Author: Sari Gordon

Americans have long suffocated under the dead weight of silly, made-up sports like World Wide Wrestling and American Gladiator. Football, basketball, hockey, baseball, NASCAR, even golf and tennis have grown corpulent with corporate money and more branding than you see at a cattle ranch.

Then there’s boxing, the oldest sport in the world, which has become a sterilized show-off between billion-dollar babies in silky shorts and puffy red mittens. When Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates are the only writers still buzzing about a sport, you know you’ve got a big bloated corpse on your hands. Then this young Turk writer Palahniuk comes along, writes Fight Club, and all of a sudden, pugilism is back off the mat. It’s been seven years since the movie version of Palahniuk’s novel came out, and guys in the Twin Cities are still strippin’ down to their skivvies and engaging in bare-knuckle fighting for no apparent purpose and with few rules.

Ultimate Fighting, or Mixed Martial Arts, is the punk rock of combat sports. As one local promoter puts it, “We have for-real people beating each other up, for real.” The best place for action around the Twin Cities is the Myth, the Maplewood nightclub that’s the size and shape of a Best Buy. Once you’ve passed the “no gang colors” dress code, the friskers, and the metal detectors, the club bursts its tethers and blasts off on Red Bull-powered rocket boosters to a galaxy where the men, women, drinks, and action are all served straight up. The shoulder-height stage at one end of the room is reserved for patrons, who sit on metal folding chairs. The octagonal cage fills the dance floor on a five-foot-high riser. About one hundred people have paid a couple of hundred dollars each (or been comped) for the VIP seats and tables that sit back about fifteen feet from the action. Several collapsible tables and chairs are pushed right up next to the cage for the medic, judges, or fighters’ mates, who cling to the black-plastic-wrapped fence and holler advice or fling water bottles over the top of the twenty-foot wall to the fighters between rounds. The entire club is dark except the ring, which is tented in a hot pool of lights. Backlit silhouettes of heads and waving arms are visible behind a railing in the second deck, the equivalent of nosebleed seats at a football game. In this galaxy, only the royalty below get within spitting, sweating, and blood-spurting distance of the gore.

Once the fighters make the long walk through the cheering crowd and into the cage, the referee locks the gate. The combatants aren’t the ones fighting to get out; it’s the audience that wants in.

Fights go three rounds, five minutes a round, with a minute-long break in between. The amateurs kick things off, grappling around in a double crab walk most of the time. When two guys just wrestle around on the floor, it’s easy to forget the lawlessness of the sport—until someone wriggles an arm free and starts punching the other guy’s face while the referee does nothing but watch. It’s amazing how much a face can swell in just a couple minutes.

After a particularly bloody recent bout, the winning fighter stood up long enough to have his triumph declared, then promptly bolted from the cage and landed on all fours over a bucket. “Now folks,” yelled the announcer, “you know you’ve seen a good fight when the winner is puking!”

Half the crowd is made up of women, and they’re screaming, not wincing. Most look like sorority girls hoping for a glimpse of Brad Pitt. Two Asian women perched on their white boyfriends’ laps in the front row don’t look like they go to school or do anything but what they’re doing right here: jumping up and down and screeching, loud enough to be heard over the rest of the crowd, “Kick his fucking ass, you motherfucker!” So much for the cultural cliché about passivity and obedience. Then there’s a cadre of women thin and sparkly enough to be dangled from their own magenta cell phones. On the professional Ultimate Fighting Championship circuit, they’re called “Octagon Girls.” They go everywhere in a single-file line, wrapped in shreds of hot-pink fishnet and tottering on Kiss-style white platforms like candy stripers in a Russ Meyer fantasy. This night, they lent an especially poignant accompaniment to the announcement from the promoters of a new breast-cancer-awareness project.

During the next round, a fighter went down and out. A blue-gloved medic rushed to his side. Every pair of eyes in the house was on the body of the inert man while the victor stood awkwardly off to the side until his opponent was revived and wobbled out of the ring.

A current topic of hot debate in the Ultimate Fighting Championship world concerns groin attacks. Opponents of the nut-punch ban say that freestyle fighting should be exactly that. And if groin kicks become legal again, the only rule from Palahniuk’s vision—“You do not talk about Fight Club”—could be rendered completely moot.

There once lived a very rich man in Hudson, Wisconsin, who suffered from manic-depressive disorder. A couple of years ago, during an upswing, he drove to Seattle and bought five cars at an auction. Among them were a purple mid-eighties Jaguar with gold trim and rims, and a 1972 red Mercedes convertible. I first saw the cars during an auction preview at the Red Barn in Spring Valley, Wisconsin. Even with her delicate bloom of Tropical Nights air freshener, the old Jaguar attracted only snickers from the Carhartt-and-coveralls crowd. The Mercedes had many more suitors. One by one, they sunk into the driver’s seat—the car had black leather upholstery as soft as Roy Rogers’ saddle—and turned the key, to no avail. They pulled up her hood and poked around. Even their fluency with engines of every kind could not arouse the low-slung beauty.

Inside the Red Barn’s auction hall, Jack Hines stepped up to the podium and intoned the invocation he uses for some two hundred auctions a year: “Folks … ” With sons Jeff at his side and John in front of the portable computer cart recording transactions, Hines spent the next four hours selling hundreds of things left behind by the deceased, divorced, broke, or retired. Over the past forty years, countless pieces of Pierce County history have passed through his hands. Every object—from grandfather clock to writing desk to bagel cutter to Twins pennant—was once new and valued. Hines’ job is to connect these things with the folks who can put a dollar amount on that value.

“We’re going to start ’er off at ten dollars, who’ll give me ten dollars? How about five, who’ll give me five, no one? One. One dollar. Who’ll give me one? One? And one! We’ve got one, now who’ll go two, two dollars, we’re at two, do I hear three? OK, we’ll sell this the hard way, $2.50, do I hear $2.50? $2.50! Now three dollars?”

At the previews, antiques dealers and serious collectors can be identified by the big Rubbermaid tubs they carry and the stacks of newspaper (for breakable items) under their seats. Gun and coin auctions bring masses of people who sit with thick price guides like hymnals in their laps. Everyone’s searching for treasures, or at least something of use, but some country-auction offerings are particularly sad. They usually come in lots jumbled together in cardboard box lids. Too many copies of National Geographic, Sean Cassidy records, and rusty old colanders can make an auction feel like a garage sale. Other auctions open doors into private lives, like the small stacks of vintage nudie photographs sold in the driveway outside a dead man’s storage facility one very cold day in Ellsworth a couple of years ago. A mysterious man in a dark cloak paid more than five hundred dollars for the bunch, an obscene amount.

“Folks,” Hines said, “Bob, a very well-known and past highway commissioner for years, was taken from us by the dear Lord and so to settle the estate, the following personal property will be sold at auction.” Among the listings were houseplants. The houseplants were fresh because the auction was held quickly; the same week as the obit.

Hines led us outside to the lineup of cars, lawn mowers, jet skis, go-karts, and unidentifiable farm implements. The Jaguar went for the price of a K car. The snickering stopped abruptly as the clump of thirty or forty guys put on their poker faces for the Mercedes. After I won it, my mechanic husband reached under the hood, reconnected the vacuum hose he’d seen hanging loose and started the car.

I’ve hit a few other jackpots, like a first edition of Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums (paid four dollars, sold it for four hundred dollars) and the four Red Wing plates (bought for less than ten dollars, sold for seventy dollars apiece on eBay). Hines knows when he’s holding hot stuff, but he never shows it. He gives knives with swastikas the same “Gosh, what have we got here?” demeanor as he does with two-thousand-dollar John Deere signs or broken mantle clocks.

“Folks, this clock looks like it’s missing one hand, but”—he turns to Jeff—“you know what they could do with that?”

“What’s that?” says Jeff, without missing a beat.

“They could buy the next clock, take the hand off that one, and put it on this one!”

Before I drove off in the Mercedes, trailed by the glares of the losing bidders, a woman approached me. “I hope you enjoy that car, it’s a beauty.” She had once been married to the man who’d bought the car. She, like the cars, was another casualty of his illness. His name turned out to be a familiar one in western Wisconsin. He’d shipped four of the cars from Seattle and driven the Mercedes back home in a manic storm of snow and sleeplessness. Apparently he got hungry somewhere in the middle of North Dakota, pulled over, and without getting out of the car, got out a rifle and started shooting at some elk. He was arrested and spent a night in jail; then he returned to Hudson and hung himself from the light fixture in his living room. His ex-wife and daughters turned to Hines to sell off the estate.

Later I would find condoms and piles of burned-out disposable lighters under the seat of my graceful and classic—and amazingly fast—car. I drove it for a couple of summers, then put it up on eBay. I made a slim profit and, after an astonishingly easy procedure, shipped the Mercedes to her happy new owner in the United Arab Emirates.

One Saturday morning about six weeks before April 15, our national day of fiscal confession and atonement, an Orthodox Jewish man and his son walked along Highland Parkway. The two passed a nondescript side-by-side duplex, where a half-dozen tax preparers were knee-deep in paperwork—the kind of work, the onerous old stereotype goes, usually handled by the dark-suited men now walking to temple on the Sabbath. Across the street, the Lubavitch Day Care Center and Day School sat in darkness while clients continued to stream in and out of the duplex, which houses Mohs Tax Service, until 9:00 in the evening.

Through the last thirty years, Linda Mohs has turned her one-woman shop into a virtual empire by working with artists, musicians, actors, and other margin-dwelling, small-business taxpayers. She has ten thousand clients. Her full-time, year-round staff of twelve mans the calculators twelve hours a day, six days a week during the tax season. Mohs herself finds an almost unholy joy in doing taxes. She says it’s “superfun.” She may be working on another man’s Sabbath, but her principles are one reason so many people are drawn to Mohs.

Among the business cards in her waiting room and the names listed on her website are caterers, geriatric care specialists, freehand faux finishers, early-childhood Spanish teachers, and doulas. There are a sprinkling of listings in other languages. Mohs said that half of her job consists of counseling people through crises like divorce or severe financial loss. “My clients are sane and insane, rich and poor, nice and naughty. I love the variety.”

When you walk in the front door of Mohs’ office a computerized voice announces, “Front door, open.” That’s where the formalities end. The wild style of the interior makes one wonder if the rooms are just as noisy when they’re empty. The waiting room is a museum of coffee mugs. Elsewhere, shelves are bowed with paperweights, glassware, and souvenirs. The “South of the border room” is filled with fishing nets and plush toy parrots. The walls are thick with lurid-hued paintings, printed slogans, postcards, one-liners, and family portraits. Employees and their clients sit in ersatz cubicles made from turquoise Naugahyde restaurant booths. Even the kitchen is operational: During tax time, a cook serves homemade lunches and dinners.

Mohs is diminutive and sports a short cap of brown hair and a dazzling array of rings. She has a wide open face and darts from room to room like a squirrel in a giant oak tree as she fields questions about esoteric tax laws, or chirps requests for copies or files over the din. She buys coffee and toilet paper by the vanload and is notorious for her thriftiness, no doubt the result of her childhood among eight siblings on a farm with no electricity or plumbing in Ogilvie, Minnesota. Her family was miserably poor, she said. Her mother worked and her father’s income was negligible. “If we could shoot it or grow it, we ate.” Many times, they went hungry.

Mohs’ relationships with her own children are as distinctive as her business. She can’t tell you how many children she and her husband Tom have raised. They made three of their own, but informally fostered, adopted, and cared for so many other kids, they’ve lost count. She estimates that she has shepherded a dozen kids to their high school graduations. She took in her ninety-year-old great aunt and adopted a three-month-old girl simultaneously. “They were the best of buddies. The little one would hitch a ride on the wheelchair and they had lots of tea parties together.”

In the seventies, Mohs had been doing taxes for her friends in exchange for pizza and beer when she realized she’d lost her appetite for the compensation, but not the work. She did the books for two photographers, Boyd Hagen and Joe Giannetti. When they dissolved their partnership, their employee, Ann Marsden, started her own business and Mohs followed.

Susan Thompson, who has worked with Mohs for ten years, had to leave work early on Saturday for a family emergency but made a point of pausing on her way out to testify about Mohs’ charitable nature. “She’s amazing.”

“She’s more than amazing,” said another employee, Desiree, jumping in when she overheard Thompson.

In addition to her open-door policy to those needing a home or a meal, Mohs and her husband cook and prepare forty turkeys in their kitchen each Thanksgiving and serve dinner at their church. She’s been known to encourage altruistic pricing among her staff.

Despite her advocacy on behalf of her artistic and often beleaguered client base, Mohs believes that the current Republican-controlled legislature has given more breaks to taxpayers than any other administration. She adheres to the commandment that government mind its own business—that may be why so many people return to her for their annual reckoning, and leave uplifted. —Sari Gordon

Spring was still months away, and standing just inside the entrance of the “Twenty-fifth Annual Cycle World International Motorcycle Show,” at the Minneapolis Convention Center, two blond girls were handing out plastic bags. They looked old enough to get their first tattoos, but demure enough to keep tugging at the creeping hemlines of their neon-green mini dresses. With their skinny legs clad in nude panty-hose and knee-high platform boots, they looked like they were playing dress up. My friends and I took our bags, hoping to fill them with freebies.

Inside, the hall was a circus of brand names— Yamaha, Suzuki, Ducati, Moto Primo, Vanson, BMW, Buell, and, of course, the elephant in the tent, Harley-Davidson. Most of the salespeople stood back and let the booths and the bikes do the talking, while the hungrier ones lurked around the perimeter like hyenas. The more aggressive or desperate vendors darted into the slow-moving herd, hoping to hook a few weak-willed stragglers.

“Say, I noticed you have some sunglasses there, if you have just a minute—” Like a perfume salesgirl, one predator popped up in front of me armed with a spray bottle, but I ducked and dodged. Safely out of range, my friend confided that her husband got roped in earlier. “And you know what?” she whispered. “He said his glasses were the cleanest they’ve ever been.”

After an hour, my swag bag was still empty. No one else seemed to be scoring anything, either.

At the very back of the hall a small crowd had gathered. Despite the lousy location, spectators were standing three-deep around a booth and pushing in to get a better look. Above them, on a platform, stood a man with his shirtsleeves rolled up, his face red and moist from the lights flooding his stage. He spoke into the round foam ball of his headset and somehow managed to make eye contact with everyone and no one all at once.

“Folks, you’ve probably seen something like this on TV, but I can guarantee,” he said, punctuating his words with finger jabs, “You have never seen the Super Shammy.”

He grabbed a large bottle filled with some kind of cola and poured it all over a square carpet sample. As he talked, he held a fan of yellow swatches and dealt them out to the crowd. “As you can see, folks, the Super Shammy isn’t just absorbent, it’s super absorbent,” said Super Shammy Man as he pressed a piece of the magical material onto the carpet. He soaked up all the liquid, then lifted the dry carpet up high for all to see. He proceeded to mop up all the excess soda on the table, too. Then he squeezed the Super Shammy, with its bulging payload, over a rubber dish pan filled with murky grey water. The stream seemed endless. There was the roar of the stunt bike demonstration going on nearby, but Super Shammy Man’s crowd was completely silent. They heard only the sound of that nasty, unwanted liquid trickling into the plastic tub.

“Folks, the Super Shammy isn’t just for sunglasses, spills, and shiny shoes. The Super Shammy is great for”—he whirled around and caught me taking his picture instead of listening to his pitch—“cameras like yours, honey.” He moved on. “What about the bathroom, the kid’s room, the boat, the RV, the soccer game?” He didn’t even bother to mention motorcycles, but his audience was spellbound nonetheless.

We moved on without buying anything, but the huckster’s fading monologue lingered. When was the last time a salesman trudged the rural roads of this country, serenading the Lady of The House with his shtick? When was the last time the Lady of The House was even home and willing to open her door to strange men?

The next day I wanted to ask Super Shammy Man about his job and his life, but none of the event coordinators had any information. They knew him only as the exhibitor in booth 147. His accent—Canadian, I think—suggested that he wouldn’t be sticking around after the last day of the show. My Super Shammy samples don’t have logos or toll-free numbers. Super Shammy is on the web, but it seems they’re distributed exclusively by lone peddlers like the guy at the Cycle World show. These characters buy their stock from the Fuller Brush Company, the outfit that once upon a time jammed thousands of well-worn shoes into front doors all across the country and, according to the cartoons in old Playboys, offered occasional “private demonstrations” to some of those lonely housewives.

The four of us left the show without a motorcycle, a young spokesgirl, or even a bagful of free souvenirs. Still, I felt like the farmer’s wife left holding the bogus receipt for a family Bible and yet smiling as she watches her thief in the night heading down the trail to his next mark. Now I wish I had let Super Shammy Man wring a few bucks out of me. He and his increasingly rare brand of late-night infomercial seduction was more satisfying and a lot less humiliating than the twelve-dollar admission fee I paid for the privilege to ogle motorcycles that cost a thousand times that much and which I wouldn’t even be able to use for another three months.—Sari Gordon

Is there a sound more heavenly than the harp? The ancient, wing-shaped instrument seems incapable—even in the hands of a clown—of producing anything but the most soothing and somber sounds. The Stoney End Harp Company is headquartered in an old barn in a rustic valley just outside Red Wing. For more than a decade, it has been a quiet presence in an area more famous for work boots and pottery. In the Stoney End workshop, five hundred harps are forged from local oak, cherry, and walnut each year. The atmosphere is hardly bucolic; the harps’ celestial notes are forged in a hellish cacophony of hammering, sawing, scraping, and drilling, with loud modern rock and the occasional yelp of a cussword adding to the auditory frenzy.

Presiding over the din is Gary Stone, who admits he has no musical abilities, but was intrigued by the way harp-making joined the science of acoustics with his love of woodworking. His wife Eve says he has a “tin ear.” But that impairment may be just the thing that compels Stone. Like a tone-deaf Robin Hood spreading euphony, he seeks to bring instruments to people who don’t think of themselves as musical.

Connecting musical instruments and amateurs is why Stone and his wife moved their company from the West Bank of the University of Minnesota to its country home. The old-time, agricultural, make-do heritage of rural Minnesota is in perfect harmony with Stone’s quest to bring folk and ethnic instruments to non-musicians. He says Stoney End harps are not for high-end concert performance or the recording industry. “The main thing we’re interested in is people making music for themselves, for people to enjoy as a life or activity.”

It can still be a serious commitment. A Stoney End harp is a substantial investment: A simple folk harp (with twenty to thirty-six strings) costs between $1,000 and $6,000; a larger forty-six to forty-eight-string pedal harp costs from $13,000 to $50,000. Those are the kind you see in orchestras. They are played by “harpists,” while “harpers” play the smaller folk, or Celtic, harp. Harpers typically have humble aims. Many of them volunteer to play their music for weddings, sick infants in hospitals, or to nursing-home residents.

“We make a good-sounding instrument,” says Stone, “not the most expensive and not the least, not the top of the line or the bottom. Just the best value.”

Stoney End harps have loyal fans all over the world. Though most are sold to British retail shops and distributors, the second largest destination for Stoney End is Japan, where they ship five or six instruments a month.

Stoney End’s former mail order and web business has moved into the second floor of the barn and is open to the public. The shop is also the sole North American location of Hobgoblin Music, a celebrated folk-instrument company that has eight retail shops scattered around Great Britain.

Not only are the beautiful, handmade harps on display. There are also didgeridoos, Peruvian panpipes, bodhrans, bones, lutes, concertinas, accordions, ouds, and bougarabous. For the musically challenged who still want to get in on the campfire tunes, there are egg-shaped shakers and percussion instruments.

The top floor of the Stoney End barn is a performance space, an old hay loft that lets light from the uppermost windows rain down through the second floor. The stage and the concert schedule threaten to make Stoney End the Seventh Street Entry of the folk scene. Why should audiences strap themselves into fixed theater seats to see Riverdance when they can stomp the boards to Curtis and Loretta, Bill Staines, Ann Reed, and traditional Irish musicians Triall Ro-Crua in a historic barn just a bagpipe’s throw from the Mississippi?—Sári Gordon

About twenty years ago I had a spiritual awakening. Actually, it was more like a little chat. I was lying on a hospital bed, staring out the window. “Okay, I’m willing to believe you’re out there,” I said to the steam coming out of the sewer in front of St. Mary’s, “if you’ll help me quit heroin and get me out of this place.”

The sun came out from behind a cloud and on a bitter winter day in Minnesota, three thousand miles from home, I felt something… I don’t know… something big come over me. I felt something even heavier lifted off of me. I didn’t want to disappear completely so I quickly tacked on, “and please don’t make me a Jesus freak.”

I still think I’m pretty spiritual. I was baptized in the Catholic Church, and officially converted to Judaism when I was ten. Our family did Transcendental Meditation, Dad did EST, and in the last twenty years, I’ve gone to four different synagogues and attended St. Joan of Arc, the South Minneapolis Catholic church with a gay pastor and a liberal pulpit. I’ve also chanted “nam yoho renge kyo” with Buddhists, taken numerous Zen classes, prayed with Sufis in Morocco, and done a few sweat lodges and Wiccan ceremonies. I’ve haven’t gone through any rebirthing rituals in the mud, but I like my friends who have.

I know about cults, too. I lost a brother to one in California. I mingled with the Heaven’s Gate people when they came to Minneapolis to spread the word about aliens and Jesus, something I never really did figure out. They didn’t stick around to help explain it, either.

Then there’s the sect that I actually belong to—the one I’d leave, but they can’t kick me out. Once it dawned on me that I had gotten on my knees for a lot less than what a twelve-step program had to offer, I realized I had no more excuses. I’ve been going to meetings for a long time now. I spent the first few years poking at AA with a stick, waiting for something to crawl out. Nothing ever did. I’m not saying this as an official spokesmodel for AA, because there aren’t any. My observations are simply my own, based on meetings I’ve been to. I haven’t paid anything, I haven’t met anyone in charge, and there’s no mecca to which we all flock every year. People with a few hours of sobriety go to the exact same meetings as those with decades. Most detractors point to the G-word up on the wall, but I’m an agnostic (maybe a Deist) and I’ve been clean and sober for some time and no one has come to take my secret decoder ring.

When I read that Eckankar was having its worldwide seminar here in Minneapolis this month, I was curious. I had seen Eckankar stickers back home, usually on humble old Datsuns. Eckankar and I, it turns out, were both born in the early sixties in the South Bay Area. I grew up in the backwash of Joan Baez, Neil Young, Ken Kesey, Charles Manson, and Jim Jones. Right after I moved to Minnesota, my dad and his wife bought a house in the foothills above Palo Alto, in a pretty enviable neighborhood. The seller was a guy called Sri Harold Klemp, a name I didn’t easily forget. I was impressed that the leader of a religion had such good taste and resources. Klemp had sold the house so that he—and his church—could follow me to Minnesota.

Or was it just a coincidence?

The basic teachings of Eckankar are virtually identical to Hinduism: Students (“chelas”) strive to rid themselves of the karma that keeps their souls from going directly to heaven for good. This involves reading, meditating, chanting, dream interpretation, and soul travel. Chelas can advance through a numbered series of initiations that correspond to the level of their self-knowledge, “god-consciousness,” and mastery of Eck principles. High Initiates (or HI’s) get special privileges and act as mentors and leaders to first and second “circle” members. The initiation rites are secret, but you can’t be a HI without paying your dues on time for at least two years.

Eck has no rules. The official party line is that they are a group that studies spiritual principles. The group is not exclusive, and joining doesn’t cost much. You don’t have to change your clothes (no saffron robes), your religion (Jewish, Lutheran, or Catholic Eckists are simply supplementing their own religions with Eck principles), or your diet (unlike their Hindu predecessors, Eckists can and do eat cows). Sexual orientation doesn’t matter, and there’s no hanging out at the airport. In other words, Eck is not a cult. It doesn’t require much of its practitioners, at least on paper. There’s a recommended twenty-minute daily incantation of a single syllable, “Hu,” which members do together at seminars and regular gatherings.

There are twenty-six thousand Eckists in the U.S.; there are no numbers for Minnesota members. Every state has at least one local-branch “Satsang Society,” or study group. Satsangs all over the world host identical programs for both the public and for members, from studies of the Eck “bible” (the Shariyat Ki Sugmad) and other Eck religious tracts to talks like “Discover Your Greatness as a Soul” and “How to Have More Love in Your Life.”

Members and seekers can also get the Eck message on local cable stations, which usually feature videotaped talks by Harold Klemp, whose image is ubiquitous in their materials. Master Harold is the “Mahanta,” the highest human incarnation of “god-consciousness.” Klemp is just the latest of thousands of Mahantas, but there can only be one on Earth at a time. “Mahanta,” like “chela” and “Sri,” is a common Sanskrit word used in Eastern religions. (Today many of those words are trademarked by Eckankar.)

Chelas are encouraged to look at a picture of Klemp when they meditate. The official portrait can be had for twenty-five dollars, unframed or in wallet-sized versions. Nearly every photo of the Mahanta is the same: A simple, professional head shot of a bespectacled Klemp, dressed in a blue leisure suit and tie. I’d be more tempted to ask him about Roth IRAs than I would about the nature of my soul, but Eck likes that conservative image and many Eckists model their dress after him.

The slightly dated picture and the deification of his image led me to believe that Klemp no longer walked among us. It turns out he’s alive, though no one I spoke to seemed to know or care where he is or what he does for a living. But they do gather to revere him in the flesh occasionally; this month, five or six thousand Eckists will fly in from all over the world to see Harold Klemp in person as the Saturday-night headliner at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

Klemp’s whereabouts aren’t the only secret in Eckankar. There are no public records for Eckankar’s finances because it is tax-exempt and qualifies as a religious organization under IRS rules. Local Satsangs that take in less than $25,000 a year don’t have to file tax returns, and nearly every Eck Satsang falls into that category. But there are no records for the headquarters, either. No one knows how much is spent on salaries or on the new building being constructed for office staff, who are currently housed in New Hope. There are, however, records of numerous properties owned and sold by the Church, some of them in spiritual and real estate hot spots like Sedona and Hawaii.

Yet members pay only $120 a year to belong ($50 for other countries). Their websites do list cover charges for many classes, workshops, and seminars, which range from $25 to $150. Those numbers don’t add up to much. But some Eckists who have left the organization say money plays a big role. One of them, Elizabeth, says the pressure to donate is constant. Elizabeth was a member from the age of thirteen, when her parents, siblings, and grandparents signed up. She recently left Eckankar and was “disowned.” Only one sister risks the rare conversation with her. When I asked Elizabeth about interviewing her parents, she said I would get nothin
g more than canned responses and outright denials. After she told me that her mother told her “never to contact her again,” I dropped it.

Elizabeth says Eck’s family rate is $160 a year, but that’s just the beginning. She says the Satsangs need donations, as do the discourse/Satsang classes, book-discussion classes, workshops for training, and regional seminars. Donations are requested from those who attend all Eck functions. Then there are books, videotapes, music CDs, pictures, posters, recruitment materials such as reply posters with tear-off information cards, business cards, bumper stickers, and fundraiser items like T-shirts, jewelry, and coffee cups, all of which can be bought by Eckankar tax-free.

Paul, who was a twenty-eight-year veteran of Eckankar and a High Initiate before he bailed out five years ago, told me that he feels his life was wasted on the organization. “I spent thousands of dollars on Eckankar,” he said. Paul believes now that it was a “fraud and illusion” designed to profit the people at the top.

Paul Twitchell, Eck’s founder, was born in Paducah, Kentucky. Like his friend L. Ron Hubbard, he published a few science fiction novels and in 1964 or 1965, after studying under a couple of Indian yogis, Twitchell introduced Eckankar to the world from his home base in Menlo Park, right near the place where my family once played miniature golf. Twitchell declared himself a “Living Eck Master” and said that he had been given the “Divine Rod of Power” by Rebazar Tarzs, a hundred-year-old man who today “still lives in a hut in Hindu Kush Mountains,” according to Eck publications.

Eck’s detractors have a hundred complaints, but most agree that Twitchell was a plagiarist. The most vociferous critic and documenter is David Lane, who says Twitchell simply cut and pasted text from books like Julian Johnson’s Path of the Masters. The 1939 book is widely considered among religious scholars to be the pioneering account of a Westerner’s interpretation of Eastern religion. Anti-cult advocates in particular cite Johnson’s first and foremost declaration that “Real Masters never charge for their services,” a passage Twitchell neglected to crib. Less academic are accounts of Twitchell’s questionable relationships with his spiritual mentors, peers, wives, and near-wives.

Twitchell died in the early seventies, around the time I was blacking out on Mogen David after my bat mitzvah. He had named Darwin Gross the next “Living Eck Master,” and he reigned until 1981, around the time I left California in search of a simpler life. It is said that Gross then handed the “Rod of Power” to Harold Klemp and soon after, Master Harold brought Eck back to the Midwest, near his Wisconsin hometown and beginnings as a Lutheran minister.

Gross, however, says that the Rod wasn’t handed to Klemp at all and that Klemp and his associates, including the current president of Eckankar, Peter Skelskey, wrested it away in what Gross calls a “coup.” Gross maintains that he is the true Living Eck Master/Mahanta and heads up his own religion, called Ancient Teachings of the Masters (ATOM). The overthrow of Gross—who looks like a guy who has a nice Mac Davis collection—doesn’t strike me as a South American bloodbath so much as an eighth-grade slap fight in the computer lab; then again, I’m an immature, superficial snob who can’t read any Eck material without thinking of a bunch of kids in a tree house fighting with foil swords stealing names from Mad magazine.

Of course, I didn’t blink when I bought pot from a guy named Gogo Garfinkel, so I decided to drop by the Eck temple out in Chanhassen and keep an open mind, at least for as long as I could go without a cigarette on their 174 acres of smoke-free grounds. It’s probably the only place in this country where you have to specify which pyramid-topped building you’re looking for, but basically the white one is Prince’s, the gold one, Eck’s.

I pass by a basket of paper slippers offered to protect the carpetand chat for a minute with the host and hostess on duty, Burdoc and Esther. Esther is really happy to see me. She’s wearing a sharp suit in a confident shade of red. Her jewelry, hair, and accessories say, “Have you had your luggage in your possession the entire time?” I like her, she’s peppy. She’s enthusiastic. Now she’s getting a little too
excited, so I ask if I can just look around for a while on my own. She tells me the official tour won’t start for another forty-five minutes. That’s fine, I say. I’ll just wander around. There are excellent walking trails outside. I’ve been out there before with my dog. Esther and Burdoc exchange looks. “How about if I show you the library?” she says brightly, while Burdoc picks up the phone.

Esther tells me that an inordinate number of moving vans were appearing in her life. She calls these coincidences “waking dreams.” First there was one on her street, then another on the way to work, and, well, you get the picture. “What does it mean?” I ask. She looks so excited. “Well, it means I’m going somewhere.”

“Really? Like a vacation?”

“Oh no, as soon as I get home I’m packing everything up. I’m going to be moving soon,” she says, with the same assurance one would use in saying that the sky is blue. I squirm out of her suggestion that we do a “Hu chant” together by asking for directions to the ladies’ room. When I return, Jennifer Exsted, Public Information Coordinator, is waiting for me. She looks out of breath. I feel terrible that Burdoc had summoned her from a picnic she was enjoying nearby at Lake Ann on this beautiful Saturday afternoon. “Oh, no, no, it’s no problem at all,” she reassures me. She shows me around the empty temple, opening doors, flicking lights on and off as we peer into one immaculate and dull classroom after another. The whole place looks like a hotel conference center. Most classrooms contain a bunch of chairs, a vase of fake flowers, and a silver dish with a doily in the bottom, presumably to muffle the sound of donated change. On the walls hang faithfully rendered paintings of visions by various Eck members. There is a preponderance of castles in clouds and vast natural settings with solemn human figures standing under stars with extra-long rays.

When I ask if the temple was built with security in mind, Exsted says that the building was designed for longevity, not defense. Neither of us mentions the vandalism—including bullet holes—that the temple suffered in the early eighties, some even while it was still under construction.

At the back there is a windowless room with a few rows of theater seats, a miniature chapel. It’s meant for smaller ceremonies, Exsted says, like weddings or rites of passage for youth. Eck has no position on gay marriage. In fact, when I ask about the usual hot topics—abortion, divorce, gay rights, polygamy, plus a few curveballs I make up on the fly, such as can you be a porn star and still be a member in good standing?—she bats every one out of the park. They abide by the laws of the state. They don’t do anything outside of the law and don’t encourage anyone to do so.

I keep her in the chapel a little too long. I’m entranced by the ten pictures of Eck Masters on the wall behind the podium. One in particular looks like a roadie for Siegfried and Roy. He’s got long blond hair and blue eyes and is clearly Caucasian. Exsted tells me I’m looking at Gopal Das, “from Egypt.” There’s the famous Rebazar Tarzs, who looks like Jim Marshall, the Vikings Hall of Famer. There’s Peddar Zaskq (Paul Twitchell), Yaubl Sacabi, and the guy with my favorite name, Fubbi Quantz. The most recent addition, Kata Daki, is the only female Master. She doesn’t look as if she’s been painted by the same artist as the others and I wonder if she’s been tacked on to the lineage to show gender sensitivity. Exsted doesn’t know much about her.

Je
sus, says Exsted, was not an Eck Master. Many of the Masters were just simple people who “appeared” to those in need of guidance. You don’t even need to use one of Eck’s Masters; “it could be someone who you would say you love,” says Exsted.

“Okay, so can I just worship the Quaker Oats guy?”

“Well, uh,” she says, almost missing a step, “I guess you could, but Harold’s picture has a strong vibration.” The secrecy around Klemp, says Exsted, is intentional. He is a celebrity, and the sheer numbers of followers—reported at fifty thousand worldwide—simply makes it impossible for the Master to be available to everyone on the phone or in public. When Eck first began, the leader would wade among his students, but those days are gone, says Exsted, gazing at the Master’s picture.

When I ask Exsted if Harold Klemp is actually alive somewhere, she says, “That’s a good question. You’d have to ask him.” So people can just pick up the phone and call him? “There isn’t really the need to do that,” she explains.

She’s right. Talking to Eckists, I find that they are perfectly comfortable referring to recent discussions they’ve had with Harold even though they have never personally met him. They converse with Harold in their minds. Exsted agrees with my conclusion that Harold Klemp is in many ways like the pope. Still, for this guy whose human form is insignificant, five or six thousand people are flying in from all over the planet, paying $130 to get in ($155 at the door), and I’ll bet they won’t be expecting to hear their Master’s voice from a TV monitor.

The seminar, to be fair, is also a chance for Eckists to hang out together, to visit the temple, and to attend workshops specifically tailored to their initiate level. The theme this year is “the Year of the Eck Missionary,” and attendees will go home equipped with suggestions like “be sure to mention Eck to at least one new person a week.” I’m curious about how these “missionaries” work in an organization that claims a non-proselytizing platform.

Exsted says that these and other questions about the Master should be taken up with Eck’s president, Peter Skelskey. Uh-oh. Isn’t he one of Harold’s bouncers who snatched the Rod of Power from poor old Darwin? Then again, he is like a founding father: It would be like asking Thomas Jefferson why he kept slaves. Fortunately for us both, Exsted calls me later to say that Skelskey doesn’t want to talk to me. I bet she told him about my Quaker Oats question.

Exsted finally knocks me off the log when she tosses out a second invitation to do a quick Hu chant. I stumble. I get all embarrassed and say no. At that, she leads me out of the chapel, triumphant and ready to show me the new kitchen.

I thought very, very hard about Eck during the drive back home. I mean, there are coincidences in life that I just let go all the time. And I do have dreams that leave big footprints on most of my days, which I normally kick onto the “maybe I’ll figure it out later” pile.

Just to prove I wasn’t chicken, I tried chanting the Hu. I start with “Hoooooo, hoooooo,” and then I remember that it’s pronounced “hew,” so I start again. “Hewwww…hewwww…” Oh, no way. This isn’t going to work. All I can think of is David Sedaris’s boyfriend. Then I start wondering why David Sedaris’s voice sounds so much like Klemp’s. I give up.

In September of 1991, two thirty-four-year-old members of Eck committed suicide, one near Syracuse, New York, and one in Kansas City. Eck spokesman Kent Livingston* told a New York paper in an official statement, “These things happen with members of all sorts of religions,” he said.

Now, I’m willing to allow that two suicides might be considered an acceptable loss of life—even better than average—for a worldwide congregation of fifty thousand. But last month a small news item appeared in the French newspaper, L’Express: Ten bodies were discovered in a house in French-speaking Mauritania. The news never got picked up by English-language outlets, and the only subsequent details provided were that two of the probable instigators (the ones who died last) held Eck medallions in their pockets. The others, it was reported, had been followers of the religion who had become entangled with the pair in various money-lending scenarios. In other words, this little group of Eckists was a cult, at least by one definition.

Most Eck practitioners don’t seem to hear, know, or care about the charges being lobbed over the walls of their castle. Only a few esoteric anti-Eck books have been published, people don’t protest their meetings, and there are no instances of dramatic deprogramming rescues.

Online, however, it’s a different story. After slogging through thousands of debates ranging from the philosophical to the juvenile (“Hey, Doug, do you still cut your hair using a salad bowl?”), I’m frankly relieved to simply walk away from the cacophony and call it a draw.

What sticks like a JuJube in my molars, though, is Klemp’s apparent power to amend Eckankar’s sacred texts and official history. His job, in fact, is to interpret the texts and update members with the latest from Fubbi Quantz and Co. Sadly, Klemp and others have simply erased or taken out of print those publications that disrupt the current image of the organization. Not only does Eck have a very short history; it seems to be written in pencil. A few troubling citations do remain:

“…the mission of the Mahanta on this earth is to stir the millions of non-initiated into revolt against all orthodox religions. It also means that anyone who opposes the Mahanta in any of the worlds is foolish for the ECK will work swiftly in retribution.”
—Book I, p. 181

“But once the chela has become a member of the inner circle, he cannot resign. Those few have found that spiritual decay sets in immediately, affecting the health, material life and spiritual life, and brings death more swiftly.”
—Book II, p. 197 (p. 166 in older editions)

Since neither Klemp nor Skelskey wants to talk to me, I’ll assume that these citations are still in play.

One recent morning my partner’s stomach was growling and it sounded exactly like the intro to “Dreamweaver.” Clearly, all this Eck stuff was starting to get to me. What did this mean? Was he merely hungry or was Harold trying to talk to me? Maybe Harold was hungry. I read somewhere that he may be suffering from environmental illness. What could I possibly feed him? Maybe he was trying to tell me to give away my Aveda products?

I didn’t get it.

Admittedly, I was ready to have an encounter with Eck like the one I’d had at St. Mary’s more than twenty years ago. To be honest, writing full-time in rural Wisconsin does get a little lonely. I looked for a parting of the clouds, for a ray of sunshine that may have led to a fellowship like the one I have enjoyed in a variety of twelve-step programs.

In the end, I realized that the true guiding light in my life is right in front of me every single day that I am fortunate enough to open my eyes. I’m happy as a spiritual amoeba; I’ll continue gravitating toward warmth and light and avoiding cold, pointy things. It’s just a tad too noisy there among the Eckists and anti-Eckists. Besides, I tend to feel at home with loners and survivors, not joiners and believers. Out here, among the crickets and coyotes, I can hear God speaking pretty clearly. Most of all, I guess I’m no longer in the market for the surrogate sense of belonging I once got from dope and those first uncomfortable AA meetings. I am surrounded by infinite proof of a universe that has a place for me right here, right now. Besides, my God doesn’t mind if I smoke while we pass the time.

*Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the speaker. We regret the err
or and hereby correct it.—Eds., 11/11/04

Now that it’s closing time at Ruminator Books, some faithful readers may be seen staggering around in front of the locked doors, willing to go anywhere for a fix except those literary sports bars, Barnes & Noble and Borders. Like drunks, they want their medicine straight up with no straws or umbrellas. They like to walk right in, sit right down, and drill into their favorites under a looming altar stacked high with the objects of their obsession. They like to be left alone. Real bookstores don’t need a big rack of Danielle Steele jiggling up front to tempt the riff-raff. The ambient sounds of chipper salespeople, children, light jazz, and gossip are for Gymboree and Cost Cutters. Thankfully, there are plenty of St. Paul bookstores that know that the only good hissing comes from a librarian, not a milk steamer.

Midway Books, for example, has been a cool oasis on University and Snelling avenues for more than twenty years. While flyers get pinned to their windshields outside, customers can calmly roam three floors of rare and enduring volumes of literature, art, and photography.

Midway also has poly-bagged vintage comics and girlie mags like Rogue and Nugget, but the husband-and-wife owners steered their shop into more highbrow waters a few years back. Kathy and Tom Stransky bought six entire bookcases’ worth of art and photography books from a couple of itinerant collectors who traveled the country in a converted school bus.

A scholar can still slap down a few clams for a Ford-administration-era Juggs, but the store has also attracted celebrities with more esoteric appetites. Patti Smith stopped in after her recent appearance at First Avenue, looking up H.P. Lovecraft. When she spied a children’s book illustrated by Jessie Willcox Smith, Patti wanted it for her daughter, Jesse. Stransky presented the book as a gift to the singer, saying, “You’ve given me so much pleasure through the years, it would be an honor to give you this.”

Stransky may not regularly hand out books gratis, but browsers are free to admire thousands of the most beautiful books in the world, like those illustrated by the proprietor’s own favorite, Kay Nielsen.

Down the street on Snelling is Speedboat Books and Gallery. A funny, nervous little man named Paul Dickinson owns the joint. He has been successfully featuring artists in his basement gallery for years. He does a brisk business online, selling weird, out-of-print, and rare books. Selling on the web provides some steady income for Dickinson, but he doesn’t predict that the Internet will suck up bookstores entirely. “People like to look at a lot of books,” he says, perched behind the tiny counter of his haphazard shop.

There is a hefty collection of kitschy covers that appeal to artists (The Frightened Fingers) and he sells a lot of technical manuals. Dickinson says he’d rather help the guy who’s looking for the ’72 Datsun Handbook than a darling first-edition Gatsby. “A good used bookstore is a cultural archive,” says Dickinson. He recently sold a Lucky Luciano book to the scriptwriters of The Sopranos and filled a request by David Mamet for a book on aberrant psychology.

Thomas Loome owns two magnificent bookstores in Stillwater. Of Loome’s Theological Booksellers’ inventory, he says, “People don’t collect these books. They are meant to be read.” The only sign of frivolity in the store might be the multicolored ribbons that dangle from beneath a shelf of daily missals. The books are housed in a circular room filled with stained glass light and hardwood floors. The floors are seriously sloped and the dim light from the hanging wrought-iron lamps blends with the sound of the rain coming through the open door to create an atmosphere more tantalizing than any in-store pastry counter.

Though Loome admits that he prefers to read his “intellectual hero,” Noam Chomsky, he and two other booksellers travel the world to maintain a bewilderingly esoteric collection of a half-million mostly unfamiliar volumes. C.S. Lewis and Thomas Merton are two recent best sellers, and fans of St. Thomas Aquinas could easily be overwhelmed by the six-foot-high, twenty-four-foot-long free-standing shelf dedicated to his writings—if the floor itself doesn’t cave in first.

Some used books tell their best stories on their endpapers. Near the cash register of Loome’s other Stillwater bookstore, the secular one, is a first-edition copy of Thomas Merton’s Roots of Nonviolence. The book is dedicated by the author to Joan Baez, for an impulse price point of seventy-five dollars. Sixth Chamber, another independent bookstore in St. Paul, has a book by Robert Bly. For thirty-five dollars, a reader can contemplate the value of the author’s “charming inscription” against the owner’s need for a few bucks.—Sári Gordon

Selling water in Wayzata would be like selling beer in Baraboo. How then to explain the one thousand people who streamed into Wayzata Community Church the other day to hear a lecture called “The Hidden Messages of Water”? The pews were brimming and the ushers tersely redirected latecomers to folding chairs spilling out into the lobby. The lecturer himself was surprised at the overflow crowd: After his introduction, he paused to take pictures of the audience, who cheered and waved.

Who was this conservatively dressed, tousled, middle-aged Japanese man, and why did all these people—mostly women—dress up and fill the parking lots and streets with their Lexuses and Volvos? How was it that he came to sell water to people who paid twenty-five dollars each, and probably all lived within a mile of a lake?

It was Dr. Masura Emoto. He is a half-scientist, half-evangelist whose books have sold more than a half-million copies. Trained in Japan in alternative medicine, Emoto fills bottles with water, exposes them to words, music, or prayer, and then freezes them. He then photographs the resulting crystals. The images are either “beautiful” or “ugly.” Many of them, as he indicated with his laser pointer on the huge screen suspended above him, actually reveal apocryphal images. In one experiment, he “showed” a picture of Niagara Falls to the water and the water responded by producing a crystal that resembled, according to Emoto, the eye on a dollar bill. The word “war” produced a fuzzy, irregular crystal that suggested a jet flying into the World Trade Center, while the Japanese word for “mother’s cooking” generated a brilliant, symmetrical crystal.

The audience oohed and aahed at each picture, as if they’d never seen a snowflake before. (They also oohed and aahed at the spinning graphics of his PowerPoint presentation.)

Emoto played music to the water. Beethoven and Tschaikovsky were among water’s favorites. For some reason, he then led the crowd in a karaoke sing-along of “Red River Valley,” though the PowerPoint text was so tiny the lyrics were unreadable. “Someday,” he said, “our pharmacies will be filled with CDs, not drugs!” The audience loudly applauded. (It was not clear whether Emoto had been inside an American drugstore recently; CDs are gaining fast.)

Emoto then pronounced the three steps to personal and global health: First, drink good water. Though he didn’t elaborate on what constituted good water, there were small bottles of grocery-store water for sale in the lobby that presumably fit the bill, along with a vendor selling a water purification pump. Second, said Emoto, listen to good music. Fortunately, there were also CDs for sale in the lobby from the opening act, a piano-and-recorder duo. (Emoto didn’t give any examples of bad music, perhaps because of his alliance with Yoko Ono.) Third, and probably hardest to copyright, “keep consciousness to be positive.”

Dr. Emoto roamed the stage with a wireless microphone. He talked about atoms and solar systems and elementary particles. He said that our bodies are like miniature solar systems. He said that the vibrational energy produced by MRIs was the technology with which breast cancer could be cured. He said that water could pick up messages from outer space, that groups of people who held their hands in prayer formed better crystals than groups who merely held hands. He said that the world’s major viruses like AIDS, SARS, and the “chicken flu” were each released soon after a major war.

The most precious moment may have come when the sun started to set in the airy and cavernous space and Emoto, reduced to a dim silhouette, read a verse for the audience.

With the words projected on a screen above him, Emoto recited in halting, robotic English: “Imagine. There’s. No. Heaven. It’s. Easy. If. You. Try. No. Hell. Below. Us. Above. Us. Only. Sky. Imagine. All. The. People. Living. For. Today.” Domo arigato, Dr. Emoto.
—Sari Gordon

Jeff Mihelich is blind. He is also gay. He also enjoys going to the theater, the Guthrie and Patrick’s Cabaret being among his favorites. For a blind and gay man to actually see a play called Puppetry of the Penis, well, that would be like hitting the trifecta, right?

That’s what Mihelich thought when he requested the services of an “audio descriptor” for the local staging of Puppetry. The show is really no different than others that have sprung from New York and hit the road, like Stomp, Riverdance, and the Blue Man Group. Sure, the “genital origami” thing is a little edgy, but there was nudity in Hair and Angels in America, and the general public didn’t find that too hard to swallow.

At the show, Mihelich hoped to get the sight gags by wearing a single earpiece, which picked up the voice of Rick Jacobson, the interpreter. Jacobson sat in a tiny booth behind the audience at the Mixed Blood Theatre and his disembodied voice sounded a little like a hypnotist’s: “You are in the center of the room. There are seats to your left and right. Here comes a woman with a pink feather boa and a crown. She is crossing the stage.”

What Jacobson didn’t have to describe to his visually impaired listener and eavesdropping journalist was how the middle-aged woman in the boa and a cocktail fog ended up stealing the show. This was quite an accomplishment, considering that the crowd popped thirty-five dollars each to see two naked guys, one American and one Australian, make balloon animals with their genitals.

“Okay, the lights are going down. There is smoke blowing across the stage.” Jacobson quietly began the narration. The two guys ran out, wearing only sneakers and capes, and positioned themselves behind two mic stands. Crouching between them was a woman with a video camera. The rest of the show was projected, in extreme close-up, on a large screen behind the puppeteers.

They recited the opening disclaimers, reminding the audience that there would be full frontal nudity and that only adults should be in attendance, which is weird for a show that would probably appeal most to a group of nine-year-olds in a backyard with a refrigerator box. Jacobson discreetly interjected visual cues, “The performers are both fairly athletic-looking with nice little treasure trails.” Jacobson, it turns out, has worked with Mihelich before and is also gay. This made it possible for him to use language that would normally get a person fired from any other job.

The on-stage patter started. “Now I’ll have to ask everyone to be quiet for this next little fella,” said the Australian, lending a nature-show tone to the boy-island, tree-house ambiance. Jacobson whispered, “The American has turned around and looks like he’s working really hard on something. Now he turns to the audience.” The Australian continued as the video camera zoomed in for an autopsy-clear image of the other guy’s hairy crotch. “I think if we’re lucky we’ll be able to see this shy little creature.” Jacobson sounded like a golf announcer. “He’s pulling his ball sack up and over his dick so all you can see is balls. Now he’s slowly revealing the head of the dick, like it’s peeking over the top.” As the audience performed the requisite “Awwwwwww,” the Australian landed the punch line. “That’s right, folks! It’s the Australian Hairy-Backed Turtle!”

Which, in fact, looked like a fairly unappealing knot of male flesh. The audience shrieked and squealed and cheered. Mihelich and his partner stared straight ahead.

After quite a lot of this sort of thing, someone from the audience, a middle-aged birthday gal with a fire-engine shriek, got invited onstage for the usual audience-participation gag. By the time this was over, her siren overtook the penis parade. Since the crowd was dominated by what seemed to be a drunken bachelorette party, they really weren’t there for the dialogue.

Later, Mihelich described his experience. “I couldn’t hear the describer at all. The women were yelling and screaming and blocking him out. I don’t think a gay audience would have screamed that much.” In the end, it didn’t matter that much. Both of us agreed that I really didn’t need to see that. —Sari Gordon