Free The Book of Mormon Girl by Joanna Brooks

around and around the Rose Bowl parking lot in our modest knee-length shorts and Brigham Young University T-shirts, giddy at the sight of so many Mormons in one place, riding what felt like a red-punch-and-sugar-cookie high. In the morning we rehearsed our moves in dusty quadrants of the Rose Bowl grounds—umbrellas swinging left, then right, then left, then right. After lunch, we moved out onto the legendary Rose Bowl turf to experience the wonder of thousands of “Singin’ in the Rain” dancers moving in precisely choreographed circles, zigzags, and lines.
    After our final run-through, in the late afternoon heat, the dance festival organizers herded us all into the Rose Bowl stands and set up microphones on the grassy gridiron, so that Mormon youth from all over Southern California could bear testimony of the truthfulness of the gospel, expressing to one another our love for the Mormon Church and the teachings that kept us safe and together in these latter days. A youngman in his twenties, one of the older dance festival participants, a returned missionary fresh back from Chile wearing modest knee-length shorts, stood at the microphone and proposed marriage to his girlfriend in the stands.
    As the sun set over the smoggy San Gabriel Mountains, our master of ceremonies materialized: beloved Mormon television star Gordon Jump of WKRP in Cincinnati .
    Gordon Jump rode out onto the field in a little jeep, greeted us, and then gave the word. We all deployed to carefully segregated bays of the great concrete Rose Bowl to change into our spangly, sateen dance festival costumes sewn up in some faraway subtropical factory town.
    That’s when the first of the fifty thousand Mormon spectators began to arrive at the Rose Bowl parking lot. Wood-sided station wagons loaded with kids and coolers of cold cuts, Jell-O salads, and supermarket-brand grape soda started to clog up the freeway off-ramps to Pasadena. When one station wagon broke down, exhaust swirling around its tires, almost immediately another station wagon or, better yet, a family van would pull up alongside. “Can we help you? Hop on in!”
    Lost a wallet at the Rose Bowl? It would come back in the mail, intact, postage paid.
    Small children who wandered away from parents into the festival crowds? Safe as lambs.
    Will you go a mile with me? Heck, I’ll go an extra mile.
    That’s the sort of thing that happened when sixty-five thousand Mormons got together.
    Of course, the born-agains couldn’t resist, and they sent an especially brave delegation to do battle against all sixty-five thousand of us. About a dozen anti-Mormon picketers stood at the Rose Bowl gates, looping their signs in the air. In those days there were always a few picketers outside our churches or temples, telling us that we didn’t believe in the right Jesus. But with sixty-five thousand Mormons on the Rose Bowl grounds, fifteen thousand of them young people trained as precision dancers, the ragged little deployment of born-agains didn’t have a chance. A group of Mormon kids encircled them and began to sing our beloved hymn, “I am a Child of God,” the very sound of which so confounded our tormentors that they withered and vaporized into thin air.
    At least that’s what my best friend Natasha told me she heard from a girl in the cha-cha number.
    There were other Mormon and Mormon-friendly celebrities on hand for the festivities: football great Merlin Olsen (now of Little House on the Prairie ), star quarterback Steve Young (great-great-great grandson of Brigham), Mrs. America 1984 Debbie Wolf, America’s Sweethearts the Lennon Sisters of Lawrence Welk fame, and at least three Osmond brothers.
    First number up: one thousand couples in hot pink and orange Carmen Miranda dresses and matching suits dancing the cha-cha.
    Next came a thousand couples in silver-and-gold sateen to do the Charleston and the jitterbug to the sounds of the Glenn Miller Orchestra.
    A thousand more couples in neon