***

Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You’re off to New Races!
You’re off and away!

You have notes on your hand.
You have feet in your pumps.
The liberals can’t stop you,
Those socialist chumps.
You’re on your own, and you know what you know!
Which isn’t that much—you’ll need backers, and so…

You’ll look up and down K Street. Check lobbies with care.
Of some offers you’ll say, “I don’t choose to shill there.”
With those notes on your hand and those heels on your feet,
You’re too smart to get linked to that not-so-good street.

The voters hates lobbyists!
They’re leeches, you see.
So distance yourself
From those whores in D.C.

Real America’s there,
In the wide open air.

Out there things can happen,
And frequently do,
To people as pretty
And shameless as you.

And when pundits malign you,
Don’t worry. Don’t stew.
Just spout folksy shit—
They won’t know what to do.

OH, THE PEOPLE YOU’LL SNOW!

And then Fox will call you!
You’ll go on each show.
They’ll all but fellate you.
Your fan base will grow.

Your Facebook will help bring reforms to a stop.
You’ll make sure that black Hitler’s policies flop.
Whatever you say, they’ll believe it—I know.
The people will love you wherever you go.

Except when they don’t,
Because sometimes they won’t.

I’m sorry to say so,
But, sadly, it’s true
That Slip-ups
And Trip-ups
Can happen to you.

You can get all tripped up
By a laughable Gaffe,
And your friends will condemn you.
The pundits will laugh.

You’ll come down from the Gaffe
With an unpleasant bump.
And likely your numbers
Will be in a Slump.

You will come to an issue not easily spanned,
And the answer for it won’t be writ on your hand.
An issue that wears credibility thin.
Should you try to stay out? Do you dare to wade in?
Whose votes could you lose? Whose votes could you win?

And if you go in, on whose side should you stand?
Free-marketers with their invisible hand?
Or those who think Jesus will leave most behind?
Simple, it’s not, without handlers, you’ll find
For a mind-maker-upper to make up her mind.

You can get so confused that you’ll race in to find
You are stuck with an issue you can’t get behind.
And you can’t move it forward, despite all your fame.
You’ve no choice but to play that old Waiting Game.

No! That’s not for you!

You’ll escape that Red Tape.
You’ll duck out! You’ll resign!
You’ll find an inflated new scandal to mine.

With tour bus a-roarin’,
Once more you’ll ride high.
Ready the death-paneled Dems to decry.
Ready the warming of Earth to deny.

Oh, the people you’ll snow! They will buy what you sell!
They’ll pin their hopes on you, you Liberty Belle.
Politics is a game, and their lives are the stakes.
You’ll spend them to win it, whatever it takes.
Fame! You’ll be as famous as famous can be,
With the whole wide world watching you win on TV.

And after you do…
Well you must follow through.

And once you’re in office, there is a good chance
A crisis will scare you right out of your pants.
When China plays tough and Iran gets the bomb,
They will not be charmed by your shtick, Hockey Mom.

But on you will go,
Though attack ads befoul.
On you will go,
Though the Democrats scowl.
Onward through many a wearying week
Though your arms may get sore
And your staffers may leak.

You’ll get mixed up, of course,
As you already know,
With many unsavory sorts as you go.
So be sure when you step,
Step with care and great tact,
And remember—politics
Is a Balancing Act.
Just never forget to be dexterous and deft.
And NEVER mix up the right side with the left.

And will you succeed?
Good God, I hope not!

STOP HURTING AMERICA, LADY!

So…
Name your kids weird things like Bristol or Trig.
Remember you can’t put lipstick on a pig.
You’re off to New Races!
Start running today!
The brass ring is waiting.
So get on your way!

Originally published in the Lolla-Lee-Lou issue of NakedCity magazine, March 2010.

NakedCity’s irreverent and incomplete review of the events of this awesomist of months:

AMERICAN!

• Revolutionary patriots Paul Revere, Betsy Ross, and Alexander Hamilton are born in different cities and on different years.
• The first presidential election is held, probably preceded by the first shameful attack ads making fun of Washington’s wooden teeth.
• Kansas, Alaska, Connecticut, Michigan, New Mexico, and Utah are admitted to the Union as states. Alabama and Mississippi secede like jerks. Georgia joins—and then later changes its mind and secedes. Virginia wises up and is readmitted.
• Our most irrelevant president, Millard Fillmore, our greatest secretly-wheelchair-bound president, FDR, and our most Nixonian president, Richard Nixon, are all born.

UPLIFTING!

• Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation. Two years later the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, abolishing slavery, is submitted.
• The League of Nations is established, making Woodrow Wilson happy for about five minutes.

DEPRESSING!

• Prohibition begins, turning ordinary citizens into drunk, jazz-listening criminals.
• The Space Shuttle Challenger explodes, watched live by millions of school children.

SUPER DEPRESING!

• Adolf Hitler becomes the chancellor of Germany and the Holocaust begins.
• Mohandas Gandhi is shot and killed.

OLD-TIMEY!

• Gold is discovered in California. Thousands of grizzled men rush for shovels and moonshine.
• Thomas Edison receives a patent for his electric, incandescent lamp. Uses it to stay up late, looking at racy daguerreotypes.

CONTROVERSIAL!

• United States Supreme Court rules that abortion is legal in Roe v. Wade decision.

ROYAL!

• Queen Elizabeth I is crowned, begins Corgie collection.
• Henry the VII and several Roman emperors die.
• Martin Luther King, Jr., is born.

WARLIKE!

• United States forces, led by General Andrew Jackson, defeat the British in the Battle of New Orleans, ending the War of 1812. Terrible country song later written commemorating it.
• General Eisenhower takes command of the Allied Invasion Force in London. Manages to defeat the Germans, despite baldness.
• The Vietnam War ends.

BORING!

• A surprising number of First Ladies are born or die, but no one cares.
• The first public museum in the United States is established. Gift shop to follow.
• Thomas Jefferson’s daughter, Martha, gives birth to James Madison Randolph, the first child born in the White House.

MUSICAL!

• The Beatles release Meet the Beatles and Yellow Submarine. Girls worldwide scream at the top of their lungs for the first, do drugs to the second.
• “Hello Dolly!” opens on Broadway.
• Singer Elvis Presley is born in Tupelo, Mississippi. NakedCity writer Red later writes an article about how totally hot for him she is.

INDUSTRIOUS!

• Henry Ford introduces the assembly line, which proves so successful that it wrecks American health care generations later. (No, seriously. Henry Ford is responsible for the employer-based system of health insurance that’s dragging us down.)

FORESHADOWY!

• Pearl Harbor leased by the United States from Hawaii for naval station. Bum bum bum!

Originally published in the Virgin issue of NakedCity magazine, January 2010.

When you know where to get it, there’s nothing more helpful for achieving holiday spirit than good Christmas music. You can spend money on albums or downloads, hunt through the season’s releases to find a few gems, but I prefer a more automated solution.

Free internet radio service Pandora, which I listen to all year long, has allowed me to listen to holiday music and retain my sanity. The web app lets you create your own radio stations, and learns what you like (so you never have to listen to Bing Crosby sing “Silver Bells” again) and helps introduce you to new music. They have a great collection of premade holiday stations to start you off. All you have to do is pick one and start listening. When it plays a song you like and want to hear again, you click the thumbs up button. When a saccharine tune about reindeer comes on, or one that merely doesn’t fit the mood you’re shaping for your station, click thumbs down, and that Pandora station will never play it again. And if a pop song you like actually comes on, you can always keep it in rotation by giving it the thumbs up. (I’m a sucker for Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” myself.)

I set up a station last November, and listened to it a little each day. By Christmas I had a station I could throw on and ignore for hours without having to worry about breaking the mood. I put it on while I wrote this, and so far, I’ve heard a Gershwin-esque jazz orchestra play “What Are You Doing New Years Eve?”, “What Child Is This” on swinging jazz piano, a mournful “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” on acoustic guitar, and “Of the Father’s Love Begotten” monastic chant-style.

I’ve always loved jazz at Christmastime because of A Charlie Brown Christmas. And years of choral training gave me an appreciation for classical arrangements and traditional pieces that have fallen out of favor. But Pandora also helped me discover some beautiful folk and bluegrass music that will be a part of my holidays for years to come.

The service is free, but a small annual fee gives you more privileges, like skipping more songs each hour and listening to music at a higher quality encoding. Once you’ve created an account, you can listen to my station, Merry Little Christmas Radio, and use it to start your own, by visiting tinyurl.com/ncholidayradio.  My gift to you this season is bearable music. Merry Christmas.

Originally published in the Lush issue of NakedCity magazine, December 2009.

Get your martini shaker and fill it with ice. Now pour in the vodka, sour apple liqueur, and cranberry juice. Shake that thing like the Mayflower on the stormy Atlantic and strain the passengers into a cinnamon-rimmed cocktail glass. Garnish with a green apple slice and serve. Repeat until you are cranberry sauced.

Now banish the kids to the basement, gather the grownups around the television, turn on the parade, and hand them all one of these treats. Let it sink in for a few minutes, and then ask what everyone is thankful for. If this drink makes them forget your mother-in-law’s constant stream of criticism for a while, it just might be you.

Pilgrim’s Progress

2 oz. vodka
1 oz. sour apple liqueur
1 oz. cranberry juice
Ground cinnamon
Green apple slice

Shake liquids over ice and strain into a cocktail glass rimmed with cinnamon. Garnish with apple slice.

Originally published in the Brew issue of NakedCity magazine, November 2009.

THE READER

You’re so brainy and sardonic.  You could talk for hours about the history of literature and the Enlightenment.  Obviously you know about stuff like wine and art and politics.

She sees Candid and Emerson and Melville on your shelf and knows that you’re an intellectual heavy hitter—all she knows about Moby Dick is “Call me Ishmael.”  A Vindication of the Rights of Women reveals that you’re concerned about philosophical issues like equality and social justice.  Try wearing a “This Is What A Feminist Looks Like” t-shirt.

The book that makes you approachable: Candy Girl, the autobiography of Diablo Cody, former stripper and the screenwriter of Juno.  “Oh good,” she thinks. “We liked the same movie!  I must be smart, too.  And if he likes strippers…”

Your go-to move: Russian lit.  Get a couple classics in Cyrillic.  Then memorize some sexy phrases in Russian so you can pretend you studied it when she asks.  Tell her, “Anyone can study French.”

THE POET

Oh! Your passion burns like fire!  The feeble shell of your body just can’t contain all the art that’s inside you.  Poetry is in your soul.  You read Shakespeare and do theater.  You like artsy, French New Wave movies.  You fill up notebook after notebook with your deep thoughts and poetry.  You listen to bands so cool that no one in Wichita has heard of them.

Plays and books on theater tell about your life on the stage.  Poetry and epics reveal your romantic soul.  Make sure to have PBR or absinthe on hand.  Try to hide anything that looks too expensive.

The book that makes you approachable: Little House on the Prairie.  It’s nostalgic because she read it as a child.  It’s not poetic or dramatic.  It’s just silly with red state values.

Your go-to move: Poetry, dummy—read her poetry!  Bookmark something romantic or sensual, and be as earnest as you can.  Try some Pablo Neruda or be daring and go straight for “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.”  Gather ye rosebuds while ye may…

THE GURU

You are an enlightened soul.  A feather floating on the eddies of the cosmic current.  You see the light of the divine in all things, and you yearn to share your love.  You must do yoga and love things like green tea, vegan cooking, and farmer’s markets.

Zen classics tell her about your search for inner truth in a world of suffering.  Books on Western philosophy let her know your wisdom isn’t merely limited to the East.  Don’t forget the incense.

The book that makes you approachable: The Tao of Pooh. Winnie the Pooh as a metaphor for The Way?  Clearly you have a sense of humor.

Your go to move: Tantric sex books.  Find an old copy of the Kama Sutra.  Leave Tantric Awakening lying around.  Bookmark a particularly intense passage with a post-it note.  Then let her propose trying some of it out.  A good Buddhist knows that chasing after desire only leads to suffering.

Originally published in the Crib issue of NakedCity magazine, August 2009.

I may be exaggerating just a tad.

But even as our televisions grow monstrously large, new technology is bringing us the freedom to leave our desks behind and do our computing everywhere. It’s happening from two directions. Portable devices are getting better and cheaper, and software is moving off your hard drive and onto the internet.

I don’t need to tell you about the portable devices. You’ve seen the iPhone commercials enumerating the apps they have for everything. I wrote about organizing my whole life through my phone last month. What you may not have noticed—even as you’ve been using it—is that your software is rapidly becoming portable, too. The buzzword term is “cloud computing.”

I know, you’re really sick of learning about the internet’s “next big thing!” buzzword every two years. The media just finally shut up about Web 2.0. But stick with me here—this is really cool and it’s going to make your life easier.

The basic idea is simple: a software program doesn’t have to run on your computer. It can be a “web app” that runs on internet servers somewhere else. Think of the internet as an imaginary cloud of data, always roiling and changing. You interact with the cloud through your web browser, or through hybrid local applications that combine the polish and feel of a desktop application with data streaming from the cloud.

You’re probably already doing this. Your web-based email is a web app that’s been performing the same job as desktop email clients like Outlook for almost 10 years.

Now, just stretch your imagination and think how the benefits of web mail could improve other programs you use. Because they’re online, web apps work on any operating system. They never have to be updated to the latest version or conflict with other programs. Many of them are completely free. You can access them from your living room or an internet cafe in Morocco.

In the future, it won’t just be individual applications—your whole computing experience may be in the cloud, and individual computers will just be places to access it from. In the meantime, I’ve listed some of the best web apps you can use today below. They’re not all as good as their desktop counterparts yet, but the mobility can be truly freeing. I may have finished this article on my laptop, but I started it on Google Docs.

Just remember to unplug your desktop before you take an ax to it.  You want clouds of data, not smoke.

Google is the king of web apps. Their still-young webmail service, Gmail, is the best available. They roll out impressive new services constantly. Google Calendar is a robust calendar program that syncs with Outlook and iCal. Google Docs is still rough around the edges, but provides basic word processing, spreadsheet, and business presentation functions, and can import and export (imperfectly) MS Office files. By downloading a plugin for your computer called Google Gears, you can make your online information and documents accessible offline.

Apple has it’s own suite of applications, MobileMe, with polished email, calendar, address book, and online file storage. Unlike Google, they charge an annual fee, but many feel it’s worth it for the polished interface, powerful syncing, and integration with their Apple devices. Apple’s office suite, iWork, has an anemic web counterpart, likely to improve in the future.

Evernote. A fantastic online organizer for your life. It let’s you collect text, pictures, links, etc., into virtual notebooks online. It has attractive desktop applications that access your online information, browser plugins to make clipping from websites easy, and great smartphones apps. It even uses character recognition to make the text in clipped images searchable

Mint.com makes organizing your finances easy and attractive. The service can download your current financial info from most banks automatically. It lets you track and categorize your spending, generate reports and pie charts, and create email alerts to warn you when funds dip too low or something suspicious happens with your bank account. It also has a great iPhone app.

Pandora is a little like iTunes on autopilot. It’s an online radio station that lets you create your own personal stations and learns what you like as you rate songs thumbs up or thumbs down. For an annual fee, you can stream higher quality recordings, skip more songs every hour, and use a desktop application so you don’t have to keep your browser open. And again, they have a great iPhone app.  Notice a trend?

Remember the Milk. Another great organizational tool. It’s an online to do list with lots of great features to help keep you on track. Their great iPhone app costs extra.

Twitter. Need I say more?

Originally published in the Move issue of NakedCity magazine, July 2009.

“Welcome to Apple. I’m Lisa, the automated concierge agent. What can I help you with today? Do you need to make an appointment for help at the Genius bar? Or would you like me to help you find a new Mac or iPod? Or I could call over a sales clerk to help you.” She spreads her hands in front of her and the options she mentioned appear as text floating in front of her. “Just point at what you need.”

You point at the option that says “Shop for Laptops” hovering over her front. The menu disappears and leaves you pointing at her breasts. “Watch where you’re pointing,” she says with a wink, “My iMacs are up here! I can show you any of these laptops, or I can ask you some questions to help you figure out which one is right for you.” As the latest MacBook models appear floating beside her, you think to yourself—is the computer flirting with me?

Welcome to the future of retail. (It’s a utopian future. That’s why we finally have an Apple Store.)

It sounds like a scene from Minority Report, with interactive advertisements calling your name and talking to you about your last purchase. But the technology for automated sales kiosks already exists and sees limited use in Europe and Asia. Now IMG is trying to make it take off in the US.

NakedCity took a tour of the IMG offices in Old Town and got to play with the model they use to demonstrate at conventions and have had on display at Final Friday events.

It’s simple, really. Instead of an expensive and fragile touchscreen, an image is projected onto an ordinary sheet of glass. A bar overhead runs the length of the glass and uses cameras to track your hand movement. You don’t touch the screen—it wouldn’t do any good anyway, it’s just glass—you gesture in the air, and the cameras interpret to move a virtual mouse.

IMG is the sole US importer of the tracking bar, and they’ve developed the kiosk setup we played with for clients. But the hardware isn’t the story, and it isn’t what really gets them really excited. Merely pointing at a screen is a flashy trick that will get this technology noticed. But there’s nothing amazing you can do with gestures that you couldn’t do similarly with a touchscreen or a mouse. The software is just interactive video and Flash like you use on websites. You’re moving a “mouse” with your finger.

The groundbreaking idea here—the thing that’s really going to impact your life—is the content of the programs being run. It’s putting interactive computers, with human faces on them, into your daily life. Within 10 years, advertisements will call out to you on the street. Your bathroom mirror will light up with weather reports and morning news, just like JARVIS in Iron Man. When you get lost in the mall, an interactive map will lead you to the food court. And Lisa will help you decide that the entry level MacBook is powerful enough for you after all, saving you $600.

And IMG will be the ones giving these digital people faces and personality.

Originally published in the Sync issue of NakedCity magazine, June 2009.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.
~ George Bernard Shaw

Those who picked up this issue for my article about Church on the Street—because they met me doing research or my mom told them about it at church—may be shocked to see my name beneath this headline.  In this issue, we’ve done a bit of exploring the “sacred.”  I want to give a brief meditation on something I hold sacred: the Profane.

I believe that civilization—everything that word encompasses, art, politics, science, and philosophy—is a process of creation and destruction.  Movements and truths are born, and they grow.  But over time, human nature turns truths into dogmas.  We turn them into institutions and the ideas behind them calcify.   Everything must be torn down and built anew.

I believe there must always be someone standing on the brink, pushing us onward.  The Subversives, the Artists, the Satirists, the Prophets who come out of the desert to throw the moneychangers out of the temple.  When we meet these people we call them profane because they break the taboos.  They drag us out of Order and into Chaos, and we don’t like to change.  We fight to silence the artist.  We’ll try to murder the prophet.

History is filled with the martyrs of subversion, whose profanity is now our holy truth:  St. Socrates of Athens, St. Wilde of Dublin, St. Ghandi of Porbander, St. Martin of Atlanta.

Speaking of martyrs, what would Jesus do?  If one believes the Bible, he would tell you to sell everything you own and give all your money to charity.  Then he would eat lunch with streetwalkers, embezzlers, and transvestites.  He would inform his followers that they have missed the point entirely (myself surely included).  Two thousand years later, his message remains so subversive that we whitewash over it.

Originally published in the Sacred issue of NakedCity magazine, May 2009.

They meet in the courtyard behind the Historical Museum.  The buildings around them make excellent walls—the yellow stone of the museum on one side, cold cement on the other, with ivy clinging to the bottom.  A gazebo, with its graceful point, serves as both pulpit and steeple.  People mill around a line for coffee and tea, talking and laughing.  The sound guy is checking the speakers and mic.  Others are finishing the setup for the fellowship meal afterwards.  Things are running late because they forgot the ladles.  It’s really just like a church.  But there’s no ceiling.

It’s an important point, because most of the congregants of Church on the Street are homeless or on the edge of homelessness.  Walls abound for them, but there aren’t enough ceilings.

* * *

I heard about Church on the Street through my friend, Brenna Powers.  Brenna has been the church’s main pastor since it’s founder, Mike Young, died of cancer a year ago.  I interview her and another acquaintance, Cliff Bragg, an assistant pastor, at the Donut Whole, where we discuss the destitute and the hollowness of the modern church experience over donuts.  Writing about the homeless is apparently replete with symbolism and pathetic fallacy.

They fill me in.  Young and others created Church on the Street to minister to the people on the margins in Wichita.  They meet every Sunday at 12:30 in Heritage Park, even in the foulest weather.  As much as 90 percent of the churchgoers are people in physical need.  They come for the human fellowship, the spiritual message, and the free lunch and hot coffee provided.  Brenna and Cliff are quick to explain that it’s a church, not a charity.  It’s a spiritual community seeking to follow the example of Jesus by living among those who need help the most.

“It’s a church that fills the needs of its congregants.  Like any church does,” Brenna explains.  “No one who goes there consistently, goes there to get their feeling of charity.  Maybe initially, but not anymore.”

Cliff goes on, “It’s not like the Lord’s Diner, where people volunteer to come help for a week.  We want people to come in and get involved—establish roots, grow deep.  And in the process you serve each other.  So you’re not serving the homeless, you’re serving each other.  So it might be that there’s a homeless person in line one day serving us.”

* * *

I go three times, and each time the weather gets worse.  The first Sunday, there’s a lot of snow on the ground, but the air feels like spring.  A family with several younger children is shoveling some of the slush away.  Purple buds peek through the snow melting snow on the trees.  Water is dripping everywhere, and I’m wearing too many layers.

Someone greets me right away when they notice my notepad, and before long, I’m sipping carefully from a styrofoam cup of scalding tea, while Brenna and Cliff introduce me people.  They’re setting up the food line to my right—ham and beans.  After a brief service, everyone will dig in.  “We keep it very short because we know how hungry they are,” Cliff tells me.

I’ve come on an unusual day.  Cliff is going to talk to the church about some problems that have been brewing.  There’s been some normal church acrimony developing—judging and bickering—and some problems that spring from the unusual demographic—threats and under-the-radar dealing.  This is especially worrying.  The police have been very respectful of the church, but that won’t last if they start getting called in to deal with drug sales and brawls.

“I’m not coming here to condemn anyone.  I’m standing here because I love you so much.  I’m not standing here in the snow for my own health.  I come here because I love you so much,” Cliff tells the crowd.  “You were beautifully and wonderfully made by God.  I don’t care what anyone says.”

He’s standing on the steps of the gazebo, talking to a loose assemblage of about 50 people.  “I’m going to establish right now, if it hasn’t been done before, that this is church. This is not a park.  For two hours, every Sunday from now on, this is church.”  There are people in nice clothes (many of whom are homeless) and rags.  I see a man in a suit, people in jeans, men in layered sweatshirts underneath filthy coveralls, and a girl in boots that are not practical for snow.

“This place is holy.  And by holy I don’t mean sinless!  I don’t mean struggle-less!  I don’t mean that people come in here and have their crap together!  That means people come in here who are like me who know that they are so messed up that they need something bigger than them to help.  They know that they can’t do it on their own.”  There are people of every skin tone.  Adults and children.  The diverse crowd and the message of love could be a touching TV moment if the real need in these people wasn’t so raw.

“This is one of the easier ministries I’ve been a part of, because no one is hiding their brokenness,” Brenna tells me.  “Any love is falling on a very hungry soul.”

Cliff wraps up a moving sermon—“God loves us.  And I think that’s good enough”—and the downtown bells go off with magic timing.  Normally they are not so lucky.  Everyone moves on to the ham and beans.

* * *

“You know how some people are livin’ for Friday?  It’s the end of the workweek, and they can’t wait till Friday.  We can’t wait till 12:30 on Sunday.  And we live our week that way.  This started Friday about noon—the cooking.”

I’m talking to Stubby, a board member of Church on the Street.  He’s also the president of the local chapter of the Diakonos Brotherhood, a group that’s integral to the church.  They’re a motorcycle ministry made up of born-again broken souls.  There are five guys in the Wichita chapter, four of whom are recovering addicts.  They wear black leather vests with Jolly Roger patches and answer to names like Sweat Hog and Hollywood.  “They’ve all been to hell and back,” Brenna tells me.

“One person you can reach and keep from being hungry tonight, or take somebody to treatment and have them not go to sleep fucked up or drunk—it’s all worth it,” Sweat Hog tells me.  “Save one human being, that’s what it’s about for us.”

The brothers were doing this kind of work before Church on the Street came along.  After they connected  with the church, they jumped right in to help.  They drive around a rebuilt school bus full of clothes and supplies—the Cool Bus.  Barrels of clothes get set up on the sidewalk outside the park, and people can look through and take what they need.  Once a month they do the cooking and Roger, their chaplain, does the message.  “It just takes the load off Church on the Street,” Stubby says.

Crucially, their attitude helps make the church approachable.  It’s easy to see that guys like them wouldn’t be involved with a group of holier-than-thou prigs.  That’s important to Stubby.

“You know, I’m a recovering addict.  I’ve been clean 17 years.  Up to that point, never did anybody approach me in this fashion.  And it makes me think, I could have saved myself years of misery had somebody done that—even planted a little seed.”

* * *

It’s Diakonos’ Sunday this week.  Palm Sunday.  I just came from my church’s service, and the contrast is stark.  The wind is biting cold, and by the time I leave, my toes will be numb.  There are no children waving palm leaves, only naked branches on the trees in the courtyard.  I left a special cantata service early to meet Marc, my photographer.  We sit in his car until it’s time to face the wind.

Marc sets off photographing everything while I talk to people.  They’re unloading a large cross from the Cool Bus.  Roger made it this week, and the plan is for one of them to stand holding it up it in the middle of the courtyard every Sunday.  Marc and I observe a wonderful, postmodern occurrence.  A Hispanic man (brown like Jesus) takes it from them and, unselfconsciously Christlike, bears it on his shoulder to it’s own Calvary, mercifully nearby.  Marc discovers his name is Cruz (Cross).

It turns out that the Diakonos brothers are champion barbecuers.  Everyone eats the best barbecued chicken I’ve ever tasted.

* * *

I ask Cliff and Brenna whether they consider the Church on the Street a part of the Emerging Church movement—a general trend among younger Christians to move away from traditional church institutions toward a more forgiving, practical theology and social justice concerns.  Cliff is quick to dismiss affiliation.  “No, not at all.  No way.  We’re not trying to be a part of any church movement.”

“We’re not a movement, we’re not a charity, we’re not an organization, we’re not trying to pioneer anything.  We’re not trying to do anything.  We’re just living life.  And we happen to do that with people who have been abandoned or happen to be neglected,” he tells me.  “When Jesus was alive, he just lived among who he was around.  Nothing profound about that, except that we happen to be doing it with a group of people who have been marginalized.  No one pays attention to them except when it’s charitable.”

I have to laugh to myself, because Cliff and Brenna have been rattling off points from the emerging church manifesto the entire interview.  Defining the church as a fellowship of people, not a building; living within the world; focusing on physical needs before spiritual ones; shunning hierarchy—from my outsider’s perspective their group is textbook emerging church.

It reminds me of the Absurdist playwrights:  Brilliant playwrights working independently, all exploring similar themes, using similar forms.  Added together, their work was the most important movement of the 20th century.  But when someone first noticed the similarity and named the trend, they all flatly denied being Absurdists.  They said they weren’t interested in being part of any Movement.

I point out to Cliff that they needn’t be part of an organized faction to be part of a larger trend.  “Okay,” he says.  “So what?  Are you gonna pick up a spoon and help serve or what?  I don’t think any of us care.”

* * *

Easter is both cold and wet.  The rain keeps people away.  Everyone who does show up huddles around the gazebo to keep dry.  At the moment this gazebo is all the building they have.  They’d like to find something—they’re getting more food donations, and they don’t have anywhere to put them—but they’re leery of a mortgage.  They want people who donate money to know it’s all going to the needy and not to pay for some building.

“We’re kind of hoping that someone will give us one,” says Brenna.

They do dream about opening a shelter, where they can have Bible studies, and showers, and kitchens, and a hostel-type setup for people to help take care of themselves.  “That’s why we’re maybe even looking for a place that’s run down, so that it can be a community project, where the homeless can come fix it up and say, ‘Look what we’ve done. This is our sanctuary.’ That’s our dream.”

Worship will always take place outside, though—or at least, huddled under the gazebo.  In the meantime, they’re focusing on bringing people into the embrace of their spiritual family.  When Mike Young was grooming Brenna to take his place, he told her, “All it takes is compassion.  You start from that.”

Her spirits cheerful, despite losing her prepared message to a puddle, Brenna delivers an Easter sermon that speaks to her family’s world—about a Jesus who people wouldn’t see because he wasn’t mighty.  About a God who cares about people’s hearts, not their clothing or possessions.

Originally published in the Sacred issue of NakedCity magazine, May 2009.

No, we do not.

In appreciation of your patience, we present to you our decadent, new signature cocktail.  The name is risque, but logical: if a gin & tonic is a G&T, then surely an absinthe & tonic is a T&A. You deserve a little T&A, you saint of sustainability, you.  And although it’s pale green in color, no attempt at environmental responsibility has been made on our part.  Enjoy!

T&A

1 oz. Lucid Absinthe Supérieure
1/2 oz. Absolut Pear
Tonic

Fill a highball glass with ice. Pour in a short shot of absinthe and a little Absolut Pear to taste. (Don’t substitute Grey Goose; the pear flavor is different.) Top off with tonic. Optionally you can garnish with a small amount of muddled fresh mint.

Originally published in the Green issue of NakedCity magazine, April 2009.