Oh, by the way, I got word Friday that Ms. Editor's editorial director at Well-Regarded University Press has read Missionary Man and likes it. They've sent the book to their legal department for a read-through, with some minor worries about whether there's anything in it that the Mormon church would feel compelled to sue over. If there are no problems, then we might possibly be one step closer to the Holy Grail. . . .
The news came less than half an hour before █████ and I left for a weekend in Utah with my friend Scott and his family. Scott is an actor and playwright, and he just opened a Mormon-oriented theater in Orem. As █████ and I sweated through a production of My Turn on Earth at the new theater (what were we thinking?!), I reflected on how the plot of that rather didactic LDS musical mirrors that of a chapter in Missionary Man called "What Happened Before Any of Us Arrived." I read "What Happened" for a capacity crowd at KGB in July, and if any of the other audience members at My Turn on Earth had been there they probably would have heard the laughter and feared a massive and immediate retaliatory lightning strike.
One day soon I hope to have a recording of that KGB reading that I can post on the site. Carol Lynn Pearson and Lex de Azevedo it is not.
