Weird Crap That Happens In Salt Lake City
I lived out there from 5th grade to 11th grade. Here are just a few things I find odd about that experience.
>> With the exception of Kathy Regulski (and I’m only using her name in case she Googles herself – she should write me), no one I knew out there drank, smoked, or had had sex.
>> Because the school sponsored dances that happened on a monthly basis, no one I knew out there went out on actual dates (group trips to see a movie, yes – guy/girl going out, no).
>> In order to ask someone to a dance, or to reply to the asking, you had to be
creative. For example, buying five pounds of Smarties candy, putting letters to your name on individual candies in different rolls, re-rolling them, and sending the Smarties and a stupid poem out to the person you’re asking. They had to unroll every goddamn roll of Smarties to find out who asked them. And, like I said, you had to reply creatively too. Basically, as soon as one dance was over, the whole process of asking/replying started all over again.
side note: I did once ask a girl by just asking
her to the dance, but her reply was, “You’ll have to do better than that.”
>> In the (literally) two dozen dances I must have attended, there was never anyone visibly drunk, nor was there ever any alcohol at any of the pre- or post-dance events.
>> Ever wonder why the Mormons (as an institution) are almost (if not) the world’s leaders in genealogy research? Because they
baptize the dead. They believe that every person who ever lived who wasn’t Mormon on earth goes to a big celestial waiting room on the other side where they await baptism into the Mormon faith on earth. Then, once baptized, they still have to be pestered by missionaries on that side of the fence to willfully accept the word. Then they turn into missionaries themselves, and once they have collected enough scalps, they can move on. But not as far as the good Mormons from earth.
>> If you’re a good Mormon on earth, which means you’ve been married and have had a bunch of children and tithed and done everything the church has asked, you ascend from earth to become a god of your own world, ruling that world with your wife by your side. They give them “code names” at their wedding ceremony, that way they can find each other on the other side.
>> In what amounts to a wink-and-a-nod sideswipe of separating church and state, when a public secondary school (jr./high) is built, the city/district “accidentally” buys too much land, and “accidentally” buys too much building material, and sells it off to the Mormon church to build what they call a “Seminary” building on adjacent property to and with the same materials as the “public” secondary school. As a student, you can get release time to go to a class a day at the Seminary building, but I doubt that I could have gotten released to drive five miles to the Catholic church for CCD.
>> And, of course, on the busiest north/south artery through the valley, State Street, my friends and I stopped one night at a beer bar (liquor laws are weird out there too) in a reasonably urbanized area. After a little while, an older dude dressed like a cowboy was flirting with our women. He kept telling the girls about how he rode in on his horse, and was feeding them all sorts of cowboy crap. With the bar being surrounded by strip malls and residential areas, we thought he was full of shit. Eventually, he got up to go, popped open the back door, and sure enough got on his horse and galloped back home from the bar. I guess maybe the fact that he was wearing spurs could have been our first clue that he wasn’t lying about the horse.
Holly?
Bob? Anything to add?