“Let me look at you guys.”

Another crowd. Faceless. Restless. To them, I am another comic. Unknown. Urban. Our disappointment sits between us.

I look out at them, trying to connect. They sit on silent haunches. There is a primal relationship; one of us is predator, one prey. Right now it’s unclear which is which.

The light on my face is too damn bright. I can barely see the front row. I only make out couples, holding hands, knuckles white, tense. I put a hand over my face, creating a makeshift visor.

“Sorry, I can’t see shit. They have these Gestapo find-a-Jew lights burning a hole in my retina.”

They laugh. A little. I’m literally half-blinded, annoyed, and unable to actually see my audience.

“How many people here are Mormons?”

Although there was another ‘haha-this-hacky-question-again’ wave of nervous laughter, I was genuinely curious. Despite having the trappings of some sort of quasi-erudition, I found myself completely naïve about what, precisely, is going on in Salt Lake City.

The audience at the Wise Guy Comedy Club in West Valley (read: poor section of SLC) responded, as comedy clubs do, with a smattering of applause. I wasn’t sure if that applause represented an accurate Mormon-o-meter, or if it represented general malaise towards comics asking that hackneyed question.

There were one or two Arsenio Hall-style ‘whoop-whoop’s.’ I guess a couple of people were hopped up on some Joseph Smith. The response quickly abated and the audience looked at me expectantly. It was basically the first thing I said; they were looking at me like baby birds, wanting nourishment, wanting to trust that I would take care of them. The third line. The turning point. The prestige.

“Hmmmm…. So I guess the rest of you are just white trash, huh?”

As luck would have it, this audience happened to have some white trash on them. The previous swells were usurped by an eruption of yelps and hollers and claps and, even more luckily, laughter.

Ahhhhhh, poor people. My people. Now the set could begin…

5 hours earlier, I found myself smoking a cigarette in downtown Salt Lake City looking at a bronze Brigham Young gesturing fondly to something Southeast. Beyond him, there were potted flowers and trees and manmade waterfalls and flawlessly clean marble and cemented populated by people who were also commensurately polished and shiny.

I took a drag of my cigarette and pulled out my cell phone to take a picture. “This is f#$%ing beautiful” I said in sincere admiration. My vague smile on this sunny day on the corner of TEMPLE SQUARE in Salt Lake City lead me to the austere visage of a Mormon magistrate, who gave me a ‘come hither’ finger move, the type of gesture, heretofore, I could only ascribe to kindergarten teachers and/or horny drunk girls (albeit the two aren’t mutually exclusive).

“First day in Salt Lake City?”

“Yeah.”

“You just broke 3 laws. There’s no smoking in the square, no cursing, and no cell phones.”

“Oh, shit,” I said, not ironically. My mouth had officially become potty after 6 years of club standup.

“Since you are on the entrance of the square, I’m not going to issue you a summons or a ticket. But please, put away your phone, your cigarette, and your attitude. Thank you.”

I took a few steps backwards and threw the lit cigarette in the street. Clearly, the magistrate didn’t like that, but it was out of his jurisdiction. I put away my cell phone in my back pocket. I decided to keep my attitude around, just a little quieter, with arms folded. “Go be safe in my head with the other Demons” I told my attitude.

I walked back into the square, gave the magistrate a smile, and proceeded into Temple Square. Despite the admonition, I didn’t feel chastened – mostly because Mormons have such a pleasant demeanor. The perma-smirk found on the face of every Mormon I saw nestled coquettishly between smug and spiritually content. Yeah, they thought they were better than the ‘non-believers’ in the midst, but ultimately, they didn’t care enough about them to form specific judgments. “If these fools don’t believe that Joseph Smith was visited by Moroni and dug up ancient tablets that no one ever saw and that Jesus made a pit stop in Kentucky, then too bad for them.”

Temple Square, like many of the sites, landscaping, and architectural concepts predicated on the Mormon religion, was designed to represent, to a small degree, an entrance into heaven. It is an exquisitely beautiful and serence square spanning about 4 city blocks containing bronze statues, perfectly manicured flowers, waterfalls, fountains, and, of course, the temple. Since it is sacrosanct to them, they have constructed standard social rules that apply to Temple Square and no where else in Salt Lake City: namely, no smoking, no cell phones, no cursing, and, apparently, no black people.

If this is a synecdoche for Mormon heaven, guess what black people – you’re not in it. My blood boiled instantly. I wanted to kick Mitt Romney in the testicles. Why are there no African-Amormon’ans?! Of course, if something is too good to be true, it almost always is. I decided to break into the temple.

I went into the ‘grounds’ around the temple and there were about 12 weddings take place, allegedly since it was the ‘first sunny day’ of the year. I got in wedding shots, asked inappropriate questions, and was generally amazed at how damn sexy Mormon brides were. The grooms… not so much. I’m sure there alteregos on World of Warcraft were hot, but these pasty, freckled lards were dorks and their brides were fittingly and tragically young.

I went to the door and tried to wedge it open. I tried every window and side door too. Then I became aware the entire façade of a temple was basically hermetically sealed and my only way into it was through another building that would entail security and an underground entrance.

I made my way to the other building and decided to just walk through like I owned the place (something that has served me well getting into some of the snobbier parties in New York and LA. That’s right, suck it, Sky Bar). I heard an ‘excuse me’ from a Wilford Brimley lookalike and kept walking. His waddle could not keep up with my Manhattan pace. Soon I was at the entrance, about to cross into the temple, when a man looked at me.

“Do you wish to enter here?”

The paradoxically calm yet ominous undertones of his voice made me stop in my tracks. My mouth wordlessly moved up and down like a broken animatronic. The guy was sitting in a chair, the last buttress between the inner sanctum of the Mormon temple and the bustle of the pagans and the outside world.

“Yes, I do.” I satisfied myself that I had an answer that was, at least, honest.

“Are you prepared?”

I wasn’t sure what this meant, but as I thought about it, I got sucked in by the man’s countenance, by his whole appearance. He had uniform white hair and eyebrows, that, within a shade of Behr paint, matched PRECISELY with his white suit, white tie, and white shirt. Scanning down, I saw the equally white belt, pants, and shoes. It was like he had been dipped in a white vat with just his hands and face covered. He looked like an X-RAY of a well-dressed business man.

It was at this point I noticed my cavalier attempt to enter the Temple had galvanized a crowd of 4 or 5 of these shockingly white, exact same dressed X-RAY people. It was at the point, I realized that these impossibly white clerics were like the Oompa-Loompa’s of the Mormon world: creepy, uniform, and the keepers of all the secrets of what lie on the other side of the big door.

I gulped and tried to think of an answer to the ‘are you prepared?’ question. For a second, I thought about being a smartass and taking out a condom. I’m kidding, of course; I don’t wear condoms.

Before I could say anything, he handed me a brochure on the Mormon faith and said, in his mesmerizingly melodious voice, “I think you need to prepare and you need to get right with God.”

I wanted to laugh in his face. Unfortunately, the lonely child in me that struggles with my faith… In anything… clambered up my throat and took a mischievous tug at my tear ducts. I blinked back, surprised that I even cared anyone would say that to me…

It’s 5 hours later, and I’m hearing laughter. I had planned to rip on Mormons and expose the religion for what it is – the scam of the century by a charismatic charlatan with a penchant for 14 year old girls. Unfortunately for me, as a comic, I am the one who feels like the fake. I, for one, wish I had that faith in anything. I, for one, wish something could give me a perma-smirk and a belief in something higher.

I gave my doubts a shake. I am onstage. I am telling date jokes, relationship jokes, and fart jokes. And, for a brief moment, Mormons and white trash and this urban infidel come together. They are all laughing. There is sanctity to that, right?

Hmmm, maybe one day I WILL be prepared…

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