I was the smallest boy in my school. That, coupled with a lifetime struggle with allergies, has rendered me a lifelong non-athlete. I was a kid who lived in his own imagination, and, to a lesser degree, in his own NES. I couldn’t be bothered with playing shortstop when there was a princess that needed saving – be she 8-bit or entirely imaginary. She was out there, and she needed me.

Oh, wait, was I supposed to catch that? Whatever.

That said, I enjoyed the last little league team I played for. My mom was one of the coaches, and we won second place in the league tournament that year.

We were the 89ers.

After we won our trophies, all the coaches and parents chipped in to take us to All Sports Stadium in Oklahoma City to watch our namesakes, the Oklahoma City 89ers.

That night stands out in my mind as a highlight of my childhood; it was one of the first times I remember truly enjoying sports. Every time I hear the Don Henley song “Boys of Summer,” I think about that night.

In high school I knew someone who worked at All Sports Stadium, on the grounds of the Oklahoma State Fair in Oklahoma City; it was not a great facility. Since then the stadium has been razed, its glorious replacement erected in Bricktown, and the team’s name changed from the 89ers to the Redhawks.

I know the Oklahoma Land Runs inspire memories of Manifest Destiny and broken treaties; Oklahoma City singer-songwriter K.C. Clifford wrote a whole song about it, titled “Redman.” But whatever the implications, the team name, The 89ers, was reminiscent of something very specific to Oklahoma City – the way and the time in which it was founded, a way that is unique and weird among American cities. The “Redhawks” name for me sounds a little generic.

Don’t get me wrong – All Sports Stadium was nothing compared to The Brick; love sports or hate ‘em, that this city is moving up in the world in terms of its professional teams and facilities has done wonders for it. I’m looking forward to a summer full of games downtown.

Maybe it’s just nostalgia; I think, in the end, most of what Americans love about baseball – especially in this age of endless steroid confessions – is about nostalgia, about a simpler time. For me, the name – The 89ers – it evokes that.

Photo courtesy Flickr user eschipul.

In this photo by John Vachon, we see four employees of the Mid-Continent Refinery, which was located in West Tulsa. A few years earlier, in 1938, the refinery was the scene of one of Oklahoma’s most violent and long-lasting strike.

Jeremy Luther is This Land Press’s Art Director/Illustrator. This “slashy” sort of title only hints at the extensive amount of art, design and visual delight that he delivers in every issue.

For example,  in the current issue “This Machine Suits Up” (Vol.3, Issue 2), Jeremy (who is featured on the inside front cover) crafted a portrait of Mr. Sherman Ray (of “Mr. Ray Fits a Suit“) out of fabric remnants, thread, buttons, spools, and a vintage thimble. He then proceeded to shoot the image on film and used Photoshop to add in the text and other graphics.

Jeremy  joins This Land’s crew by way of Kansas City, having studied at the Kansas City Art Institute.  He is obviously an asset to This Land for his conceptions as an artist, ease in working with multiple mediums and his wizardry in ye old Adobe Creative Suite. We’re glad to have him on board.

Here are Jeremy’s answers to our MEET & GREET questions:

1. What influences you? (alternately, what are your “Must Read/Listen/Watch” items? Print or online). 

I have a wicked addiction to the encyclopedia, and I spend far too much of my free time with my nose adhered to those hallowed seams. Really, whose hobby is reading the encyclopedia? C’mon. I get a lot of influence by just being aware of what’s out there: following other artists and designers from around the world has never been easier and I relish in that. Check out great other creatives like James Jean, Eric Fortune, Jon Foster, Daniel Rozin, Chris Ware, Derrick Dent, Bee Johnson, and my good friend John Lee. There’s too many to list really, and they’re all more intense than a campsite. Really.

Also, I have a strong Norwegian connection and my inroads there allow me to follow closely what’s going on in European design and culture, something which I enjoy greatly.

2. Who or What inspires you to do the work that you do?   

I am inspired by pretty much anything and everything. I love seeing patterns in the surrounding world, and that excites and energizes me. I get very charged by mathematical expressions like fractals and the things going on at CERN. Nikola Tesla rules the roost.

I like to jaywalk through the intersection of mathematical, technological, political, cultural, artistic, and scientific history whenever I can.

Specific to art, I’m a big supporter of knowing the rules before breaking them, and so I have a lot of respect for and admiration of the classical masters from the Greeks to Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, and Bernini; to the more recent Sargent, Rozzi, Jean, Rockwell, Fortune, Ware, Leyendecker, Mucha, Lautrec, and so on.

3. What is your favorite piece you’ve done for The Land Press?  
On the Charles Smith cover (Vol.2, Issue 14) I was faced with finding an elegant place to put our issue number and price tag; against all odds I managed to figure out it should go right above the UPC. IT looked great there, and it was a real moment for me.

A lot happens on my desk in two weeks, so much to the point I tend to forget most of what I’ve done here. I can tell you that I love working on the covers every single time, although sometimes I practically have to kill myself to get it just the way I want it. My favorite interior illustration off the top of my head was the Faulkner Love piece, of a girl sitting in a giant red ampersand. Being a designer, you’re pretty much required to have a licensed typography fetish with a Certification in Ampersands- so any time I get to integrate type into an illustration, especially a great big “&”, I’m a happy camper.

My favorite issue visually speaking, is the upcoming February 1st issue, which I spent a lot of time re-designing and creating illustrations for.

4. What do you love about Tulsa and/or Oklahoma?   
Oklahoma at large is generally new to me and so aside from the pleasing assortment of straight lines and gnarled coils that make up the silhouette of the state, I haven’t much place to say. I’m still learning it. I can say that Tulsa is a lot like a huge little town: Small enough to pretty much know everyone but big enough to always meet someone new. There are truly exceptional people here, and they would be reason enough to stay.

5. What is your drink of choice? Alcoholic or otherwise?

~~~

For more about Jeremy, check out his bio and for more of Jeremy’s work,  feast your eyes on the Past Covers Board on This Land’s Pinterest board. Catch his latest masterpiece, on the front of the latest issue of This Land, found at any of our 50+ distribution spots or via Subscription.

I’m gay too. And my mother, like her father, does not want a gay son. My mother made a point to tell me, only a year ago, at my grandfather’s funeral, in front of 4,000 people, that Hell does exist and I’m going there. My uncle and I were raised in a world dominated by Evangelicals who taught, and still teach, that the fires of Hell await all gay men and women. This is the Evangelical “Christian” legacy for gays like my uncle and me: Threats. Bullying. Damnation. Death.

But for me, and many others, the story doesn’t end here. Five years ago, when I was divorced and came out, I found myself, like my Uncle Ronnie, in Oklahoma, in my thirties, and terrified of losing my children because I was gay. I was regularly called a faggot, both by strangers and by my ex-wife, and, like my uncle before me, reached a point of despair. Suicide among gay men and women in Evangelical communities is still prevalent. Evangelicals may not be killing gays outright—the police report suggests my uncle killed himself. However, while the Evangelical community might not pull the trigger when one of their gay members commits suicide, they provide the ammunition.

When I came out, I started writing a letter to my Uncle Ronnie, a letter meant for me, for my uncle, and for friends I have who are still closeted—terrified their family will reject them. Five years later, I’m still writing this letter—it’s become a way for me to record this experience.

It all started for me one summer afternoon when I was twenty-seven years old, and I stood in my kitchen and said to myself, out loud, that I was gay. It was the most liberating feeling I’ve ever had, and for the next three days I was on top of the world. But then reality came crashing down on me—I was married, with children, and I didn’t know what being gay would mean in terms of my family, my wife, my children. It was a horrible place to be. It took a few more years of being scared to death and going to two different therapists before I finally decided that the best thing for everyone involved was for me to get divorced and come out. I had been suicidal for years, and I eventually realized that my children needed a father who wanted to live, who looked forward to tomorrow, and the only way I could be that man was to get divorced and come out.

That’s when I started writing my letter to my uncle, because I felt like he was the only one who would understand. My parents didn’t understand, most of my friends didn’t understand—it was something I didn’t know how to explain, so I started writing.

Coming out was TERRIFYING. I remember going to gay bars and standing against the wall like a thirteen-year-old kid at a middle school dance. I was awkward and shy and didn’t have a clue how to talk to people. I drank a lot; it would take two or three drinks just to get the courage to step away from the wall and actually talk to people. And the feeling of talking to a guy who seemed to like me was great, and scary, and nerve-wracking, and amazing, all at the same time. I’d spent my whole life aching to find a nice guy who wanted to hold my hand so the first time I went on a date and held a guy’s hand was AMAZING. I’d never felt happier.

But I was living in Oklahoma at the time, and someone driving by yelled “faggots!” at us. A couple weeks later I was in line at a bar with my boyfriend and two tough guys in front of us said they hoped “no fucking fags” came into their bar tonight. My boyfriend and I were both over six feet tall so I tapped one of the guys on the shoulder and said, “Hey, you’re looking at two fags right now. What do you want to do about it?”

I had never been in a fight in my whole life, but I was ready. I wanted a black eye. I wanted everybody to know I was out, that I was a fag, that I was ready to fight for the right to be who I was. The owner, Edna, leaned over the bar and said “Nobody’s gonna fight about something that stupid in my bar! Free round for the four of you as soon as you hug each other. Do it! Now!” And so we all awkwardly hugged each other and drank Tequila together.

Even a year after coming out, I can’t say things had really gotten better. My ex-wife was still calling me a fag in front of my children and screaming all the time. So, I eventually took her to court for that and other custody violations, spending $50,000 I didn’t have. But it was worth it—she hasn’t called me a faggot since, and my children haven’t heard their mother or new step-father talk disparagingly of gays in their presence either. My ex-wife and I share our children equally, and the kids are doing great. We get along just fine now.

And me, I’m doing great. Finally. I’ve had a lot of different boyfriends. I’ve fallen in love a couple times. I’ve felt that wonderful, giddy feeling you get when someone you like likes you back, and the gut-crushing feeling you get when that same someone lets you go. I’m finally not desperate anymore. I’m just me, happy, and gay, but not defined by my sexuality. The best thing about coming out has been to watch myself go from someone terrified of being gay, to someone willing to fight for my right to be openly gay, to, finally, just another guy living his life who happens to be gay. That’s the best thing of all. I had to fight hard for it, but it finally happened—the freedom to just be myself, no apologies, no fighting, no drama. The day I thought would never come finally snuck up on me and surprised me. My grandfather was famous for telling people, “Something good is going to happen to you!” And, it’s strange to admit it, but he was right.

That’s what I’d like to tell my Uncle Ronnie today: It really does get better.

Randy Roberts Potts is the gay grandson of televangelist Oral Roberts. He has worked with juvenile delinquents on the East Coast, was a social worker in Oklahoma City and spent five years as a middle-school English teacher.

This article soon to be appearing in It Gets Better: Coming out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living. Edited by Dan Savage and Terry Miller, published by Dutton Adult.

“That’s the old Trader Vic’s room,” he said, handing his keys to a parking attendant. “It’s now a pretty popular Vietnamese restaurant.”

Le Colonial, it’s called, and it manages to fit. When it was Trader Vic’s, the area known as Cosmo Place, between Downtown and Little Saigon, was a nightlife destination. According to a website that tracks tiki culture, Queen Elizabeth II experienced her first- ever anywhere restaurant meal at Vic’s in 1983, as a guest of the Reagans, no less. She drank a Tanqueray martini. That Vic’s closed in the early ’90s.

We walked up Taylor Street to the Bohemian Club. It was Thursday—bohemians’ night out. Before dinner, we drank a No. 209 martini at an oak bar long and polished enough to have 10 pins at the end of it, surrounded by large oil paintings and the soft roar of men not at work. I stole a couple of paper napkins off the bar, the club’s owl logo teetering across them.

I’d spied the No. 209 tucked among the other gins. It’s a newish brand, produced locally in a distillery down at Pier 50, very near the spot where Barry Bonds Jr. used to plunk homeruns into the bay. A couple of sips in, I spotted the bottle next to it: Junipero, a small-batch offering from the folks who also brewed Anchor ale, another San Francisco product.

“Hmm,” I said. “Maybe we ordered in haste.”

“I know Fritz,” Barnaby said, referring to Fritz Maytag, who’d resurrected the old Anchor brewery and then sold it after an award- winning run. “He’s 75 and in great shape. Beefy, not obese, you know? You know, like he could have played quarterback at Cal-Berkeley back in the day.”

He suggested a trip up the coast to meet Maytag, but I suggested we drink a Junipero instead, as an after-dinner nightcap. The club ranks were beginning to thin and last orders were being taken. I wondered if anybody would awaken the older gent I saw napping earlier in the library, his body sunk into the puffy, tan leather of a club chair. I thought of him being left there, like Corduroy, to be discovered in the wee hours by a security guard making rounds.

“Next time,” I said about Fritz, sipping the Junipero and making a mental tasting note I soon forgot.

“Anyway,” Barnaby said, chinking glasses, “welcome to San Francisco.”

* * *

He’d grown up here, in the shadow of his writer saloon keeper father, drinking ginger ale at one end of the bar while the likes of Tyrone Power and Ava Gardner drank gin at the other. Dad Conrad named his bar El Matador, after a novel he wrote on bullfighting called Matador became a surprise bestseller. He chronicled those days of wine and roses in a delicious tell-all, Name Dropping: Tales From My Barbary Coast Saloon. (A dozen years before, though, he’d published a memoir of a different sort—Time Is All We Have: Four Weeks at the Betty Ford Center.)

With writers and drinkers, the olive often doesn’t fall far from the tree. Conrad III followed in his father’s footsteps with a fistful of books. One of them, The Martini, published in 1995, caught the front end of the wave that stranded ’tini menus across American bartops, recipe books in the stacks at Borders, and faux-vintage cocktail shakers on the shelves of Pottery Barn. It was my martini manifesto, a reference guide and devotional in ice-cold words and pictures. Its cover—a tightly cropped photo of a martini glass, its bowl glistening with the droplets of mid-chill—was the model of perfection I pictured when shaking at home during what historian Bernard DeVoto called, and Conrad quoted, “the violet hour.”

The same year he published The Martini, Conrad met Maurice Kanbar, who couldn’t drink more than two martinis without getting a headache. (Conrad’s own theory, from page 120: “Even if there’s no driving to be done, two’s a pretty good limit.”) Having the wherewithal and now the need, Kanbar invented SKYY, the quadruple-distilled, blue-bottled beauty that overran the vodka market in the 1990s, in large part because of that cobalt bottle, which he had to get produced outside the country because, he explained, “making glass is a dirty business. You have to have smoke and glass and ovens. Americans don’t want to do that. They want to sit at a computer.”

But the SKYY wasn’t the limit. With his non-compete clause expired—he’d sold SKKY off to spirit conglomerate Campari in 2001—Kanbar now peddles Blue Angel (in a clear bottle of brushed glass), another ultra-distilled spirit in a market he helped saturate.

Kanbar’s inventiveness manifests itself in all manner of productions— Hoodwinked!, the animated hit film; an 85-cent pair of eyeglasses he wants to distribute pro bono in third-world nations; Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil; Zip Notes, in which he put the adhesive in the middle so the paper wouldn’t curl—but, in 2005, it ran to a few square blocks of downtown Tulsa. Kanbar now owns 16 buildings worth of it.

Always a bookish sort, Kanbar’s properties have included, almost since its inception, Council Oak Books, the Tulsa publishing house struggling to make it in the world of Kindles and downloads. (As of December, the firm had relocated to San Francisco.) With Conrad, he’d launched a new imprint on Council Oak, Kanbar & Conrad, though he couldn’t remember when or how he met his new partner.

“San Francisco is basically a small town and he’s a writer. I like writers. If Barnaby Conrad is a writer, then I immediately have a compatibility with the man. Writers are my guys.”

Mine too, especially when they fall in with guys who buy up downtowns in their spare time. You know, when they’re not distilling spirits and publishing books. I’d been looking for a reason to get back to San Francisco. Now I had a couple.

* * *

“You know he was a tumler?” said one-time columnist Bruce Bellingham.

I pictured Maurice in circus tights, floating beneath the big top. I wouldn’t put it past him. I shook my head.

“Not a tumbler,” he said, reaching for something to write on and finding it in his breast pocket in the form of a sealed envelope.“It’s one of my many medical bills. I had a heart attack in June 2010 and now I have $94,000 in medical bills. And there goes one of them.”

Bellingham took another sip of wine, scribbled something on the envelope, then handed it to me.

“A tumler, for you Gentile boys, is a man who’s hired in the Catskill Mountains to break up the party before an opening act. So, he’s really like a clown. Like Jerry Lewis. It’d be like me going from table to table, ‘Hi, ya, how ya doin’!’ It’s a Yiddish term for a troublemaker. Someone who stirs it up.”

Barnaby took a sip of his Blue Angel martini—a gin man seguing into vodka out of homage, I assumed, given that we were in Perry’s on Union Street, Maurice’s favorite spot, and he was to have been here with us. Kanbar calls a Blue Angel martini a “BAM,” believing that a drink without a name is a bottomless well. (“The key to the business is a call,” he said. “Like a Cosmo.”) Barnaby downed his in an effigy-like salute to its absent inventor, while I paced myself with a Sierra Nevada.

“He wasn’t a kid—maybe 19 or 20—and he’s been a tumler ever since,” said Bellingham. “But, he’s cultivated tumling into a finesse. Of course, no one around here knows what a tumler is.”

Bellingham wrote columns for the San Francisco Examiner, and with San Francisco newspaper icon Herb Caen.

“I wrote jokes for him. I’d send him jokes everyday by fax. Puns, political metaphors. I sat in Herb Caen’s office while he was ill and went through 59 years of his column, all gathered in leather-bound books. The Chronicle owns them. I thought, ‘Where am I going to begin?’

“They had so much fun. You and I cannot imagine. Barnaby can tell you.”

Caen and Conrad Junior inhabited a time in San Francisco when the word saloon was a term of endearment. When books were books and men were men and martinis were gin. You can still get a drink there, but the way the old boys—and their sons—tell it, things have all but dried up.

“Single women with dogs and fast-food restaurants and nothing else,” Barnaby says of the future city by the bay.

Writer Rebecca Solnit, in her Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, plots 21 bars on a map of the city’s legendary “6 a.m.” saloons, so named for the hours they kept in order to better serve the dock workers leaving the graveyard shift. Service and software have replaced shipping, but the bars remain.

Beyond the living proof, there are the dead. Novelist Jack London had a San Francisco saloon mix vast quantities of martinis and ship them to his getaway in Sonoma. “Professor” Jerry Thomas, hands-on author of The Bartender’s Guide—an 1862 classic that predates them all—made his mark at the Occidental Hotel on Montgomery Street. Thomas makes a good case (particularly for a deceased) for inventing the martini, or at least being its missing link.

Bellingham was in purgatory when Kanbar bailed him out. A local charitable house received a big gift for taking care of Bruce between gigs, courtesy of the man with the golden arm.

“I’ve not been upset with one gift that I’ve ever given,” Kanbar told me. “But if you asked me about business deals, oh God, have I met snakes.”

* * *

We left Bruce and Perry’s for Bix, next stop on the “martini safari” I’d been promised and was doing my best to make a good show of. We drove up Laguna, jumped over to Broadway, and headed downtown.

Gold Street hides between Sansome and Montgomery, a few blocks in from the Embarcadero. It was called Gold Alley back in the day, when the burlesque clubs and watering holes of nearby Broadway teemed with all that was then rustic and possible about San Francisco. When Streisand was playing the Purple Onion before she was Streisand, and newsmen like Caen had the equivalent of 10,000 Facebook friends, all of it earned in the saloons and restaurants and nightclubs within earshot of here. It’s around the block from City Lights Bookstore on the diagonal at Columbus. Chinatown is near, as is American Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola’s headquarters, where the ground-floor café proffers Coppola’s own wines at a relative steal, and tempting plates of radicchio Treviso, spaghetti carbonara, and pizza quattro formaggi.

“This is Gold Alley,” Barnaby said, pulling into a lane too tight to turn around in, and promising to tell me later about the time he shot a .44 out into the bay standing right here. I looked up over a warehouse roof to see the white apex of the TransAmerica Pyramid. That, the neon of Bix, and the headlights of the sedan were the only lights glowing.

We crowded around the bar at Bix, a restaurant I’d known only from an image in The Martini—of other people crowding around the bar at Bix. In the book, author Conrad, proprietor Doug “Bix” Biederbeck, painter Mark Stock, art dealer Martin Muller, Herb Caen, and others smile over a caption labeled “Neo-Martini Culture in San Francisco.” In the foreground sits a very large bowl of crushed ice sprouting chilled cocktail glasses like so many spring crocuses.

Biederbeck likes his martinis cold, versus large, and to that end he serves them in small, tulip-shaped glasses, the gin cold enough to induce shock. “Here,” he said, retrieving my cocktail from the bartender. “Drink that and I’ll get you another.”

I sipped, squinting at the peal of competing conversations, and a piece of the city’s still-strong drinking culture revealed itself to me. Towering shelves of spirits glistened from the backlit bar. Fit, robust men in white jackets shook and poured in a dizzying blur of glass and ice and steel. The musty smell of Argentine Malbec forced its two scents—strawberry and spice—on an air already perfumed with heavier tincture. Older, moneyed-looking women brushed skirt hems with young, honey-eyed vixens while their collective men pushed empty glasses back for refills.

“You about ready for another?” Biederbeck asks me. “No, wait … Let’s have a punch!”

Like a good barman, he’d recently found Amer Picon through a London purveyor and purchased a case. Its orange essence and dry bitterness begged for a punch, the definition of which varies, even among liquid historians. Two non-wavering components tend to be the presence of fruit, and the mixing of batches versus glasses at a time. (Esquire drinks writer David Wondrich outlined all the tasty possibilities in his 2010 book, Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl.)“When the case showed up,” Biederbeck said, “there were only 11 bottles in it. My tariff, I guess. Here …”

He handed me a glass of punch and I turned to watch the band, all ivory pings and bracing snares and throat. The bigshots of old- school jazz play here, not that I’d know them by sight or sound. But Biederbeck, true to the name, is a student of both jazz and the drinks that tend to mingle in its presence.

Over the piano, singing a tune of its own, is a painting from Mark Stock’s “The Butler’s in Love” series. It’s the first thing you see when you enter Bix and the last thing you take in before you pass the velvet curtain on your way out. It dominates the space the way the Eiffel does Paris, no matter the vantage point.

In “The Butler’s in Love–Absinthe,” the butler—a barely veiled Stock—leans into a jade-green wall, gazes at the lipstick staining an empty absinthe tumbler, and resigns himself to a life of subjugation and unrequited love. He hangs with his back to the crowd, which likewise pays him little heed.

Between Picon punches, Barnaby showed back up from somewhere down the busy bar. I’d been trading John McEnroe stories with a tennis fan named Renee Richards (not the U.S. Open Doubles finalist of sex-change fame)—she knew him in high school, I peed next to him in a New York theater. Anyway, I’d lost track of him.

“Here,” he said, handing me yet another punch, “I got you another drink. We should probably eat something. I realized I hadn’t eaten anything all day except a piece of lemon meringue pie for lunch.”

I stood two-fisted with my back against a marble pillar that stretched to the second-floor ceiling. A single window in a whole ceiling of them was opened to the late-January night. Oh, to be a bat in that belfry. Caen is dead, and Biederbeck a little thicker through the middle, but Bix is about as much like a photograph in a favorite book as a place can be, meaning every bit as good as you prayed it would be lest you feel your faith wavering. Of course, it could have been the cocktails. It always can.

Earlier, I’d asked Barnaby where Team Martini held court before the days of Bix. It was Alfred’s.

Forgotten, but not gone—having moved from its original location over the Broadway Tunnel to Merchant Street, in the shadow of the Pyramid—Alfred’s is a steak joint in the pre-Fleming’s sense, meaning ripe, aged cuts smoked over mesquite and big martinis and Manhattans cold and keep-’em-coming. Kerouac ate there (and knowing him, drank) and wrote about it in The Subterraneans. Among old souls, Alfred’s was the nostalgic choice in an environment of New Age imbibing.

“Everybody was drinking white wine and then going to the bathroom to do cocaine,” Conrad said. “Well, we didn’t want that. We wanted to do our thing out in the open.”

There was a time when Barnaby Conrad III was among San Francisco’s most notorious bachelors, eligible and elusive at once, as likely to be in his attic painting, or at the bar drinking, as he was being seen on somebody’s arm. (A lot of that time is scheduled to come out in April, in a book titled The Bachelor’s Progress, which his editor called “a sort of Tom Jones romp.”) But then he married Martha Sutherland, an authority on contemporary Chinese art and a CIA operative of 18 years—two passions that must have played out strikingly when she found herself in the midst of Tianmanmen Square in 1989. But then she married Barnaby Conrad.

Of the lumber Sutherlands, she is, whose TV ads once employed country comic Jerry Clower in all his big-bellied bluster. Playing the Kevin Bacon game, that put Clower and Conrad at too close a remove for my comfort and taste. Yes, I had done the fanboy thing and chased my favorite writer (on ice-cold gin drinking and absinthe’s “green fairy” wings, anyway) all the way to the top of Pacific Heights, sometimes called “Specific Whites” for the exclusive group that dwells there.

I’d chased him to a watering hole in a book where writers and drinkers mixed like vermouth and gin (or more likely vodka) in my mind. Yes, I was ashamed. But I was also on assignment.

“San Francisco is a drinking town,” Conrad said, balancing a glass of Amer Picon as he might a combustive nitrate or some tonic of eternal youth.

I drank to that.

Although Harjo has some serious artistic cred under his belt, with films such as Barking Water earning Sundance attention, and a Tillman Award to his name, at This Land he’s able to showcase a broad range of skills.

What influences you? (alternately, what are your “Must Read/Listen/Watch” items? Print or online).  

I have too many “must watch” movies to list… at the moment I’m in love with this documentary called Heartworn Highways, about “Outlaw” country music in Texas in ’76.  A friend sent me a link to it but you can only watch 70 minutes before you have to pay for it.  I decided to just order it on Amazon.  Can’t wait to watch the rest of it.

Who or What inspires you to do the work that you do?   

I’m really inspired by people and their stories.  The work that I’ve been doing for This Land has been great because there’s a lot of pride in telling stories about your community and showing the amazing people and stories we have here in our back yard.  I’m also really into the fact that people can rediscover some of the stories many years after we are gone.

What is your favorite piece you’ve done for The Land Press?  

I would say a three way tie between We Are Still Here, Indian Elvis, and Anton Von Ostendorf.  I think they represent the possibilities of what we can achieve with the short doc format.

With Anton it’s a cool blend of visuals, interview, and a beautiful score by Costa Stasinopoulos.  ”We Are Still Here” is a good example of how we make people aware of something going on right in their back yard.  I don’t know how many times people told me that they didn’t even know Yuchi people lived here until they watched the video.  It makes people aware of the diversity of our community and also the importance of language revitalization in native communities in Oklahoma.  It’s sad and hopeful at the same time.  ”Indian Elvis” seems like a good blend of all that but with humor as well.  I have too many favorites… Public Secrets as a series is a lot of fun to make.

What do you love about Tulsa and/or Oklahoma?  

I love all the stories in Oklahoma.  It’s overflowing with unique history.  I love dirt roads and the countryside.  Tulsa is perfect because it’s not too big and it’s not too small.  You can get a good cup of coffee,  but you can also get to the country pretty fast if you need to.

What is your drink of choice? Alcoholic or otherwise?

My drink of choice would be coffee.  All day long.

For more information about Sterlin Harjo, check out his bio and browse the “Watch” section of This Land.com.

Stay tuned for an exciting announcement about the future of This Land films from Sterlin and Matt in the coming weeks!

“We were the only church (in North Tulsa) to live through the 1921 race riots,” says Pastor Anthony Scott. “It was the only church that was not destroyed. It looked so nice that the rioters literally thought that it couldn’t be a black church. So they bypassed it.”

Almost forty years after its miraculous survival, First Baptist’s spiritual connection to the plight of African-Americans in Tulsa and beyond came full circle. On July 28^th, 1960, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke from the pulpit of First Baptist to an over-capacity audience of 1500. Fresh off the success of the Montgomery bus boycotts, the 31-year-old minister had recently positioned himself as the voice and face of the rising civil rights movement and was on a cross-country mission to mobilize black communities, encouraging them to vote in the imminent Presidential election. One of those communities was North Tulsa.

Scott says that Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall also visited the church.

“The church, in its heyday, was a stopping place for a lot of national figures,” he mused.

“We are a historic church. But we need to transition that into being a leading church once more.”

Joshua Kline is a writer based in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

He runs the thimbled hand over impeccably slicked back hair and looks me over through large-framed glasses that magnify his eyes, which knowingly search for details that often go unnoticed in casual conversation: Does one shoulder hang slightly lower than the other? Does my neck crane forward to make my spine curve? Does a 30-year habit of standing into my left hip make the left leg slightly shorter? All of this occurs instantaneously as I introduce myself. He’s not sizing me up for a mano a mano fistfight. He’s measuring me.

I tell him that I’d like to have a suit tailor-made, and that I was interested in gray tweed or a suit with a similar texture. He tells me that he stopped building suits because of the amount of energy it takes, but he’d be happy to alter a suit for me. He chuckles and riffles through a manila folder full of photos, newspaper articles, letters, and trinkets. Ray pulls out artifacts that show me the man he has become: champion weightlifter, avid rower, accomplished tailor.

“I’ll tailor the suit so good for you, it’ll fit you like a glove,” Ray says in a thick Polish accent.

I ask him what kind of suit I should get and he sets down his folder and takes his measuring tape from around his neck and guides me so that my back is facing him.

“Drop your arms,” he says. He measures me with lightning speed. “42 is too tight, and 43 they don’t make. You’ll have to go to a 44. 44 might be a little bit too large but it’ll have to be tailored.”

He grabs my hand and energetically guides me to the stepstool in front of the mirrors. He checks my inseam and then whips the tape around my waist. “You need about a 351⁄2 or 36 pant. Don’t get 34, 36 on the pants. Go to Woodland. Then tell them, ‘I will buy it but I will take to my tailor for approval.’ See, when you cut it up then you cannot take it back. Then just come over. I’m always open.”

Before I leave, Ray shows me one remaining photograph. It’s a picture of director Steven Spielberg with his arm draped affectionately over Ray’s shoulders.

“See,” says Ray, “I was in the concentration camps. Not just a tailor.”

* * *

A week later, I return to Ray’s Tailor Shop with a gray wool suit bought from a department store at Woodland, as he instructed, and I made sure to get a suit that met the size specifications he recommended.

Ray says, “Let me see it.”

I pull it out of the bag. Before he even looks at the tag he tells me he can’t work on it. He goes over and grabs a suit jacket he’s been tailoring.

“You think anybody in this town can do this?” he says, holding up the jacket front. “This is a hand-sewn buttonhole. See? Everything now is made by machine. From China.”

Ray takes the newly bought suit from my hands, looks at the tag, and laughs. “China.” He takes the jacket off the hanger and hands it to me to try on. We walk over in front of the mirror and shows me how it needs to be adjusted.

“The shoulders are too tight. I have to let out the shoulders but look—” He shows me the inside of the jacket. “Not enough material

here. How’m I gonna let out the jacket with no material? Suits like this don’t give me anything to work with.”

He has me try on the pants. He points to the front pockets, and I see that the outside seams pucker out as I walk. The crotch sits too low. When I raise my arms, the jacket sleeves are too short. Suddenly, a suit that looked slick, modern, and slim-fitting on the rack looks dollar-store cheap. Ray works the material of the suit adroitly, sliding material through his fingers and stopping at all the imperfections: not enough material to let out the sleeve; frayed material on the pants leg; lapels that, because of mass manufacturing, sit unevenly on my chest. He’s the doctor and I’m the patient. I ask him how he learned to become a tailor.

“I was trained in Europe,” he says. “My grandfather was a tailor. My father was a tailor.”

In 1938, when Ray was 12, Russia occupied Poland. Ray lived in a small village near Bialystok, and because of the widespread poverty in Poland, his family survived through bartering rather than money. At 13, Ray began to apprentice under his father after showing that he had mastered a hand-sewn buttonhole. His skills ultimately saved his life.

“When I went to Auschwitz, what would I do?” he asks.

Before I can respond, before I can ask, he tells me to take off the suit and take it back. He helps me out of the jacket, but when he hands it to me, doesn’t let go. He looks at the cuff of the sleeve and begins to finger it, turning the sleeve inside out to reveal what seems to me now poorly sewn stitching. The stitches tack back and forth sloppily, string ends hang haphazardly, exposing precariousness where one thread, pulled the wrong way, leads to disintegration and ripped seams. Not the arrow-straight line that suggests good workmanship.

“You see?” he speaks softly, hanging onto the arm. “Before Hitler came we were under the Russians for 18 months. Russia took over half of Poland and Germany took the other half. The Russians told my father he had to do hard labor and I said, ‘Dad, you stay home because you got to provide and make a living. I will go.’ I used to come home with my hand bleeding. I was not used to the work they made us do: shovel mountains to make a road. During wintertime we would go to the forest to cut wood they sent to Russia. But that was not so bad. When the Germans came—that was impossible. They hardly gave you anything to eat. I never dreamed I would come out alive.”

That, according to Ray, was in 1939, and was the beginning of the end. Hitler and Stalin agreed to share Poland but, without warning, Hitler forced the Russians out in three days. It happened with lightning speed.

Ray manipulates the jacket sleeve as he talks, exposing its inferior construction. He lets loose the sleeve.

“Well, you take this suit back and get a new suit. A Hickey-Freeman. Or Jos. A. Bank,” he says.

* * *

I return the following week with a gray pin-striped suit from Joseph A. Banks: A Signature 2-Button Wool Pinstripe suit with plain front trousers. When I remove the garment bag, Ray’s eyes light up. He shows me the strength and intricacy of the stitching. He sets it down on his material table and shows me the extra material, left for the express purpose of tailoring.

“This I can work with,” he says.

I go into the changing room and put on the suit. It swallows me. The jacket fits more like a cloak, and I feel like a young boy playing dress-up with his father’s clothes. The pant legs puddle at my feet and if I don’t cinch the waist, the pants fall straight to the floor. Ray has his work cut out for him. He has me stand in front of the mirror on the stepstool and sizes me up.

He braces himself to bend down—a wide stance, then bending at the knee while resting both hands on the other knee. He lowers himself slowly until the first bent knee rests on the floor, will-you-marry-me style. He works at the cuff using pins and chalk, marking at the material. I ask him how he was taken to Auschwitz and he stops.

Ray’s shop is in the center of a strip mall, and when nobody’s talking and the radio’s not on, it’s pin-drop silent. He looks at the ground without really looking at it. He drops his hands to his side and he’s thinking, thinking. It’s him and me and the crackly buzz of fluorescent lights that burn color away into dull monochrome. Under this stark whiteness, he schools me in history.

* * *

Ray had lived under the forced labor of the Russians, but the Germans were not so accommodating.

“The Germans put me and my family on a train to Auschwitz,” he says. “I was 15 or 16 so that was ‘41 or ‘42.” Ray had heard rumors that Auschwitz was a death camp, but his family refused to believe him. He begged his family to jump with him from the train.

“They said no,” he tells me. “All the time I begged them. They thought they were going to the resort. Every time I think about it I wanna kill myself.”

Ray stops talking. He raises his arm. He moves to the other leg and the chalk draws a trail of slash marks on the material to be eliminated. He pauses, hanging onto a piece of loose pant leg.

The Germans, Ray says, left the boxcar unattended because most Poles thought the train led to an interment camp where they would be kept for the duration of the war. They accepted their fate as prisoners of war. No one imagined the human capacity needed to carry out Hitler’s die Endlösung: the Final Solution.

Ray and four other boys on his boxcar suspected the worst, and they wanted off.

“There was a little window on top of the boxcar of the train,” Ray recalls. He had tried to squeeze through it, but his heavy fur jacket wouldn’t allow it. He crawled back down, then tried again, this time making it out. A friend threw his coat out after him. Ray and four other boys escaped the boxcar and ran into the wilderness. He didn’t realize then that it would be his home for the next year.

“You know, in Poland it gets cold like it’s Canada,” he says.

He takes pins and begins stabbing at the chalk marks. Purely. Precisely. He pulls the material close to his face. Stab. Instinct kicks in while his mind traces outlines of the past he’d rather not recall. Stab. He tells me it’s a lot to talk about: the farmer who saved his life by providing a single spade but refused any other assistance for fear of retribution. Stab. I resist the instinct to flinch as he pulls needles from the pincushion. Stab. I trust in his experience as he sticks the pins and tells me more about the year in the forest.

“We took the spade and dug into the ground—about two feet down and then two feet horizontal into the ground,” he says. “We make a little place in the earth where we can lay down but we can’t sit up. At night, you know, we could get out. But in daytime it was us, staying underground. When the snow comes, we thought it was bad. But then later the rain came and we wish we could have the snow.”

He stops stabbing and examines the material closely, running his fingers along the metal dashes that force the pant leg to conform. The pinpoints that poke and scratch stay safely concealed just beneath the surface of the material.

“One of the boys couldn’t walk because his leg was frozen,” he says. Ray begged him to walk to find food, but the boy’s leg had turned gangrenous. Ray and the others eventually took the boy to the ghetto at Bialystok, where the boy’s leg was amputated.

“There was no medication. No penicillin. Nothing. Not even aspirin. For Jews, they say let ’em die.”

Ray stands back up. First the hands braced on the knee, then the push that shoots the upper body up. He’s righted himself and he concentrates his chalk and pins on my shoulders.

“They shot him.”

According to Ray, all of this occurred around the beginning of 1943. The Bialystok ghetto was close to his uncle’s hometown, and when he and Ray found each other in the ghetto, he convinced Ray to remain there rather than attempting to escape back into the forest. Ray had lost his immediate family and his uncle’s presence comforted him, briefly.

The Bialystok ghetto housed around 50,000 Polish Jews laboring under the Germans. In Bialystok, Ray began to realize the extent of the Nazi cruelty. Even physically challenged Germans wound up in the camps and then, not long thereafter, disappeared.

“The trains, the boxcars, was carrying the people to the gas chambers day and night,” he says. “Women, young girls—they shaved off their hair and they was wearing wooden shoes. They put potato sacks on them to wear. They looked like monkeys. Killed them all.”

It was during this time that Ray was separated from his uncle and shipped to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. It was 1943, when Ray was just 17.

* * *

Ray maneuvers himself behind me and I feel the weight of his hands on my shoulders. He pinches the shoulder material and lifts up. He holds the material from each shoulder between his thumbs and forefingers.

“Too much space, you see?”

I see my reflection in the mirror. He’s lifted the shoulders of the jacket so that my head sinks.

The second train to Auschwitz was a different story. “Before, I was from a smaller town so it was easy to escape from the train. This time the Germans was starting to lose the war, so it was worse. You couldn’t jump because on every boxcar was the SS with a machine gun.

“At Auschwitz they brought you in … to vanish,” he says. At 15 square miles, Auschwitz was the largest concentration camp, and the Nazis divided it into three sub-camps: Auschwitz I acted as the base camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau was the main extermination camp, and Auschwitz-Monowitz enforced hard labor. In all, Auschwitz housed a total of 1.1 million Jews, 960,000 of whom were killed. Ray was one of the few who survived the second camp, Auschwitz Birkenau.

“OK. Now you can step down.”

I step off the chair. Ray grabs the back of the jacket at my lower spine and pulls the jacket tight against me. I fall back because I’m not ready for the force of the pull, the firmness with which he holds the coat. In the mirror I see him hunched over, marking the coat with his chalk. Lines and Xs, from the base of my neck to the small of my back.

“When I got there, in Auschwitz, they asked for tailors, shoemakers, bricklayers,” Ray says. “I was making uniforms for the SS—you know, the riding breeches. Everything had to be tailor-made. Everything had to be done perfect. You had to do it right or boy, watch out. And when we got through with the uniforms we were making civilian clothes. I was 16 or 17 by then. If I wouldn’t have been a tailor they would’ve killed me, too.”

The lump in my throat prevents me from swallowing. I look at him in the mirror, bent over, measuring, marking barbed-wire Xs down my back with the hands the Germans forced him to use 67 years ago on the back of an SS officer. One who killed the elderly, who gassed the women and children and gypsies. His meticulous hands make the same Xs on me now as they did back then and I wonder at the weight of his hands, at how much they endured, and I wonder if the SS officer really believed in the solution to the Judenfrage—Hitler’s “Jewish question”—or if he defied the illogic and appreciated the precision of the hands making Xs on his back, and I imagine each X marks another day of life for Ray in a place where a wasted day is another day of gained breath.

“Auschwitz was big,” he recalls. “It was an old Polish cavalry camp. And the barracks they changed for the prisoners. Put some beds in that we lived in. Three-story beds. Everybody engraved their names and their town in the wood of the bed. On every bed you saw it. Everybody would take a little knife and engrave or they’d do it with little pencils. And every time I get up in the morning I wake up praying, and when I go to bed, too, if I’m still alive. I never dreamed I would make it 90 years.”

It’s the carved name that recalls his identity, and the commitment to prayer to a God against whom he can measure himself, that kept Ray going. His main drive, his mantra even today is, “Never give up.” When others succumbed to their despair, Ray encouraged them to reject the anguish that paved the way for death. Hunger propelled the despair, and Ray never gave up finding various sources for food. In the middle of the night he’d risk certain execution and creep out of his bunk and sidle alongside the barracks until he reached the kitchen, hoping to see the window cracked with food on the sill or nearby counter. Numerous times, he’d filch a potato or two and make his way back to his barracks. Hunger pervaded each breath, and Ray says during the day and all night everyone dreamed about food, which meant that food was the goal, that hunger trumped risk, that life without food couldn’t be living.

“You have no idea what hunger means,” he says. “The biggest punishment if you want to punish somebody: Don’t feed ’em.”

He grabs the pants at either side of my waist and tugs. More chalk stitch marks moving down my hips. More pinning.

“Auschwitz was nothing but killing. When people went in, the music was playing because people was screaming. You know, in the barracks the walls was thin and you could hear the screaming. So the music was playing so you couldn’t hear the voices. You saw in the chimneys not smoke, but flame—like they were shooting fire. And a lot of times they was making—from the flesh of humans—soap. The called it reden Juden fat: RJF. From human flesh. When you went to take a shower they gave you something that looked like a rock. But it was made from humans. They’d shave off the hair to make mattresses.”

The pincushion he wears around his wrist has moved its way up his arm. As he moves to take another pin out to stick into the suit, I see, perched on the elastic band that inches up, on the soft inside of his forearm, a bird that looks like Tweety crossed with a macaw.

“Everybody used to ask me about the numbers,” he says. “I got sick and tired of it, so I covered it. It didn’t matter what in the hell it was because it wasn’t doing me any good.”

When he tells me B2526, he lets me look close to try to see it, but the tattoo artist executed his job perfectly. No trace of the number. When the Germans began losing ground in Poland because of the advancing Russian troops, the SS implemented a plan to move healthy prisoners to Dachau, a concentration camp located in Bavaria, Germany. In order to keep the prisoners from escaping during the transportation, the Germans told the Jewish prisoners they were exchanging them for German prisoners held by the Russians. It was a lie, of course. The ruse worked.

Some of the railroads to Dachau had been bombed into disrepair, which forced the Germans to take longer routes.

“It was three or four days on those goddamn boxcars,” Ray recalls. “You have a bucket if you want to take a leak. You cannot describe it. Ninety, a hundred in a boxcar like sardines. It was packed. Had to stand you know? You cannot forget. Never. Never. You talk about punishment. In an American jail it’s a pleasure. They got a television, they got a bed. They’re treated like a human. But over there? They didn’t give a damn. They wanted you to die.”

Eventually, Ray made it to Dachau, where he was assigned a new number: 19465. They put him to work making parts for the Luftwaffe. He was assigned an impossible work shift of heavy manual labor: 12 hours for the day shift, and 12 hours for the night shift.

“In case you run away they looked right away on your arm,” he says. “But we didn’t have civilian clothes. Everybody was in blue and white stripes so that nobody could run. They had electric wires, and outside the wire was ditches with water. Nobody could escape. If you would escape they would catch you.”

In Dachau, the slightest physical ailment meant certain death. On a regular basis, the SS inspected the prisoners’ bodies by calling them out of bed in the morning and forcing them to assemble, naked, and stand motionless for 30 minutes. The winters proved most detrimental because those who exhibited any symptoms of a cold or flu were dealt with severely. After the liberation of Dachau, Ray asked his doctor how he survived, and the only explanation the doctor could provide was, “You was young.”

In the mirror, I’m all white-dashed stitches held together with pins. The tailor gives me one more going-over, carefully examining how he’s refigured and put the suit together. He steps back, satisfied with his work.

“I never dreamed I would come out alive,” he says. “I weighed 75 pounds. Skin and bones.”

May 2, 1945 changed everything for Ray.

“That’s when there were white flags in the villages, hanging from the rooftops,” Ray recalls. “It was snowing in Bavaria in the forest. They was marching us through the forest. They were trying to get rid of us. Russians and Jews in the thousands. And all of a sudden we look, and nobody’s there. The SS is gone. The Russians were running to the dead horses along side of the road and cutting the meat and eating it. You have no idea what hunger means.”

I take the jacket off. First one arm, then the other, carefully slipping the material off my body to avoid the potential pinpricks while at the same time maintaining the newer, more formfitting shape of the jacket crafted by Ray. He takes the coat and carefully hangs it, then the pants.

“You know, when the war started, I had a family. They went to Treblinka in the beginning. But young and old, they got killed. When it was over, I was all alone. I was hoping maybe I will find somebody. After the war I went in the German museum and looked at the booth for Poland. The walls in the room were covered with lists of who was left alive and who is gone. I never could see anybody from my family. All of them gone.”

He takes the hung suit and places it on a rack next to a row of similarly pinned and white-dashed clothing, all standing at attention and waiting for Ray to reshape them permanently. He tells me to come back next week for the finished suit.

When I thank him, he replies, “Who shall ask, shall receive. Whatever you need, I will give it to you.”

In this ongoing  feature, our social media editor Vicki May Thorne meets and greets the staff and contributors of This Land Press.

Matt Leach is one half of the This Land film crew, the observant eyes and ears counterpart to boisterous, public  Sterlin Harjo. Leach & Harjo have produced dozens of short films and documentaries for This Land in the year or so they’ve been working together. Leach’s camerawork has resulted in beautiful tributes to the city he grew up in- Tulsa- and the many different stories that fellow Oklahomans have to tell.

1. What influences you? (alternately, what are your “Must Read/Listen/Watch” items? Print or online.)

There is a whole sea of movies to push you or pull you in one way or another and make your work feel inferior but I love documentaries like Grey Gardens and Salesman that have something so real and raw that it couldn’t be faked and are so in-depth and spend so much time with someone they catch the magic of what makes a person truly unique.  Then there’s something like Orson Welles’ F for Fake that is very playful on a conceptual level but also amazes you with its extremely low budget technical wizardry.

2. What inspires you?

I’d never really given the documentary form a lot of thought until I started doing them myself and have really fallen in love with the idea that you’re not making something up in your mind but uncovering an incredible story that’s already happened  and saving it from fading into obscurity or being lost with time.  So many times the stories we do are about someone you wouldn’t give another look walking down the street but I’m constantly fascinated by people’s stories and personalities and just the weirdness and greatness in stopping for a moment and capturing their story.

3. What is your favorite piece that you’ve done for This Land?

I think Indian Elvis is still probably one of my favorites because it seemingly had music, showmanship, oddity, tenderness, joy and sadness all at the same time.

4. What do you like about Tulsa & Oklahoma at large?

I love how unpretentious this city and state is.  I love that for the most part, if someone walked into a bar with their nose up talking about how much they have in the stock market they would be laughed out of the place.  There’s so much I would love to change about Tulsa, but the people here who are passionate about something are as genuine and “real” and talented as you could ask for.

5. What is your drink of choice? (Alcoholic or non)

Coca-cola.

It’s true, I participated, but it wasn’t what I did that’s worth rehashing. It’s what I witnessed. The incident went like this: Two swimming pools situated in the entryway of the church, four dunkers, four dunkees, and a camera man piping all the action into the main sanctuary. Seems relatively harmless and fun, until one of the dunkees tries to get away.

Everything was running so smoothly, one devotee right after another. It was a beautiful thing until the last victim stepped down and into the pool. She did this of her own choosing, what they call free will. So when I say victim, I’m not implying one being taken advantage of, but rather one whose fear permeates so deeply that it evokes an awkward situation and she becomes one. A victim, that is.

The terror on her face seeped through her pores until I could feel it pulsing in the water. She was about 40, thin, and as her feet hit the water her whole body stiffened just like a board. I quickly opted out of this one and stood back to watch the professionals.

Pastor Todd Roy was no beginner at baptizing. With hundreds—maybe even thousands—of baptisms under his belt, he stepped up to the plate quickly and confidently without skipping a beat. He moved toward her gingerly with his hand out-stretched. She took his hand almost out of desperation. Calmly and compassionately, Pastor Todd debriefed her and tried to alleviate some of the terror on her face, but it didn’t seem as if any of the words could even slightly dissolve the fear. With no time to waste and a thousand people watching in the auditorium, Pastor Todd knew intimately that the show must go on.

This is how it all went down:

He proceeded, in the scripted text, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” then began the process of easing her gently into the water. Only, she’s not going down. And not only is she not going down, she is fighting for her life, bobbing up and down, backwards, flailing arms, fighting like a drowning victim, trying to keep her head afloat before she is preyed upon by the Master Baptizer.

Todd follows her every move, then swiftly and at the right moment, he lurches into the air taking her with him, and like a killer shark feeding on a helpless seal, he fully immerses them both successfully into a thundering, tandem splash.

When Todd surfaces, he looks straight at me with victory in his eye, and says, “No one gets away from me!”