingly being like, "We're on the first floor."

So, I was like, "You know, I'm sorry, but it's not about rights, it's about consideration, jackass," and I really emphasized the word "jackass".

I think that's my new retort from now on. He apologized right away, though I'm not sure if it was due to my lucid reasoning or my clear aggression.

Class idea I'm kicking around.

If I ever get the chance to design a class "just 'cause", I was thinking I'd do it on sexual deviance in American Religious History, not necessarily because that's a theme that I'm interested in, but rather because it's an excuse to assign kids a bunch of books I'm titillated and appalled by. I think I would want to cover:

1) The evolving sexual mores of the Children of God.
2) Mormon polygamy and its getting outlawed.
3) Mormon fundamentalist cults and polygamy.
4) The mid-19th century Oneida free-love community.
5) Shaker celibacy.
6) "The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk" (that fictional book where the girl becomes a nun and is forced to sleep with priests).
7) "The Quaker City" (a fictional exposure of Philadelphia that I haven't read but I've heard includes lengthy descriptions of the city's underground brothels and how they satiate unquenchable Quaker lust).
8) That one Mormon memoir where the woman talks about BYU marriage culture, gives details of her wedding night, and talks about her struggle with compulsive masturbation as well as the one time right after she had dropped out of the church but was still wearing her sacred undergarments and she and the other girls working at the health club where she worked had to go and scrub down the drained jacuzzi in their skivvies and they all laughed at her undergarments since they looked so different from her bras and panties.
9) Maybe assign the recent Mormon version of "Pride and Prejudice" to talk about marriage culture at BYU?

The only trouble is that the department most amenable to this would be gender studies, and who wants to wade through a lot of gender bullshit to teach a class that's really about titillation? I'd probably be safer by making some uniting theme like "sex, theology, and Christian culture in U.S. history" to keep things safely historical, I think.

I also wonder if kids would flood my class, or if I'd get into trouble talking about the titillating parts by creating a weird classroom dynamic.

"Flirty Fishing".

I've been reading this history of "The Children of God", the religion that grew up alongside the Jesus Freak movement in the late 60s/early70s under the authority of David Berg, known often as "Father David", "Dad", "Moses David", or "God's Endtime Prophet". Though originally strongly Bible-based and "no sex outside marriage", the group, which held all property in common, began to accept Berg's letters as Scripture and eventually had something like free love among its members. Around the time it innovated free love, too, it started up "flirty fishing", which is where women in the group would start up relationships (including sexual ones) with men outside the group to save them. This is a testimony from "Marsena, a European disciple," found on p. 115 of James D. Chancellor's Life in the Family: An Oral History of the Children of God:

Mostly I would go to the bar or lounge of a five-star hotel and meet men in that setting. This worked well for me...

One experience was really productive, as you say. I had met this Muslim from a place in the Middle East. I met him in the lounge of the hotel, had dinner with him a couple of times, and shared with him about the Lord in a general kind of way. We had become fairly close, but no sex. I think that is one major misconception about FFing. We made friends with a lot of people in our FFing, but we usually didn't have sex unless it was necessary for the witness. Anyway, he was scheduled to leave and go back home when I got a call from one of his associates. He was very ill in his hotel room, and this fellow asked me to come and see if I could help. I found him very sick, in no shape to get on a plane. So, I began to pray for him, and to soothe him and touch him. He became better very quick. Then I completely undressed and got in bed with him. We made love. And then I told him why. I loved him in Jesus and was loving him this way to show him how much Jesus loved him.

He was completely blown away. He prayed to receive Jesus in his heart right then. I gave him some lit, and he went on his way. But he came back, and I had several other times together with him. We would pray and study and have sex together. One day he invited me and several others to visit his home town. We went for a couple of weeks. We stayed with his family and got to know a lot of wonderful people there. They were all Muslims, and a few people were not all that happy we were sharing about Jesus. But this fellow was very influential, and he told about his miracle healing in the hotel room. That seemed really to impress them. We got to witness to many people in that town those few weeks. And many prayed to receive Jesus.

The older I get, the more I think you can learn more about people from their own words than what's been written about them. l also find it interesting that later on a lot of women from the Children of God got into "ESing" (i.e., working for an escort service) to be able to witness more efficiently.

Miss Miss Hit.

Like two weeks ago I found out that on the 23rd of the past month, this one 'Christ Universal Temple' way south of me that I always see ads for in the paper -- the minister of the church is this regal-looking black woman in her 50s with gold streaks in her hair and a silver and blue robe who always gives sermons with inspirational titles -- had their annual tree-lighting and Christmas pageant, and their special guest was Jennifer Holliday (the woman who originated the Effie role in Dreamgirls that Jennifer Hudson took over), but, since was out of town, I missed it, so I was pissed.

Like Thursday of this week, too, I found out that the local cinema on campus had shown on Wednesday Almodovar's "All About My Mother", which I've always wanted to see on the big screen, but never had a chance to, so since I wasn't aware of it in time, I missed something I really wanted to go to again, so I was pissed again.

Yesterday night, however, was the Barry Manilow concert, and I was there, and I was thrilled. I don't have time to write about it now, but I will soon...

Martinis on Friday.

On Friday after dinner at a friend's place we stayed in locally to go to this one nicer Asian restaurant in the neighborhood that just opened up and has a cocktail bar in addition to the whole restaurant thing it has going on, and so when we went to the bar, I decided to try their Saigon martini, which had fermented green tea and rose wine in it, among other things, and as soon as the bartender served it up to me, these two black women at the bar next to me turned around and were like, "What is that!?!?!" I gave them a sip -- they got swizzle sticks and poked them in and sipped the martini through them -- only when I was holding out the martini, I spilled a little bit as the glass tipped since the bartender had filled the glass full up.

"Alcohol abuse, alcohol abuse!" the one woman with the green skirt and gaptooth kept saying while I was spilling it, like I had the DTs or something, so I told her that now they had to give me a sip of their drinks, and so at that point the other one, who had her hair pulled back and was in a Bears sweatshirt, took out a swizzle stick and gave me a drink of her lemondrop martini, which was suprisingly tart. We then talked for a while, and when we finally got around to introducing ourselves, I found out that their names were Tamala and Ondra, and that they really like martinis.