Sunday Morning Hot Tea - No. 41
Where Were You the Year AFTER the World Stopped Turning? and Diary Drama
Welcome to Sunday Morning Hot Tea where I write about a little something up top then answer a legal question for you down below. This week, the worst sermon I ever heard, and the great diary caper.
In this edition:
Topic of the Week – T-Shirt Envy
Legal Question – Tan Almost Everywhere, Jan Almost Everywhere
9/11/2002
It was the fall semester of my sophomore year in high school. 2002. A weird time for anybody - being a sophomore in high school and all. But also a weird time for being an American - being post-9/11 and all.
My school was especially hard to navigate as far as cliques was concerned. I was in theater, so I had my theater friends. And I was in gifted/talented English, so I had my GT nerd friends. The one clique I desperately yearned to be a part of was the most visible clique of all - the Christian kids.
As far as cliques go, the Christian kids weren’t terribly exclusive. The only requirements to join were (1) offering your eternal soul to Jesus, and (2) attending weekly meetings. But, like so many religions throughout the centuries, the Christian cliques in my school had separated into schisms.
In one corner, wearing orange T-shirts on worship-day Wednesday, was the crew from Mimosa Lane Baptist Church. And in the other corner, wearing royal blue T-shirts on worship-day Wednesday was the group from Sunnyvale Baptist Church. Warring gangs in a battle for teenage souls.
I wasn’t raised religious. I didn’t have a yearning for the Lord’s word. I just wanted one of those T-shirts. I wanted to be part of the sea of a thousand shirts, swimming with one school or the other. Didn’t matter which one. I wanted to belong.
My family went to church service about once a year (some years) at a small shack of a place behind the nearby elementary school. The preacher there was all fire and brimstone. He was a thousand-year-old man in an even older suit, yelling until he was red in the face about damnation. He punctuated each sweat-soaked sermons with an “Amen,” that was called back to him from the folks in the pews.
My mom’s best friend, Lillian, was the one who invited us to attend that church with her. Lillian was a foul-mouthed redhead about ten year’s my mom’s senior. She wore large, round glasses the diameter of a coffee mug and had a mouth permanently drawn up in a skeptical smirk. Her cheeks were sunken from years of wrapping her lips around cigarettes, and she was the first person I ever heard say the word “fuck” in real life.
“Sometimes the only thing that will help is a good use of the word ‘fuck,’” Lillian told me. Once, when she had dropped a 64 oz. can of Wolf Brand Chili on her toe, she told me the only thing that got her through the pain was a good “fuck.”
I took this lesson to heart. In middle school, when I slammed my finger in my locker door, the only thing I could do was grumble a good “fuck” to the shock of the kids in earshot.
Our middle school sat in the nexus of two neighborhoods - old Mesquite, where I lived, and the newly developed and more affluent Creek Crossing. When the new houses were built in Creek Crossing, the city had to build new schools to serve the influx of residents. First, they built grade schools, and a middle school soon followed. When they drew the lines determining who went where, my street and its solidly built but much older houses ended up drawn into the new middle school zone.
Some of the kids in Creek Crossing had not heard the word “fuck” on TV, forget about real life. Certainly never from another kid. I was willing to say it, though, along with any number of other curse words I had learned from my favorite show, South Park. This reputation made me the proud recipient of seven - yes, SEVEN - Bibles the first year of middle school. A few shy, religious kids, no doubt prompted by their well-meaning parents, scurried up to me at various points throughout the day before Christmas break. They thrust the Bibles toward me with a quiet, “Here you go. Merry Christmas.”
By high school, none of the many Bibles I had received had managed to cast the cursing demon out of me. It was no wonder then that I had not been invited to one of the two ultra-popular religious cliques. At first, I rebelled. I told myself I didn’t want to go to either of their nerd churches. They sounded boring. And dumb. But these were just lies I told myself to feel better. The truth was I yearned to be invited. I ached to wear one of those T-shirts on Wednesdays. I decided what I wanted most of all was to go to the orange church.
Yes, the orange church was where most of my friends attended. But I also made that church the focus of my desire by process of elimination. I didn’t want to go to the blue church because of some stories I had heard from its attendees. They had scared me straight into camp orange.
A blue-shirt-wearing classmate told me how she got fingered by her boyfriend in the church bathroom during Wednesday night services. Another attendee described trying anal sex for the first time in the cab of her boyfriend’s truck in the blue church parking lot after a different Wednesday night worship service. Both attendees felt comfortable performing these sex acts because, according to them, neither of those counted as “sex” in the Lord’s eye. It didn’t seem to factor into the equation that the acts were performed on church property.
Not wanting to be penetrated in any way, God-approved or not, I decided that the blue shirt church was not for me.
After waiting all of freshman year, finally, a few weeks into the fall semester of our sophomore year, it happened. An orange-shirted classmate invited me to Wednesday night worship service. I was in.
On Wednesday, September 11, 2002, I begged my mom and she agreed to drive me to the evening worship service at the orange shirt church.
Once inside, I felt still in a room swirling with laughing, shiny, blonde kids. I had walked in on a warmup game. Lesson number one: you’ve gotta warm up for worship! Groups of teens were challenged to throw plastic fish into assigned baskets. Unfamiliar with most Bible verses, I was left to assume that this game had something to do with scripture.
Listen, I said I RECEIVED Bibles as gifts. I never said that I had studied those Bibles. For all I knew, there was a passage saying, “And then the Lord sayeth onto the crowd, ‘Throw thine fish into thither basket, m’lords and ladies.’” That’s what the Bible sounds like, right? Like something from a Renaissance faire?
That was another reason I wanted to be recruited into the T-shirt gangs – the Bible references. I could have listed off the whole cast of The Dick Van Dyke Show. I could have given you the entire track listing of every Beatles album. If you needed someone to recite Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I was your girl. But when it came to understanding the reference of a cool kid’s “Abreadcrumb & Fish” Abercrombie & Fitch Christian parody shirt, I was outmatched.
High energy games like fish-in-a-basket were a great marketing ploy to get kids in the door. If you wanted to recruit the school’s best and brightest (who, in turn, would bring in the street rats like me), you had to throw some fun and games in there. I don’t blame them. Competition for souls was high. In our small town of Mesquite, there were easily 20+ churches all vying for attendees. If you could do like orange shirt church and recruit the coolest kids - your baseball stars and football stars and soccer stars - the rest would come.
Amidst the chaos, I saw a sandy haired guy in his early twenties take the stage. He put the mic to his mouth and asked if maybe we wouldn’t mind finishing up our games and could we please, um, possibly take our seats?
I had never even begun the game. Not understanding its purpose, I had lied to my team and said I had to go to the bathroom. Instead, I wandered from my assigned group of smiling Hollister models and crept to the back wall where I watched in silence as everyone else played.
Behind the leader who couldn’t lead, a group of kids I recognized as musicians from school took the stage and started grabbing instruments. The projector lit up. My classmates began to play, and the dough-faced leader took the microphone from the stand.
“Everybody, let’s take a seat,” he said. I complied, taking a seat about halfway up the room, dead center.
Of the fifty or more teens in the room, I was joined by only about five more. The rest were too wrapped up in the Holy Spirit of competition to obey the youth pastor’s commands.
He surveyed the room, pressed the mic closer to his lips, and motioned for the sound engineer at the back of the room to crank up the volume.
“LET. US. PRAY,” he shouted.
The room fell silent as if he had flipped a kill switch within everyone’s brains all at once. I looked over each of my shoulders in turn. Everyone – every single human person around me – had dropped their heads in a bow and now stood silent and still. Feeling like my head was very obviously the only un-whacked mole, I bowed down, too, and prepared for my moment with the Lord.
Face with the full attention of the crowd, the youth leader began his prayer.
“Lord, may we please ask for all these children - your children, Father God - to come to order and have a seat?”
I was no expert, but this seemed like a petty request to ask of the one Almighty God. I didn’t know Him that well, but I couldn’t imagine God was that much of a micromanager. But, like sheep in the proverbial flock, the other kids came over and filled in the pews around me.
“Thank you, Lord,” the youth leader said. I was impressed. God had moved these teenagers to sit down. Truly moved by the power of prayer. Praise the Lord. The youth leader began his sermon.
“The events of this day one year ago are, I’m sure, imprinted on all of your minds just like they are on mine. You remember where you were and who you were with when you watched the news of the attack.”
He was right. I remembered that day as clearly as I remember it all these years later. I was brushing my teeth and listening to the Kidd Kraddick in the Morning drive time radio show. My mom had turned on the local news. We listened to Kidd and watched the footage on ABC News. There it was - what would become an iconic image of the World Trade Center, billowing smoke, flaming across the bright blue New York sky.
“My God,” I said, toothbrush still in my mouth. “That pilot is such an idiot. The building is huge. How could anyone have run a plane into the side? Don’t they have computers on board or something?”
My mom shook her head and told me what we’d all soon learn was the truth: “That was no accident.”
At thirteen, I didn’t really grasp what a terrorist was. Before that day, terrorists were bad guys in movies – your Hans Grubers, British and sinister, wearing suits and doing heists. Now, terrorists were very real, right there on TV, the impact of their carnage evident in images that would be printed in history books.
In those initial moments, I couldn’t grasp all the lives that were lost that day. All the moms and dads and daughters and sons and friends and neighbors who wouldn’t come back home. Watching the smoke billowing back into the building, I never considered people who were suffocating, burning to death, trapped in those walls. Those realizations came with time. As it unfolded in real time, I still had the benefit of innocence.
Little black dots began streaming down the screen. Those were people. Jumping. I couldn’t fathom why they would jump. Just wait, I thought, naive and hopeful. Help is on the way.
The morning of 9/11, I stood watching Good Morning America, while listening to Kidd Kraddick try to carry on and offer some sense of hope. Then another plane entered the frame.
Watch out for that building, I thought. It was too late. Just like that - one minute you’re hurtling through the air in a pressurized cabin or sitting at your desk trading stocks or whatever and the next you’re engulfed in flames.
I don’t know if I screamed. I can’t remember if I cried. I know my mom, clinging to some sense of normalcy, drove me to school that day. I rode along, eager to board my school bus for a scheduled field trip that would never happen.
A year to that day, I then found myself in a church pew, surrounded by a venerable who’s-who of our school. I was following the crowd, sure. Thirsty for a t-shirt, admittedly. But I was also looking for answers. I was looking for God, the great and powerful deity, the Awesome One, subject of the music advertised on late night commercials.
I thought surely He dwelled within the walls of this, the trendiest church, where His most cherubic-faced followers gathered to raise their arms and praise Him. I was there to seek Him and expected that He would offer me an answer as to why something like 9/11 could have happened. These, the coolest of kids of our school, would help me receive his message.
Pastor Chet/Chad/Brad adjusted the microphone cord and continued his sermon. The assembled teenage band behind him strummed their instruments in a quiet soundtrack to his words.
“On a day like today, we want to be thankful. Thankful to be together. Thankful for the first responders – the heroes – who put their lives on the line that day, one year ago.”
The teens around me were not thankful. Or at least, if they were, they were too chatty to recognize it. I struggled to hear him over whispers and giggles. His eyes darted around, and he went back to his tried-and-true trick.
“Let us pray!” he commanded once again. The students responded. Again, their heads dropped in immediate silence.
“Lord, please give these students some patience. Father God, we ask you to give these students the self-control not to talk while I am talking,” he said.
My head popped up from its bow. I stared up at Chet/Chad/Brad. There he stood, nearly a teen himself, fresh out of whatever school qualifies you to be a youth pastor, asking God once again to use His almighty power to step in and do some crowd control.
Now standing in reverent silence, he finished it off with an “Amen!” With the full attention of the crowd, he got into the meat of his message.
“You all remember last year, when those terrorists got into the pilots’ cabins and crashed those planes. Before the terrorists got in there, those planes were headed to their destinations. And they would have made it if not for those terrorists.”
Yikes, I thought. Coming on a little strong with the terrorism reminders. Still, I was patient. It wasn’t easy to discuss this kind of thing. He continued.
“I want you to think about that. About those terrorists overwhelming the pilots. You are like those airplanes,” he said.
Oh no, I thought. Don’t do it. Don’t do it.
He did it.
“You are a plane scheduled to go to the ultimate destination,” he said, pausing for effect. After he looked across the crowd and found us sufficiently attentive, he whispered into the microphone: “Heaven.”
My eyebrows shot up. I checked the faces of the students around me, but no one else seemed to be reacting.
“Jesus died so all of you could go to your destination. He bought that plane ticket for you. But your destination is not guaranteed. Just like all those people on the planes on 9/11. The devil – he’s like those terrorists. He wants to derail you and keep you from your destination. The devil is banging on the door of the cockpit of your soul. You cannot let him in. Once he’s in your cockpit, he will crash your plane right into those flaming Twin Towers of sin.”
My eyes were wide, but I wasn’t staring at Pastor Chet/Chad/Brad. I was staring through him. I remembered watching the towers burn just a year before. I remembered watching the memorials and fundraisers on TV in the months since. Families torn apart. Widows and orphans heartbroken. I remembered hearing about the heroes – both the first responders at the crash sites and the passengers in the planes who fought like hell to keep the attackers at bay. My eyes adjusted, and I looked in front of me at this chucklehead, using their deaths as some weird lesson.
Aside from being distasteful and patently offensive, the metaphor also didn’t work from a rhetorical standpoint. The “Twin Towers of sin” is nonsense. No one in those people in towers deserved to be there when that happened. “Letting the terrorists in the cockpit” was an equally shitty selection of words, implying that if only those folks in the planes had fought harder, things would have been different. That they let the terrorists in.
I was mostly disgusted that I came for existential answers to big questions – Why are there terrorists? Why does God let bad things happen? How do we heal and move forward? And got this pile of shit instead. Rather than provide me any answers or even comfort, this peach-fuzzed bobblehead with a microphone turned a once-in-a-generation tragedy into a cautionary tale about bare-knuckle boxing the devil.
His speech was more patronizing than any plastic fish game and more disgusting than anything that happened in that other church’s parking lot.
I don’t remember what else he said that night. I do remember walking to my mom’s minivan in a line of headlights later that night. I slinked into the front seat.
“How was it?” she asked.
“It sucked,” I said.
“Oh really?”
“He told us not to let the devil break into the cockpits of our souls and crash our planes into the Twin Towers of sin,” I said.
She laughed.
“Well at least you tried,” she said. “Did you get a t-shirt?”
“I don’t give a fuck about a t-shirt,” I said.
***
QUESTION FROM YOU
This question comes from my dear friend, Todd, who will also co-officiate our wedding soon! Todd asks:
“Watching The Office where Michael’s journal is submitted in Jan’s wrongful termination deposition. He literally says he does not want it submitted. That should be the end of it, right?”
Thanks for the question, Todd! This is an excellent episode. I laugh every time at, “Tan almost everywhere. Jan almost everywhere.” It is also an excellent episode for Michael’s development as a character and standing up for himself.
When answering these questions, I like to establish where the players are and what rules apply. The Office is set in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Jan is suing Dunder Mifflin for employment discrimination and asking for $4 million. Dunder Mifflin is publicly traded and headquartered in New York. Most publicly traded companies are incorporated in Delaware, even if they are headquartered somewhere else. By this point in the series, Jan is living with Michael in Scranton, making her a Pennsylvania resident.
When a resident of one state sues the resident of another state and the amount at issue is over $75,000, this is called “diversity of jurisdiction” and the proper place to file a lawsuit is in federal court. Plus, employment discrimination suits often end up in federal court because they involve federal employment laws.
For this we’ll assume the federal rules apply. One of the federal rules regarding discovery states that “Parties may obtain discovery regarding any non-privileged matter that is relevant to any party's claim or defense.”
Although Jan stole the diary, it would be non-privileged and relevant to her claims as it proves the timeline of her relationship with Michael. Despite its shady origin, the court would likely allow its admission.
In the show, once the diary is introduced during the deposition, the attorneys then copy the whole thing and distribute its entirety to both sides. This is because of something called the doctrine of completeness (Rule 106 in the Federal Rules of Evidence). It allows an adverse party (Dunder Mifflin) to require that “any other part” of a writing be revealed after part of the writing is introduced. In this case, since Jan introduced the diary entry about Jamaica, Dunder Mifflin’s attorney had every right to ask for the rest of the diary to be made available as well.
To answer the question, the stolen nature of the diary does not have any bearing on its admissibility. On a gut level, that may not seem right. There is a doctrine known as the “exclusionary rule” that applies in criminal cases, which prevents the government from using most evidence gathered in violation of the United States Constitution. However, Jan’s employment lawsuit against Dunder Mifflin is a civil case - not criminal, therefore the exclusionary rule does not apply.
If Michael felt wronged by Jan stealing his diary, which she admits to doing, he could press charges against her for criminal theft or file a civil lawsuit against her. However, she asks him to “call it even” by pointing out that he emailed a topless photo to everyone in the company. Michael agrees. Still, if he wanted to call the law offices of James P. Albini and see if he’ll take the case, Michael has that option.
I hope that answers your question, Todd. Thanks for sending!
Got a question? Submit it here. They can be legal what-if questions, questions on current events, or questions about the legality of actions in TV shows or movies you’ve seen. I never ever want to answer your personal legal questions, so don't send those. Love you, but I don’t do that.
Until next week, that’s the tea, and you better find a better place to hide your diary.
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