Eight summers ago I was in Israel at the Sea of Galilee. August time. It was beyond merely ‘hot’ in any normal sense of the word. You simply withered under the relentless heat and sought out air conditioning desperately. Just like the ancient hebrews did. Like Jesus did when he was there. So one lunchtime with the temperature a slightly cooler 47 degrees, I went to the reception area, where they had wi-fi (so much has changed in just 8 years). I was wearing shorts (blue, if you care, with a nice, sweat-stained white t-shirt) and the pavement was so hot my flip-flops were insufficient insulation, as I ran to the air-conditioned room with my lap-top. I entered the sanctuary of air-conditioned wi-fi-ness and wondered briefly if that’s where visions of ‘heaven’ originally came from. I mean, would Moses have climbed all the way up that mountain and shlep back with the weight of those stone tablets if he could have just downloaded them in an air-conditioned room? Then I stopped in my flops. There were about 30 people in the room. And they pretty much all looked the same. ‘Clean’ was the first impression. Unsweaty. Shaved. Smiling. The men all wore long black trousers, long-sleeved white shirts and normal leather street shoes. Their hair was parted neatly, their teeth were gleaming.

“What the fuck are you????” I wanted to ask, but instead adopted a more gentle approach to these ultra-polite young adults (‘no Sir, let me move, so you can plug in over here, Sir, its really no bother, Sir’). Sir?? Do I look like a knight? In my YID ARMY!! baseball cap?

They were Mormons. They were ‘on the Jesus trail’. Well, sorry guys, you’ve missed him by 2000 years. I didn’t want to mention that he was dead. Then alive for a bit. Then dead again. But they’d come to see the actual water that He had walked upon. And other ‘things’ relevant to Jesus Christ (our lord).

Last night I revisited my Mormon past. My daughters bought us tickets for The Book of Mormon which I’d wanted to see forever, but Mel really really hadn’t. She relented, we went. And to be honest, it changed my life. Because although I’ve seen lots of musical shows, I can simply say, there is nothing that has ever been produced that is like this one. The music is fab, the dancing brilliant, the stage sets wonderful, blah, blah, blah. (They all do that). But the content. Ahhh the content, the words, the lyrics, the white-toothed smiles…

The show is an incredibly funny, totally irreverent, bible-bashing (literally), blasphemous, satirical and quite vicious total deconstruction of the Mormon faith, history, missions and aims. Its written by the South Park guys and they know ‘funny’. Really know ‘funny’. It is quite simply brilliant.

Unless you’re a Mormon, in which case there’s gonna be a lot of theatrical people burning forever in the fires of hell. And possibly many of the audiences too.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx