The Book of Mormon on Broadway

I knew The Book of Mormon was on the way since the creators of South Park first announced it. My closest friend, being an avid fan of Avenue Q, learned about it fairly quickly, as well, and the first thing he did was come to me. "Peter! The South Park guys are making a musical about Mormons!"

This, I've noticed, has been the reaction most of my friends — who for some reason tend to be musical theater enthusiasts — have had, and it's somewhat flattering to think that bunches of people think of me whenever Mormons come up.

Anyway, to my point. I have the soundtrack. My friends have the soundtrack, and I've suddenly become hugely popular. Especially with "I believe":



"Really?" they ask. "Kolob? Black people in 1978? Getting your own planet?"

What's been wildly funny to me is to see what people unfamiliar with Mormonism laugh at. Like, for example, a little after a minute in, Elder Price proclaims, with pride:

"I believe that the Lord God created the universe.
I believe that He sent His only son to die, for my sins.

And I believe that ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America!

And they laugh! How ridiculous and crazily stupid that sounds to them! Ancient Jews, building boats, and sailing across the Atlantic Ocean!

... and it totally just sailed right past me when I first heard it. Yeah, I thought, that's how the story goes.

They get a lot of things right about Mormons, at least in the music, and most of what they get wrong is either necessary for plot reasons — technically, you switch mission companions several times during your mission — or trivial. But one of those trivial things, for some irrational reason, bothers me much, much more than it should.

In the beginning of "Joseph Smith American Moses," the mission president says, "Well, this is very good, Praise Christ."

The fuck? "Praise Christ"? No Mormon on the planet would ever say that! That just makes Mormon sounds like a bunch of scary cultists!

Oh, wait...

What is a favicon?

A favicon is the little picture that sits next to a website's title, either when you have it in a tab or in a list of bookmarks. You know what I'm talking about.

I'm not going to pretend like I knew about this before a few hours ago. I noticed I had the option to upload a personal favicon for this blog, pondered "what the hell is a favicon?", hit up Wikipedia, and then promptly approached my brother, who's much better with all the image-making things than I am.

... which, I freely admit, isn't saying much. Anyway, you'll notice this image

will start showing up while you're at my blog, and I think it's just about the coolest thing ever, of all time.

Whee, I wrote poetry!

No no, this poetry has a point, though, and isn't just an assembly of insipid and vague sentence fragments with odd spacing and a liberal use of the Enter key.

I used to think poetry was just that, though. I used to think that poets were just narcissists who sucked at writing, and who thought, "Hey, if I just hit the Enter key randomly, this one sentence will look like a paragraph if the teacher isn't wearing his/her glasses."

But now, almost six years removed from high school, with almost seven years of existential crises and philosophical quandaries, colored by all the ostracism and social pain one can experience by abandoning religion, I'm seeing it in a very different light.

(Of course, blogging for two years and playing in the orchestra for ten has certainly helped refine my sensitivity to art, which might be a factor, too)

Anyway, I've been reading Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson, among others, in my English class, and OH MY GOD what a philistine I was before! What a mastery of the English language, and what a love for the English language, these people show! And what craftsmanship (or craftswomanship?) there is in poetry!

So, to the point of this post:

A friend of mine on Facebook regularly posts these "poems" of hers which are, she freely admits, the products of about twenty seconds of effort. And one of these poems, which she titled rain, expressed with superficial piety that she and God were both weeping for the wicked sinners, overcome by grief that Satan was winning in their hearts.

Her description of her motive, exactly, was:

rain
by _______________ (inspired by how ignorant and/or stubborn 'wicked' people are)

So, as a supposedly ignorant and stubborn 'wicked' person, I figured I'd send my own retort her way, in the form of a poem, too. It's a Shakespearean sonnet — three quatrains and a rhyming couplet — and... it was oddly fun to write.

Sunshine

By Peter Madsen
(inspired by __________'s poem, rain)

I see the others living, loving life
And dancing in the warm, inviting sun.
(Of course they're sometimes shadowed, marked by strife —
Not every day can be a perfect one).
I see their faces glowing now, outside,
Beyond this sturdy glass and bolted door,
Illuminated, they've no need to hide
Their potent joy; they could not want for more.
If only I could go participate!
But I would never dream of joining in;
My friends and family, they would castigate
And loathe me for my interest in their "sin."

For all the life I'm letting pass me by,
I'd better get to live it when I die.

I've learned a few things about writing sonnets from this, too. First of which being "Don't end a line with 'life'; there's only a handful of words that rhyme with it and it'll always sound like a forced rhyme, no matter what you do."

Anyway, she hasn't seen my poem yet (or if she has, she hasn't acknowledged it), so I'll let you know if/when our artistic dialogue continues.