Calling All Parents

                                                                         

Father and Mother Osmond

I'm now blogging without the assistance or hindrance of my recent secretarial aide, my father. For future reference in this column, unless I'm quoting myself  addressing him, my father shall henceforth be known as "John." This is for the sake of brevity and clarity. If I say 'dad" or 'father," I have to add a modifier of  "my,"  because I otherwise may be referring either to someone else's parent or be using the term in a general sense. if I refer to my own father as 'John," we all know about whom I'm talking. On the rare occasion on which I refer to another john besides my father, i will identify said John in such a way that it is clear I'm not talking about my John.. If John happens to read this later, he should console himself with the promise that I shall continue to afford him the respect of calling him "Dad" or "Daddy" when I address him. but is that sufficiently respectful?

On an only slightly related note,  I shall share with readers a rather odd anecdote. In the original Osmond family, as in with  Donny, Marie, Jay, Wayne, Alan, Jimmy, Merrill, and a pair of deaf brothers as the kids, and George and Olive as the parents, referring to their parents as "Mom and Dad," "Mommy and Daddy," or anything along those lines was forbidden. According to the opinion of George Osmond, patriarch of the pack [I wonder of "Patriarch" and "Patriarchess'' would have been acceptable alternatives to George Osmond] because we do not refer to our "Father in Heaven" as "Daddy" on the supposed grounds that such would be disrespectful, it likewise would be disrespectful for the Osmond spawn to refer to George as anything less formal than "Father," or to their mother, "Olive," as anything other than "Mother." For the record, George and Olive have passed on, so the point has become largely academic in the case of the Osmonds.

Incidentally,  members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe that God has a wife ["In the heavens, are parents single? No! The thought makes reason stare!" That's a direct quote from a hymn. I'll probably be sued for copyright infringement..] , or maybe two or three or more, but one can be tossed out of formal church membership, AKA excommunicated, for speaking too freely about this supposed (or one of these supposed)"Mother(s) in Heaven." 

If you do not believe me, go into an LDS Church (a recent memo has dictated that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is not to be referred to either as "The Mormon Church" or "The LDS Church," but there's not a whole heaping lot that the Mormon Church can do to me for referring to them any damn way I please) and somehow get yourself invited to give one of the many group prayers that will be offered throughout the three-hour mind- and butt-numbing marathon.  You'll notice that prayers characteristically begin with  "Our Father in Heaven," "Our Heavenly Father, "Our Father Who Art in Heaven," "O God, the Eternal Father,"   "Our Father Who Sits on his Butt on His Throne in in Heaven Spitting Sunflower Seeds Down on Those of us Here on Earth,"  "Our Father Which art in Heaven," (I've never understood the  LDS use of the pronoun which in  this sense in terms of when we typically use who and when we typically use which; are we referring to God as an object,  as opposed to an actual being, in which case would that not be a form of making unto ourselves graves images?) or any other of the various and sundry salutations.

 Start your prayer, instead, with "Our Father and Mother in Heaven," "Our Father and Mother Who (or Which) Art in Heaven, " or "Our Dear Heavenly Father and Mother."  If you want to see the fur fly even faster, reverse the order: try "O God, the Eternal Mother and Father" in order to cut the monotony. watch what happens. Two to one, you won't even be allowed to finish your prayer. Either someone will start it all over and finish it for you, or the meeting will go prayerless  just this once.

How important is the form of  reference to a parent? Should an offspring address a parent by his or her first name?  Is Mom, Dad or some other essentially affectionate form of parental address acceptable? Or should a parent only be referred to as "Mother" or "Father" because that's how we typically refer to God?

I'm curious as to the opinions of others.

Osmond Mania

Marie Osmond and Steve Craig, her first and third husband, on the occasion of the second of the couple's two weddings

I've been functioning as a graduate assistant in the biochemistry department for the past three weeks. I'm not technically a graduate student but I've completed all graduate requirements both for the department and for the university, and one of my former professors' grad assistants got sick and hasn't been in school for a month, so he asked me to fill in. It's good experience, so I said yes. I'm doing a lot of accompanying for the music department, but I'm otherwise not all that busy right now.


I spent yesterday, while I was helping to proctor department make-up exams, I was reading various Osmond literature. Last night I watched some videos when a date, on which I really didn't want to go but felt obligated,  fell through.

The Osmonds are an intriguing case study in what might be most aptly termed functional dysfunctionality. All nine of the Osmond second generation live or lived relatively productive lives, but it seems that they're doing so or have done so under protest. I haven't walked any distance in their shoes so I find it reasonably easy not to judge them. Marie, however, I find more than a bit annoying.

Marie has a rather curious habit of writing books from the perspective of an expert about most phases of her life. When she was pregnant for the first time, she authored a how-to edition on exercising for expectant mothers. One might have assumed that she was the first woman on the planet ever to have been pregnant or to have exercised while pregnant. Immediately after the birth of her first child, she wrote a book about regaining one's pre-pregnancy body by exercising with one's baby. Again, one might have assumed that she was the first person to whom it ever occurred to lose pregnancy weight after giving birth. She has penned numerous other volumes -- there are so many that I get confused about the actual books she's written and the ones I've just imagined. Some may be about  life as a teen recording artist, about life when going through post-partum depression, about going through a divorce (or two),  about losing one's mother, about losing a fingernail in a car-door accident, about beating the habit of biting her fingernails, about losing a husband to a polygamous cult, and about various and sundry other topics. I've barely scratched the surface of the catalog of Marie Osmond's literary works.

Knotty recently pointed out an interview featuring Marie's third-eldest (and the oldest of her singing brothers, as brothers numbers one and two were hearing impaired) brother Alan. Alan came of age during the Viet Nam War.  By virtue of being, among other things, a trophy-winning shooter in boot camp (Were trophies ever awarded in boot camp for shooting or for anything else?), Alan bypassed Viet Nam and instead braved the all dangers indigenous to Fort Ord, California, as a clerical worker in a local National Guard unit.  Alan also told in the interview of how The Spirit made manifest to him that he was not supposed to serve a mission. He woke his mother up at 6:00 a.m. to tell her of his otherworldly experience.Alan's mother was concerned about how he would avoid the draft if he didn't serve a mission. Alan's sons all served missions except possibly for the youngest one, who may not yet have reached the minimum age for serving a mission. I would love to know what Alan's response might have been had any one of his sons woken up either of his parents to announce that he weren't supposed to serve a  mission.

George Osmond,father of the singing Osmonds, now deceased, was an interesting character. He was a rather stern taskmaster who reportedly was not pleased when his children brought friends to the family home to play and who once punished six-year-old Donny for writing a letter to his mother from Sweden requesting to come home.  The single most bizarre thing to me about George Osmond was that he required his children to call their parents "Mother" and "Father" because one does not refer to God as "Dad" or "Daddy," so why should Father or Mother Osmond be addressed any less formally? Does Mr. Osmond was placing himself on a level on par with God?

I've ranted enough about the Osmonds. Have a nice week.

White Trash Temple Wedding Extravaganza

Eat at your own risk.

This blog will be relatively short by my standards because I have to go check out some Tom Trails videos which were popular in LDS seminary when y dad was a kid. I've never seen a filmstrip, so it will be an educational experience.

The latest on my cousin Celeste's wedding is that she and her mom tried making a practice wedding cake and it was the single biggest disaster in the history of baking. I suggested to my mom that she suggest to them that they   get one of those tiered trays that displays cupcakes beautifully and master the art of making cupcakes or mini-cupcakes. they'll need to invest in (or have Uncle Mahonri steal) a device that frosts them nicely, because they just can't take a knife and spread frosting out of a can all over cupcakes when it's supposed to look really nice.  I just don't want them dumping this project in my grandmother's lap. she's getting old, and it's too much work for her. She can maybe advise them, but they cannot dump the whole project on her. There's no one currently in Utah we can trust to make sure that my grandma doesn't get stuck with the whole project.  If that happens, she'll be exhausted and maybe even too sick to go to the wedding and reception, and she should be the guest of honor.  My dad told her NOT to do it, nd he's calling her doctor about it as well.

There's a curtain between the chapel and the cultural hall in Mormon buildings. They're going to open the curtain, and they want my mom to play the piano the whole time. That's really gracious, isn't it? Invite someone to a wedding, don't actually let her come to the wedding because she's not worthy, then expect her to play the piano through the whole reception (for free when that's essentially what she does for a living). My mom said she doesn't care, though. She'd rather play the piano than hang around the relatives, and she says she'll play whatever she wants  regardless of what the bride and groom want, because she's fairly certain based on everything else she's heard about the bridal couple that they have no taste in music just like they have no taste in anything else.  Actually, she has to take part in a faculty recital a couple of weeks later, and she'll play mostly what she's playing for that, plus whatever pops into her head. She has a good memory just like my dad and I do. She doesn't need to bring music with her.

This LDS chapel supposedly has a nice Kawai piano, and my dad will tune it right before. My mom said it would be hysterical to have the curtain partly closed, to have me be the one playing the music, to have them all commenting on how beautiful the music is, and then to open the curtain all the way and show them that it's the Anti-Christ Child actually playing and not my mom, but that's not going to happen because I'm not going. My mom knows this; she was just speaking hypothetically.

I feel sorry for the people who attend this soiree, because if the people in charge don't take my advice and bake cupcakes, chances are the wedding cake WILL fall on the floor. The slobs making it will scrape it off the floor, re-frost it the best they can, and serve it to the guests using the five-minute rule. The five-second rule would be bad enough, but allowing people to eat cake that's been sitting on the floor of a building that is NEVER professionally cleaned (LDS Inc. makes the proletariat clean the buildings on a "volunteer" basis) sounds like a case of salmonella, e coli, or worse just waiting to happen.

Gotta check out Tommy Trails and practice a little more piano and violin. Ciao.

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Somehow, even though certain specifics of the song aren't particularly pertinent, it fits. By the time the bride's father is dressing in black  and stealing neighbors' flowers in the dead of night in a completely futil attempt to dishuise basketball hoops, and the weding cake has been scraped off the floor AT LEAST once, the event is pretty white-trashy. This is the Dixie Chicks performing "White Trash Wedding."  Someone really clever shoud come up with a "White Trash Temple Wedding"  version of the song. Maybe the Osmonds, The King Family descendants, or even the Three Dees if they're stilll alive, could record it.