Whole Lotta Love
Whole Lotta Love
It’s just too perfect that the Mormon Church’s Independence Visitors Center reopened around the same time HBO launched its advertising blitz for Big Love, a new show starring Bill Paxton as a polygamous husband living in suburban Utah. The show cleverly avoids any reference to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but the curious can visit this handy-dandy building at 937 West Walnut.
On a recent Thursday, the center was full of activity, thanks to a visiting busload of students from a Brigham Young University sister campus in Nauvoo, Illinois. Two students were happy to tell the Pitch all about prophet Joseph Smith. But 19-year-old Andrea Nelson and 17-year-old Kara Pelo hadn’t heard anything about Big Love.
“Polygamy … was practiced for a short time to restore the church once it was founded,” Pelo explained helpfully, “but only a few people did it.”
Nelson shared a story about her cousin, who had a crush on a boy from a polygamous family. “He had cousins running around all over the place,” she said.
Robert Poll, the center’s director, says Independence suffered a dent in tourism during the 15 months the center was closed for renovation. “They missed us,” Poll tells the Pitch. “We’re probably a bigger draw than Truman.”
Poll has heard of Big Love but assures the Pitch that the fourth prophet of the church was told by God to ix-nay the olygamy-pay a long time ago. “Our group hasn’t practiced polygamy since 1898. I only have one good wife.”
The center’s tour includes a short movie in which Mormon beliefs help a family cope with such changes as the birth of a baby and the death of grandparents.
The movie husband isn’t as cute as Bill Paxton, but he does offer comic relief. As his movie wife holds their newborn daughter, he asks her, “What is the most important thing we can teach her?”
“That she is loved,” Non-Polygamous Movie Wife answers. “And that she is a child of God.”
“Isn’t that a lot for a week-old baby to learn?” he jokes as they put the baby to bed.
Independence is the home of two other churches splintered from the LDS church. (One offshoot group, the Community of Christ, built the landmark, tin-spired temple across the street from the Visitors Center.) Smith, who founded the LDS church in 1830, identified a 63-acre square in Independence as the site of the second temple, to be built — along with a temple in Jerusalem —just before the second coming of Christ. That empty plot is just west of the Visitors Center. So if Caterpillars start moving dirt around that site, the rest of us will know to look busy, because Jesus is coming.
The Bird Speaks
An e-mail hit our inbox from the parakeet bought by Toby Young and John Manard after their now-infamous jailbreak:
SQUAWK!
Bruno the Parakeet here.
Yes, that parakeet. The parakeet that was “confiscated,” along with porn, a mandolin, a copy of the stupid sheet music to O Brother, Where Art Thou, and a dozen other stomach-churning items from the Tennessee cabin where jailbreak darlings Toby “Dipshit” Young and John “Fabio” Manard hid out while on the run.
Lovebirds they are not. That’s an insult to real birds.
The U.S. marshall who adopted me named me “Manard,” apparently so I’d never forget one moment of my personal little hell. Watch me shit through the bars in thanks.
It’s all that bitch Toby’s fault that my very existence has been logged as an item on a fucking evidence list. I was minding my own business at the store where she and John stopped for Red Vines and KY. Guess she thought bringing another living thing into their love shack might brighten up the place. Here I think I’m being taken home by a nice, normal couple that wants to teach me to say “pretty bird” and put me in the living room where I can watch America’s Funniest Home Videos. (God, I love it when they show the parakeet riding around on the Labrador’s back!) Noooo. What happened instead would make Bob Saget sick. I’ve nearly plucked all the feathers out of my left wing, and I have flashbacks like you wouldn’t believe. I’ll never be able to listen to Van Morrison’s Moondance again.
I tried to tip people off after I saw John and Toby on America’s Most Wanted. I flapped my wings every time I saw someone, but stupid fucking humans would only say, “Oh, pretty bird. Who’s a pretty bird?” I am. I am.
Personally, I hope they give Toby 20 years. Let’s see how much she likes living in a cage. You get used to it after a while. At least now, with this trooper, I can watch all the episodes of Cops I want.
That’s all from me, unless they want me to testify. I’ll sing like a bird.
Love,
Bruno
