I Pissed Off an Evangelist (Routinely)

This is another post of activities long over, but I have to keep referring to them on other message boards so I might as well just blog it and post the link on them to keep from repeating the stories.

In the mid-1990s, I was kicking around grad school at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma, before I decided I was tired of college and wanted a job, which moved me to Tulsa, where I still am today.

Being a poor grad student who didn't care for bars, some of the best free entertainment was on Friday afternoons when evangelists would come yell at us on the library lawn. There were actually two that I remember, but one of them only showed up once so I might as well combine them. After all, they're pretty much the same.

This is a list of the various things I did and said to the OSU evangelists.

So Mister Evangelist first showed up the first Friday after the first week of school. OSU had various activities on the library lawn to welcome students to the new year, and one of them was a palm reader - had an actual tent and everything just like in old Bugs Bunny cartoons when while being chased by Elmer Fudd, he would pull a tent out of nowhere and dress like a fortune teller to throw Elmer off the track.

This palm reader was actually on David Letterman when he did a bit where he went to various palm readers and ended up dancing with them. Mister E. showed up to accuse us all of, "spiritual whore-mongering."

Never mind that there's no such thing as palm reading, ESP, telekinetic powers, real magic, etc.

Along with the spiritual kind, the men at OSU were also regular whore-mongers because we liked looking at OSU women, who were of course, whores, because they wore short skirts, shorts, and pants (gasp!) instead of modest dresses and wore make-up.

When Mister E. told us that by looking at a woman with lust in our hearts, we turned her into a whore, I turned to an attractive blonde next to me, took her hand, and said loudly enough for everyone to hear, "I would like to apologize from the deepest recesses of my heart..." at which point I trailed off and openly stared at her breasts. Everyone laughed except Mister E. He called me a whore-monger.

Once after asking the guys to raise their hands if they had sex outside of marriage, he ran down the line, pointing at each one while yelling, "There's a whore-monger, there's a whore-monger, there's a whore-monger!" After the third "whore-monger," I yelled, "Everywhere a whore-monger! E-I-E-I-O!"

Once while railing against homosexuals, I asked Mister E. why was there homosexuality (and even the ability to change sexes - certain fishes, etc.) in some animals if they had no souls (a common belief held by religious conservatives - I don't know one way or another). Mister E. had apparently never heard this question as he was actually silent for a moment while looking at me. After the gears had sufficiently turned, he offered this explanation: "God gave man dominion over the Earth, but Man's sin covers the Earth and affects everything on it." Satisfied, he attempted to return to his sermon, but I interrupted. "So, wait a sec. There are these two gay monkeys in the Amazon Rainforest going at it right now - I mean, REALLY going at it, and it's our fault?" He refused to answer so for the rest of his sermon, every couple of minutes I would yell, "TELL US ABOUT THE GAY MONKEYS, DAMN IT!"

For months afterwards, someone who had been in the crowd would greet me with, "Hey, gay monkey man!" Two years after I had moved to Tulsa, James Randi came to town to give a talk. I was the fourth person in the room as he was setting up, and there was a young couple already in there. We looked at each other with a hint of almost recognition, and after a few moments, the lady asked me, "Are you... Gay Monkey Man?" Randi stopped his preparation to look at us, and I said, "Long story. Involved a religious nutcase." Randi smiled, which in turn made me smile.

One of the meanest things I ever did was while I was walking with a friend, and he was out on the library lawn yelling at people on the sidewalk in front of the library. I was on a sidewalk 40 feet behind him. I stopped and yelled, "EVANGELIST!" as loudly as I could. He turned to look at me; I dropped my backpack, and ran across the library lawn straight at him full-speed. As soon as I reached him, I pulled up short (he still jumped out of the way), said, "Hey, how's it going?" and joined the crowd. My friend brought me my backpack.

Probably the funniest thing I ever did was incur Mister E's wrath not on me but on a friend. One of my undergrad degrees was in Spanish, and while that wasn't my course of study at OSU, I did try to keep up with it and had joined all the Hispanic/Latin groups including the Latin Dancing and Cultural Club, where I learned how to merengue, cumbia, and salsa well enough that I sometimes taught lessons when the normal instructor who never bothered going much beyond basics was gone. One of my good friends (and missed romances because I was dense) was a Latina named Lorena whose life was dancing. Before coming to Stillwater, she had been married and living in Argentina, running a discoteca with her then-husband. She taught me a lot of dance steps, but there was this one salsa move I always had problems with.

On this particular day, Mister E. was railing against the evils of music - not just rock and roll music but ALL music - country (understandable), jazz, rock, etc. - if it wasn't Christian and a particular type of Christian music (I'm sure Christian rock was right out). Lo and behold, I see Lorena walking through the crowd to go to class so I call her over and talking very quickly so she couldn't hear Mister E's topic of discussion, asked her to show me that salsa move again. So we started dancing salsa on the front edge of the crowd in front of Mister E, and he literally blows a gasket and starts yelling - not at me, the guy twice his size (of course), but at Lorena, about what a whore she was, and how dancing was evil, and how she was going to burn in hell. I was momentarily taken aback and about to jump in and defend Lorena when she laughed because she realized the joke, and she started yelling back at Mister E in both English and Spanish, not letting him get a word in edgewise. Fortunately, she found it funny and not an attack on her honor.

A while after I had left OSU, I was surfing the online archives of their college paper looking for a picture of me that was taken in a Latin Dancing and Cultural Club class. I was in the habit of giving my name as one of the founding fathers to the paper photographers whenever they took my picture for something as I thought it was funny, and it guaranteed to get me in. For the picture I was looking for, I was, "Thomas Jefferson." I decided to look for any stories about the evangelists and found one about a grad student who had taken to wearing robes and going out on the lawn when the evangelist was there to compete against him - promising to, "save students' souls and validate their parking."