Ha! Good one.

Heart

Actually, i went to high school with two sisters whose family was in the church. They were very, very sensitive about the whole thing and had actually testified in court about some kind of anti-cult legislation. The one who was closer to my age cried when she talked about how people viewed her family’s religion as a dangerous cult. She was, besides the whole moonie thing, otherwise incredibly intelligent, well-read, and politically active (in some good stuff). It started to make me think… hey, this might be OK, leave well enough alone? Expand your horizons, you know?

Then i visited her house and saw how subjugated her mother was, nearly chained to a stack of dirty dishes that somehow just piled and piled and never got done. She’d never learned to drive, so she just never left the house unless someone took her. Her father was never home, “working” in any small cafe he could find on his laptop. They both left the kids for California during high school and as far as i know, are still there, doing “work” for the “church.” One sister moved to nyc to become a famous actress and burned out after a few months of not finding any work; the other still grapples with a crippling, ugly case of depression. That one lives in the old family home with a constantly rising number of smelly-ass, uncared-for cats, whom she refuses to get neutered.

i can’t help but think that the cat girl and the out-of-work-actress might’ve had different lives if their parents hadn’t spent all the kids’ childhood preaching bull-honkey, but maybe that’s just me. Maybe it had nothing to do with the fact that they were all deeply, deeply delusional. Who knows.