Christian ventriloquists: better than bad

Since those strange and tawdry days of Charlie McCarthy and (shudder) Jerry Mahoney, ventriloquism seems to have gone underground. It still shows up  on novelty shows like America's Got Talent (or Britain, or Ukraine, or Mongolia or wherever), an update of the old vaudeville show glorified in the '60s by Ed Sullivan.

Though the ultimate ventriloquist was Senor Wencez with his "hand puppet" (literally, a puppet made out of his hand, which is a device that still delights toddlers), I found a particularly juicy sub-genre of the art in Christian ventriloquism. Perhaps dogma sounds better coming out of the mechanical mouth of a wood-carven mutant.

Most of these poses are from record albums that enjoyed huge popularity (I nearly said "pup-ularity") in the 1950s and '60s. No doubt these were small labels, for how else would "Do You Know Jesus?" starring Uncle Les and Aunt Nancy Wheeler (Featuring Randy) find an audience?  Quite a few of these acts proclaim family relationships, mostly uncles and aunts who somehow produced a ball-jointed wooden robot with their contribution of DNA. And I have never been able to figure out how it is that a ventriloquist's dummy would work on a record album. It wouldn't matter if you moved your lips, for sure.

I can't help but notice that all these dummies look suspiciously alike. Creepy, I mean. That mausoleum look on the puppeteer's face is mighty strange, as if she's taking a day off from Madame Tussaud's. Both dummy and "manipulator" (the technically-correct term) seem to have the same hairdresser. (By the way, like harness-makers in the early 20th century, did the dummy-maker go into decline when audiences became more sophisticated? Or did they all flee to Bible camp?)

Then we have squicky little Marcy, who has so many albums that I had to pare it down to a couple. I can imagine she had a squeaky irritating voice as she prattled on about Jesus and salvation. The manipulator has perfect helmet-like Mary Tyler Moore hair, placing this somewhere in the early 1960s. I wonder if these records were discounted at Bible camp. I know they still show up in garage sales and thrift shops, eagerly snarfed up by collectors, else why would we be enjoying this display right now?

Marcy sings some more. Yikes. We see her standing up here, which is odd for a dummy, but I'm not sure the puppeteer has so much skill as to make her mouth move without any physical contact. That WOULD be squicky, if not downright supernatural.

Obviously a bargain basement record, with an incomprehensible cover. Why is it that all these things exude so much guilt? I guess because that's what religion is all about. There are many red arrows that say "AND" on them, and many grainy b + w photos of dummies, plus choirs. And, as it says in the upper left corner, it is all FUN.

Maybe the ick factor never even occurred to anyone back then, but the thought of Uncle "D" with a girl on one knee and a boy on the other, a huge Bible in front of them and stained glass in the background is alarming today. The "D" seems to indicate a suspicious anonymity, like something from an AA meeting where people are afraid to give their last name.

Oh, rapture! Grace and Wilbur Thrush have a whole family of gaudy dum-dums, not to mention furries such as you'd see in one of those bizarre conventions (and you can't tell ME that funny business doesn't go on in those). What's that on the left, a chess game? I'll have to blow this one up and try to get the details.

Woah.

This is a very odd kind of biker ventriloquist act, with Butch and Suzi (both girls, I assume) sitting on Maralee Dawn's lap. This is an obvious pseudonym to hide her Angel Mama past. They all sit precariously atop a cardboard-cutout Harley, with the caption Featuring The Country Ridin' Preacher, which I won't even try to explain.

It's Sunday School pageant time, with a man dressed in his wife's bathrobe and a kitchen towel. His little disciple is no doubt meant to represent a shepherd boy of some sort. The title is hard to read, but it goes (as they say) something like this: Dan Butler and Louie tell the Bible Classics, Volume III.

No shit, VOLUME III! Volumes I and II must've been hot sellers at Bible camp, or maybe they gave them away free. I must try to track some of these down on YouTube. I need some religion about now to salvage this bizarre day before it sinks in a quagmire of wretched depravity.

I've saved the best until last: the inimitable Erick on the Rainbow label, which (believe me) does not mean the same thing now as it did then. Or maybe it did, who knows. Erick's routine is called Pastor Pickin', which sounds so sinister I don't want to go into it. 

My personal favorite. The seeming eroticism of this, the way their foreheads touch, the way they lean into each other, suggests a love that dares not speak its name, because it's not just interspecies, it's - well, what DO you call having a thing for a ventriloquist's dummy? I'm not sure there is even a word for it. It took me quite a while to realize that Erick and his manipulator Beverly Massagee are PRAYING together, that's all. I mean it. And it's on the Rainbow Label, too.

Psycho cycad

It started at Home Depot. No, it started in Hawaii, actually, when I saw a cycad the size of a barrel and became enchanted. It was the most primitive plant I had ever seen, with a prehistoric look to it. It had emitted a clusters of seeds, pink beanlike things that were just sitting there in the middle of it, so I took a handful of them, hoping to take them home and grow my own monster cycad. I left the seeds in the hotel refrigerator. Good thing, I might have been arrested for smuggling.

THEN came the Home Depot part. Amazingly, a couple of weeks ago I saw a cycad in a pot, about the size of a small pineapple. It had short thick spiky leaves and a whole lot of spiky things in the middle, about 3 inches tall. I thought it would probably die within a few weeks due to the wretched light in our house.

Almost immediately, the sucker began to grow. And grow, And GROW. These insane-looking, militant-looking frondlike things shot up out of the middle of it, at a rate of about two inches a day. They splayed all over the place and I had to keep moving the plant because it outgrew the space it was in. My cat is afraid of it and refuses to even sniff it.

I don't know what all this is leading to. I have a grapefruit tree growing in the front room (visible in the top left-hand corner of these photos) which I started growing in Hinton, Alberta, so far north that it gets dark at 3 p.m. in winter, with temperatures of minus 40 C. It began as a seed in my morning grapefruit THIRTY years ago, and today presides over the entire room. Some years it blooms modestly, with perhaps one small cluster of white flowers that drench the room with honeysuckle scent, and one year it presented me with one perfect, pea-sized grapefruit. It has gone through cycles of dying over and over again, losing most of its leaves, but then it will resurrect and put out a new branch that grows at least four or five inches a week. If you were patient enough, I think you could sit there and actually watch it grow.

I am afraid of this plant. I feel like Morticia Addams feeding that carnivorous thing she kept in the greenhouse alongside the dead-headed roses. I don't know what it eats, actually. Has anybody seen the cat?

The art of juju

Just a little bit of something I had lying around the house. No, actually I made it. This is my very first functioning juju doll. Though it's hard to see, there are "instructions" wrapped around his waist which are very explicit.

This was an experimental model with its heart outside of its body. The face, however, is completely accurate. It needed accessorizing, so this is also my very first functioning noose. These are surprisingly easy to make. I can do it in my sleep now. Use hemp or sisal or jute twine for these, not yarn. They need a bit of stiffness.

I did not photograph my dolly, but ran it through the scanner, providing weird effects, made even weirder by using photoshop filters such as posterize, saturation, lightness, etc. And darkness.

Some of these came out quite abstract, but I promise you these are the same photos. This doesn't happen often and means the photos have certain properties that are hard to explain.

Invert. Looks almost like those black velvet paintings sold at gas stations in the 1980s.

The Nijinsky of juju dolls! Note his form as he leaps through the air. Almost weightless.

Closeups, so you can see the devil's handiwork.

Be nice to me. Okay?

"You had me at hello"

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The age of miracles

A beautiful, gorgeous, luscious chunk of movie impressionism, with Fred Astaire to boot. And he's singing Gershwin! Mr. Gershwin and I took a blow today - quite a bad one - someone claimed our relationship was bogus and in fact didn't exist. One wonders, sometimes, just who is the fraud. WE know what is important, and we know what transforms a life, and it's love, George, isn't it. You knew all about it and lived it through your songs. So away with the naysayers and phony psychic prophets. They know nothing, and are jealous of our connection, no doubt. We survived the hit, we survived the attempt to discredit us and hang us out to dry. Love will win: it always does. The age of miracles hasn't passed.

Can a psychic be a bully in disguise?

(I don't often post chunks of my journal, but this time I felt the need. Recently I risked sending some of my writings on psychic phenomena to a "professional medium", a former college professor of mine who had set up shop on an island with his own church. I was astonished at the tone of his response, which accused me of making the whole thing up, manipulating him, going out of my depth, and that the messages I received had no psychic content whatsoever. I felt myself being yanked down, and not knowing why. He concluded by telling me "I'm saying all this as a therapist, of course", an apparent swipe at my credibility/mental health. I used to think a psychic adviser would have some kind of sensitivity, but then I realized that ego, exaggerated ability and Long Island Medium-type manipulation of the public can be all part of the syndrome. 

In rhetoric, a tautology (from Greek ταὐτός, "the same" and λόγος, "word/idea") is a logical argument constructed in such a way, generally by repeating the same concept or assertion using different phrasing or terminology, that the proposition as stated is logically irrefutable, while obscuring the lack of evidence or valid reasoning supporting the stated conclusion. (A rhetorical tautology should not be confused with a tautology in propositional logic.)^[a]

Then last night I watched a 20-20 program about a psychic who stole literally millions of dollars from a mentally-challenged man, cleaning him out while leaving him so brainwashed that he still defended her. She went so far as to present him with a  "son" conceived through artificial insemination, named Georgio Armani, who was not his son at all. It was monstrous fraud, and an extreme, but pretending to have ability often means taking advantage of others and undermining whatever strength they have. That was the tipping point for me, so I decided to post this after all. Beware, folks, they are out there, and many of them are completely ruthless.)

I think my former friend destroyed any joy I took in my recent revelations, which I only wanted to share with someone who knew what I was talking about. His arrogant dismissal of my interest and ideas could not have been more condescending. “Speaking as a therapist” translates as: I know you’re having childish delusions, whereas MY messages are always right because I am the great medium, and you’re not. He even throws the fear of ghosties and ghoulies at me to demean and intimidate and diminish me, and to make himself feel powerful. He probably just tells himself I’m mentally ill and playing with fire and making stuff up. You have to have advanced degrees to approach this subject, and if you don't, you won't be invited to the Psychic Kiwanis Club banquet at the end of the year.

That accusation of making stuff up, as a survivor of abuse and one who was totally discredited by her family of origin, is particularly excruciating, and he knows all about that! We've talked about it enough. I am reminded of letting him see just a short excerpt from A Singing Tree, my first completed novel, which I don’t think he even read, and his comment, “I think you have to be very, very careful, Margaret, or it will just be seen as some sort of zany soap opera.” I think that is the worst single comment I have ever heard about my work, and I don’t know why I gave him a second chance. When I objected because I was devastated, he just defended what he had said, implying I was too touchy to be a published author and didn’t have the perception to judge it. He was only trying to help me, after all, and I should have been grateful. The novel wasn’t published, but was considered by Random House, Doubleday, Raincoast and a number of others and taken very seriously. Not. A. Zany. Soap. Opera. Nobody else said that.

His written apology several years (!) later was of the flavour of “it triggered all my issues”, i. e. “look what you made me do”. It wasn’t an apology at all. I put up with this crap for years because I thought he had some interesting ideas. In recent years he has hardened into the Long Island Medium of the west coast. It’s a tautology, something which neatly proves itself, and anything outside that tautology is bogus, suspect, or up for ridicule. He also heavily favors the “I’ve got two Masters degrees and a PhD, and you don’t” argument. It's been my experience that academics have the shallowest perceptions (and biggest egos) of any other single group. Their knowledge is completely conventional and often displayed for prestige and as a bulwark against criticism. How can you question a man with two Masters degrees and a PhD?

Anyway, the psychic thing, even if it was just tuning in on certain energies, was interesting to me.  I wasn't looking to have it validated, merely sharing it. He did, after all, tell me I had "undeveloped psychic potential"(and we won't get into THAT one here - I have been studying it for my entire life). In fact, up until now he seemed to be fairly interested in my exploration and felt it had some validity. I took a risk, and (as with most risks) it bombed and he hurt me, I will admit it, but mostly he made me very angry. For once in my  entire life, I did not soften, and soften, and soften my reply to carefully extract all my anger. I told him what I thought, which is that he has been at this too long and has become godlike to too many people. THAT is when leaders become dangerous, when they can no longer see their own limitations, and especially when they begin to “diss” other people to feel stronger in themselves and to shore up their "superior" abilities. 

I soon got some sort of reply from him and wondered what on earth I would have to gain by reading it. So I deleted it unread, along with everything else I had ever sent or received from him. His name is now off my contacts list forever. I no longer care about pampering his ego by listening to any sort of defense of what he said. I knew more putdowns were in the works. It was abuse. How do I know? You know when someone throws mud in your face. It is indeed a nasty sensation.

POST-POST BLOG POST POST: The last time I looked up this guy's name on the internet, there was absolutely nothing. As per usual, now, a few years later, he's everywhere, including interviews in all sorts of psychic publications. All the pictures look the same - he has a sort of Criswell expression now, a Svengali look that I never ever saw there before. It's what they call image-crafting. Oh my. He HAS changed, and maybe I see now why my message was so casually thrown back in my face (but then, he was just giving me his professional opinion, which is accepted by everyone - so it must be right - because it is accepted by everyone - so it must be right.)

"You had me at hello"

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Optical illusion: how does this work?

Gee, Dot! Your undies stink!

 

Are you listening, George? Somebody finally got it.

"Why I dare not come out of the closet"

I found myself looking up this entry in the original Morningside Papers anthology today, for no reason I can ascertain except that I remembered it. I remembered a story of a gay man, married, so closeted he can barely breathe, and convinced that the closet will be his fate, if not his doom, for the rest of his life.

But what startles me about this piece is the language. He reveals his orientation with  horror and revulsion, like someone who goes around murdering little children. After laying out the facts of his stable, wonderful, conservative life, he then rips open the cover to reveal a festering secret, a secret that seems to come right out of one of those 1940s "warning" films:

He likes men.

I like men. Almost all my close friends have been men, all my life. I've always felt a certain kinship with gay men because of that fact. I'm monogamous, meaning I haven't had the opportunity to spread myself out too much, but I like to look. I'm 61, and I like to look and dream and have some pretty hot fantasies. I like the smell of a man, the firmness of body, the hair, the voice, the hands.

I guess if I was a man, I'd be gay. Would all this be horrible?

If I was free to do so, would it be horrible for me to want to claim all this bounty sexually?

Obviously, I don't get it. I never have. But what I HAVE had are a few "confessions" over the years, mostly by older men, about their one sexual encounter with a man, sometimes coerced, sometimes not, and how they agonized about it, all the while living a hetero life. One man was sixteen when he lied his way into the army during World War II, and was blackmailed into sex with an older man with fear of disclosure that he was underage. When he told me this as an old man, barely able to look me in the eye, I didn't know what to say to him except, "I am honoured that you told me this. Thank you." And I meant it: I was, literally, the only person he ever told.

So the skinny five per cent this guy mentions seems puzzlingly small. Sexuality spreads out a lot more than that, waxes and wanes. We're not puzzle pieces. We flow. Our desires flow, but sometimes they flow strongly in one direction. This poor guy is so rigid that he believes he'll be executed if he's ever "found out". He skulks around in back alleys on business trips. He has a "Jekyll and Hyde" personality. Whoo boy.

Was this sad, sad piece written in the '40s, the '50s perhaps? No, it was written and published in 1984. Mind, that was 31 years ago (? How can it be true?), and so much has happened since then that this piece seems archaic, even a little bit insulting.

It's insulting to gay men who are proud of who they are. Yes, they existed in 1984 because I knew a few of them. It's insulting in the horror-movie language it uses, the description of gayness as plague and blight. The utter unbending certainty of "ruin" if this ever "got out" is, come to think of it, a little nasty, because it supposes a culture utterly devoid of flexibility or understanding.

This guy thinks he HAS to live a lie, and that he must be the Christlike sacrifice to keep the whole ruse going. But he isn't the sacrifice. His wife is: she doesn't even know who she is married to. His kids are: every day their father sits at the breakfast table across from them with a big sign on his forehead that says, "I am not who you think I am." Chronic deception causes tension in a household, often on a subconscious level that gnaws away and erodes emotional health. Nothing is as it seems, because it cannot be, "must not" be what it is. The truth is just too horrific.  This is a guaranteed method of throwing your family permanently off-balance. It's like living with Don Draper, for God's sake, with his false identity and ruthless sexual conquests, some of them acted out with his neighbor across the hall.

I wonder whatever happened to this guy. He seemed at the breaking point. I wonder if he continued to feel, as he seemed to feel then, that keeping up the ruse of "normalcy" at work and church and home was the only right thing to do. It's twisted, and it's an example of why things had to change, and why they need to keep changing.

In spite of what media blast at us every day, not everyone is "cool" with being gay. If you are from a fundamentalist background of any stripe, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, it is not cool. It is Sin. Sin is something you're supposed to atone for. Then, "go and sin no more". Bible camps seek to straighten people out with the hammer of guilt, even though the founder of one of the largest of these groups went on record to say that the whole thing had been a tragic mistake (before moving in with his male lover).

On the surface of things, this piece, very much of its time, shows us how far we have come. But it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Under the horror-movie language is a strange kind of boasting, very much in the Don Draper mode: look what I am getting away with. And fuck you, you conventional people, because I have my own little private world here and I'm going to make sure my wife and kids and colleagues never find out. I have known men who have made the decision to be married to women, and gay "on the side", so to speak. In some cases, their wives even know. Perhaps they've resolved the tension, or think of themselves as bisexual (and hey, whatever happened to bisexual? Nobody's bisexual any more. It has become extremely unpopular for some reason). It is society that creates most of the problems here, refusing human beings the fluidity and even androgyny that is deep in their nature.

Keep sloggin' forward, folks. Keep that banner hoisted high. Think of Dublin! And think of this poor sod, who is perhaps not even alive any more, the homosexual who dares not come out of the closet.

"You had me at hello"

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