The sign on a giant ice-cream cone along Route 31 read “Welcome, LDS.” My dyslexic eye always does a double-take with those three letters. Claire and Kerry had organized an outing to the 75th annual Hill Cumorah Pageant and they only got a few takers, but Peggi and I are easy. We even saw Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in the theater.
The pageant takes place outside of Palmyra, New York, about thirty minutes from Rochester, where Joseph Smith found the golden plates in 1838. His translations of the inscriptions on these plates became The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ. I learned all this in the Visitors Center and found the subtitle interesting. It is just “another testament.” What the heck. This one has Christ visiting America just after his crucifixion, where he healed the sick and chose twelve more disciples, all-American disciples. As a former Catholic (I realize there is no such thing) I was surprised to find it no more wacky than any other organized religion.
This was the third time for Claire and Kerry, and they told us the parking arrangement was all new this year. They used to park across the street, and a whole protest scene had grown up around the pageant where you had to walk a gauntlet to get to the outdoor theater. The protesters are still an integral part of the festivities. They shout disjointed, mostly right-wing (further right-wing) evangelical messages through bullhorns and hold signs advertising AskWhyWeLeft.com. Someone was driving a truck back and forth with WhatMormonsDontTell.com painted on the side in huge letters. One angry agnostic was yelling, “You don’t need religion. Save yourself.”
It is impossible to shut out the protests, so they became a part of the show. The open-field parking lot is wired for sound, with speakers mounted high on poles playing the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, or what sounds like loud funeral home music, all in an attempt to drown out the protests. It is a surreal experience just walking to the pageant grounds. The cast members, in full Mesoamerican biblical costume, greet you with disarming smiles. I felt like I must have something permanently wrong with my face.
This trippy, Woodstock-gone-Stepford atmosphere makes the pageant itself a bit of a letdown. The sound system and lights were state of the art and as good as Further Festival, but the play is entirely lip-synched. The parking lot was jammed on the way out, so Kerry and I headed to the woods to relieve ourselves. A protester’s plea rose above the din: “Time to get off your high horse, Mormons!”
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