Two weeks ago I went the AP world history conference in Colorado. This involved spending a week grading essays written by high school students hoping to accumulate college credit by passing the Advanced Placement exam.
For seven straight days I sat in a conference room with several hundred people, at a table with seven other graders, and read through essays about the Green Revolution for eight hours each day. In order to familiarize graders with the rubric and establish a universal benchmark, the testing company organizes you into partners. You each read the same essay, grade it, then discuss any variation in an effort to properly understand the test criteria.
Since you know you’re going to be spending the next seven days sitting next to this person, there’s a very good incentive to be civil and establish a working relationship. I tried my best to prevent myself from going into jerk mode, which is in fact my default setting.
My partner was a high school teacher from New York. Although she now lives somewhere in the suburbs, she was eager to associate herself with Manhattan by pointing out that she had been a student at NYU. Without any prompting from me, she unabashedly declared that she lived in the financial, intellectual, and cultural center of the universe, just as you would expect from any good New Yorker.
Fortunately, she also had sense of humor about herself and didn’t take offense at my initial sarcastic quips, or when I would refer to her as, ‘Manhattan.’ My experience with people from the Northeast suggested they are a little more verbose, but still I was a little shocked when she turned to me on the second day and asked,
“Do you know any Mormons?”
At first it seemed like too much of a coincidence. How often will someone that you just met ask you this type of question? On the other hand, it seemed unlikely that she could have figured me out so quickly. As I was hesitating on how best to answer, Manhattan hit me again:
MANHATTAN: I just read that Mitt Romney announced his candidacy for President, which started me thinking about Mormons. So, do you know any or not?
ME: Well, there aren’t very many where I live now. But yeah, I know a few.
MANHATTAN: They’re just so weird! Don’t you think they’re weird?
ME: No, they don’t seem that weird to me. How are they weird?
MANHATTAN: The whole ‘magic underwear’ thing. That’s not weird to you?
ME: (effectively suppressing a laugh) I don’t think that’s true. They don’t really think their underwear is magic.
MANHATTAN: Oh, yes they do! We have a Mormon teacher at our high school. She explained to me all about the underwear because some of the students had asked questions. She really believed it had special powers.
ME: Okay, but that’s not an unusual belief. Buddhists wear amulets that they believe radiate spiritual influence. Sikhs wear special loincloths that they believe offer certain protections.
MANHATTAN: Well, there are lots of other weird things about them. There’s a big Mormon church in my neighbourhood. I call it the ‘Mothership.’ They all flock there every Sunday.
ME: What's weird about that? Most Christians go to Church on Sunday. It happens all over the world.
MANHATTAN: They are not like normal Christians. They all look the same. They’re all blonde, and the men all wear white shirts and the women wear these flower-print dresses.
At this point it was very difficult not to burst out laughing. First, because Mormons DO all look the same. How many times have you been on vacation, seen a family and thought, “They have to be Mormon.” Pick up a copy of the May Ensign and look at the pictures of people who attended General Conference. Every one of them look like families that somehow time-warped out of a fifties television show.
But the most entertaining element was the hushed, conspiratorial tone Manhattan used to talk about Mormons. As though she was afraid that her son might accidentally bounce his ball into the church parking lot, wander over to retrieve it, and come home wearing a dark suit, carrying a copy of the Book of Mormon, and announce he was leaving on a mission to Bolivia
So I couldn’t resist any longer. I leaned over to her, and in a very quiet, serious, tone said:
ME: (looking carefully around the conference room) Do you think there are any Mormons here right now?
MANHATTAN: (shrugging) I don’t know. I suppose there could be.
ME: Well, they all look the same, right? We should be able to pick them out.
MANHATTAN: (annoyed now that she realizes I’m making fun of her) I said they all look the same where I live. The ones out here might look different, I don’t know.
At that point our table leader came by and we both felt like students who’d been caught talking when we were supposed to be reading about the New Deal. At lunch, I shared the conversation with an LDS friend. We tried to concoct several scenarios that would allow me to re-visit the topic and the most entertaining method for revealing to Manhattan that I was Mormon.
It would be a couple days before the subject came up again. When it did, it would go a direction I had not anticipated.
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