The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [13]
Now, serving pizza isn’t nothing, and Mesa isn’t nowhere, but for someone like Pia it might as well have been.
“We’re going east, not west,” Tony explained over iceberg lettuce drowned in blue cheese dressing after our little show. “But if you can really levitate, we’d sure consider having you along.”
Pia didn’t say yes or no, just, “I know where we can get a really cool painted caravan.”
The difference between Pia and the rest of us, it turned out, was that Pia was a full-fledged, card-carrying believer. Her card was red and white and wallet sized. She’d ordered it from the back cover of the National Inquirer. A real live Certificate of Ordination from the Order of the Holy Spirit.
Tony’s eyes brightened as he turned the card over in his hand. “This is a joke, right?”
It was and it wasn’t.
“How can you believe in the Bible when it’s so homophobic?” Tony wanted to know.
Pia shrugged. “I wondered about that, too, so I asked God.”
“And?”
“God said, ‘Hey, the Bible’s got plenty of good words in it, Pia, but an oak tree praises me by being an oak tree. An oak tree doesn’t try to be a pine, now, does it?’”
“How’d you know it was the voice of God?” Tony asked, incredulous.
Pia seemed miffed by the question. Like, duh. “Because it made me feel loved. It made me feel like loving back.”
“You can’t just take the parts of a religion you like,” Tony insisted, kind of missing the point.
“Why not? All the editors of the Bible sure did, hiding whole Gospels in Egypt, completely changing stories in translations. Every church takes what serves it and spits the rest back in God’s face. The Bible might contain the word of God, but don’t forget it was written by people.”
She had Tony there, so we all headed back to Phoenix to pick up the caravan—an old Chevy Luv truck with a Gypsy-style wooden canopy painted red, purple, and gold. Flowers covered the front, snake charmers and weird mythological birds graced either side, and a turbaned fortune-teller peered out from the back. Tony converted the thing to run on grease, and Magdelena added a crucifixion scene to the murals.
We traveled north in the two cars, then east through Idaho and Wyoming to Minneapolis, then toward New York by way of Madison, Chicago, and Detroit. We looped around the East Coast for a few months before heading up to Canada, getting a little attention in zines and local newspapers along the way.
Tony played around with themes and plots for the show. Magdelena, Pia, and I threw in our two cents here and there, but Tony seemed to have some unknowable vision he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He’d spiral through different mythologies, trying a Hindu theme here, a Buddhist motif there, but he kept circling back to Christianity. “Damn Catholics,” he said. “Never did a thing for people of color, but boy did they burn their imagery into our brains. You go to Oakland, you go to New Orleans, you go to the poorest village in Oaxaca or Sicily, and you got black people handing over their hard-earned money to some pervert priest preaching in some castle of a church. The faithful go home to their tenement hovels, thinking of some white Jesus and feeling like they’re the ones who’ve sinned.” He sparked up a joint, stared off at some far point on the horizon.
“Don’t worry about it,” Magdelena said. “Don’t you get that we’re satirizing the church? When Pia and I play virgin and whore onstage, you think we’re promoting some papist agenda? Satire is what’s bringing those bastards down.”
I guess we never brought the bastards down, exactly, but as we inched back and forth across the country, old sins came back to haunt the diocese from Boston to Portland, and the priests wouldn’t say their Hail Marys, and the bishops didn’t want to admit mea culpa, and the church seemed to be doing a pretty good job digging its own grave for the feminists and the punks to dance on.
We performed.
Three years into our wayward journey, someone from a campus theater group in Yellow Springs, Ohio, called on Tony’s prepaid cell phone and invited us to