In 1989, my mother was voluntold to make two dozen children’s penguin costumes. She had a month to do this and no pattern, an obstacle she, master of the craft, likely considered trivial — this wasn’t her first rodeo, so to speak. She had been commissioned countless times before to donate artistic labor through her sewing machine for her ward’s upcoming theatrical pursuits.
Our stake had scheduled a roadshow, a staple of Latter-day Saint communal artistic expression in the 20th century, one which seems to have since fallen victim to cultural modernization and a concerted distancing from the “peculiar people” moniker of yesteryear.
Roadshows were as much a part of my childhood as anything else ever was. They were original stage productions, written, directed, and acted by Latter-day Saint congregations, by my memory lasting around 10 minutes each. Congregants were tasked with every aspect of the low-budget presentations, from costume design to staging to music to lyrics and even, yes, to dangerous acting stunts.
The most ambitious plays involved the largest casts, which often bravely featured young unpredictable children. Ideally these productions were supposed to incorporate some aspect of Mormonism and teach a religious message through a traditional three-act story arc.
No part was too small. At least, that’s what they told us when I was cast as tumbleweed number four in our ward’s 1995 loose parody of “Oklahoma!” (Our play was called “Oh, South Jordan!” and included such lyrics in the titular number as “Oh, South Jordan, where the wind goes sweeping ‘cross my yard!”) “You’ll need to practice your cartwheels,” Sister Jensen told us while measuring our limbs for the costumes on which she planned to sew a number of sticks. “I want the audience to almost feel the wind as they see the tumbleweeds rolling across the stage.”
I’m not sure who came up with the penguin idea in 1989. My dad recorded the performance on our home video camera. I watched that recording dozens of times, and it was never really clear to me why our ward had made a play about penguins or what they had to do with, well, anything.
In the penultimate scene, the 24-penguin cast formed a semicircle on the stage and performed a rap that was so offbeat and confusing that if I saw it now in any other context, I would assume it was brilliant ironic performance art. In the musical number, the penguins snapped in near unison as each took turns chanting, “I’m going on a mission and I’m gonna bring my [fill-in-the-blank].” The penguins shouted things like “scriptures” and “testimony” and “faith.” The punchline of the scene: the smallest child, in what must have been something of a “Sound of Music” “So Long, Farewell” rip-off, saying “I’m going on a mission and I’m gonna bring my . . . my . . . my teddy bear!”
This was a crowd-pleaser. Comedy gold.
And the ‘Oscar’ goes to ...
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) People portraying the Book of Mormon characters King Lamoni and Ammon in a 1998 Latter-day Saint roadshow in Salt Lake City.
But it wasn’t enough to win the competition. Oh, I forgot to mention, the roadshow was a competition. After each ward in the stake performed its play or musical, a panel of judges would select a winner and runners-up. No tangible reward was given for the victory, but everyone wanted to be a part of the winning ward for complicated social reasons none of us could have explained.
“I don’t understand how we lost to the Sixth Ward,” my mother said on the drive home. She was referring to the winning one-act play involving a young woman on one side of the stage writing Dear John letters to all her missionary boyfriends who filtered in and out on the other side of the stage reacting in despair as she read them out loud.
“They didn’t even have costumes,” my mother muttered under her breath.
“The set design was sort of lacking. Furniture from the bishop’s office?” Dad offered in support.
My sister said she heard two of the three judges belonged to the Sixth Ward, a scandal that was referenced with some regularity in my neighborhood for the better part of a decade thereafter.
We had a handful of chances, year after year, to best the Sixth Ward after our failed penguin offering. We never quite got there. The “Oklahoma!” knockoff play was the last ward production in our South Jordan stake in 1995 and it, too, was a loser. By decade’s end, no one really talked about roadshows anymore. I’m not sure if they just naturally waned in popularity or if there was a concerted corporate effort to end the practice, but as far as I’m aware, they are a thing of the past. An odd, cringey, bizarre cultural exercise that strikes fear in my heart when I occasionally worry there might be video evidence of my own embarrassing brushes with Deseret thespianism floating around in the world somewhere.
Having been out of the church now for more than a decade, I see these kinds of dead traditions through a much different, and often cynical, set of eyes than I did in the ‘80s and ‘90s. “Why were these ever popular?” I sometimes wonder, remembering these productions were typically hoisted upon the backs of what must have been exhausted neighborhood parents the same age I am now. I can’t imagine why these volunteers would have been so willing to donate their limited time to something so cheap and cheesy.
The memories, unlike the roadshows, live on
Last summer, I ran into the mother of a neighborhood kid with whom I grew up. Now in her mid-70s, she stopped to chat, having not seen me in nearly 20 years.
“You know what I was thinking about the other day?” she interrupted me at one point. Her face lit up and she smiled. “Do you remember when you kids did that roadshow about South Jordan? Wasn’t that a riot?”
I could almost see into the past through her damp eyes as she beamed at me — there, possibly amid her most precious memories, a community of neighbors rehearsing a bad play together, laughing, singing off-key, united in something harmless and wholesome. Something that would manage to become part of the fabric of us — the fabric that meant we were all from the same place, however peculiar and sometimes saccharine.
“Oh yes,” I told her. Through my mind flashed a quick image of my friends and me getting jabbed by costume sticks as we rehearsed sloppy cartwheels behind the lead performers running through a chaotic square dance. On the other side of the church gym, the director was rocking her crying baby. A gaggle of neighborhood dads in jeans trying to start a game of basketball were intermittently interrupted by meandering children, too young for a roadshow role but dragged to the building by their parents who were involved with the production and couldn’t find a babysitter since all the usual options were busy with cartwheels and square dances.
I smiled at my old neighbor over our shared memory.
“I’m so glad we did that.”
Tribune humor columnist Eli McCann.
Eli McCann is an attorney, writer and podcaster in Salt Lake City, where he lives with his husband and their two naughty (yet worshipped) dogs. You can find Eli on Twitter at @EliMcCann or at his personal website, www.itjustgetsstranger.com, where he tries to keep the swearing to a minimum so as not to upset his mother.
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