When I saw there was a BYU film from 1961 called “Shannon” I pulled the trigger and that’s how we ended up here. I have not seen this. I know nothing about this film other than its fabulous name. I will be recapping it as I go.
The film begins with a young woman walking around taking roll at some sort of party. You always know you’re in for a good time when attendance is being recorded. The attendees of this event are young women who are supposed to be 16 but are actually all 95.
I was just about to leave work for the day when my husband called me.
“Class has been canceled. They’re sending everyone home,” he said.
Skylar was deep into his second year of medical school when the university announced that due to reports of coronavirus reaching certain parts of the United States, campus would be closing.
Minutes later I scrolled through Twitter to find an endless stream of virtual fearmongering from the online masses about impending shutdowns of nearly every supply chain. “The state liquor stores are going to be closing soon and we don’t know when they’ll open again, so everyone plan accordingly,” one friend announced on Facebook alongside a picture of a line of people that wrapped up and down the wine aisles.
At some point during my periodic search for obscure, horrifying old Mormon films, I discovered a real doozy. This was about two years ago and I’ve been willing myself to summon the endurance to recap it ever since. How Near To The Angels comes at us from 1956, and it comes at us hard.
We begin our story with two schoolmarms dressing a young lady in a white wedding dress.
Whether the outing would actually happen was always in limbo—or at least, that’s what we were told. It hinged on our scholastic behavior, which had most recently been called into question during The Samantha Brown Vomit Incident only one week earlier.
The first time Skylar came to visit Salt Lake City was especially stressful for me. It was unlikely I would be able to move any time soon due to my career, so if this relationship was going to go anywhere, I needed him to fall in love with my majestic mountains and Cafe Rio.
I was eight years old when I was first introduced to Classic Skating. A neighborhood mom had called my mom to let her know they’d be celebrating her son’s birthday over roller skates and outdated rock music in the local roller rink.
I was thrilled to be included. The party in question was for a child a couple of years older than me. His mom was obviously behind the invitation. I wasn’t cool enough to be a thought for this soon-to-be-ten-year-old. But I didn’t mind. I’d have a chance to literally roll with the older crowd in our town’s mobile tween rave.
Just before my 8th birthday I was shoved into the neighbor lady’s house down at the end of the street for my first Cub Scout meeting. My friends were there, all boys around my age in half-tucked-in dark blue buttoned-up shirts adorned with patches that looked like sloppily-sewn postage stamps.
Terry Holstrom had been assigned by local church leaders to babysit us once a week by having us sit in a circle on the floor and take turns reading a 500-page Cub Scout manual made from the same paper they used in phone books. She’d crouch down in her 90s mom jeans, periodically screaming at her children in the next room to stop throwing toys.
Last year I fell down an internet rabbit hole during a few months of research I did to produce a four-part podcast series on old Mormon films. I embarked on that quest naively believing the library of LDS church films from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s couldn’t have been very robust. But I discovered that there were so many I could honestly make a career out of just watching them.
Then last month I recapped two films from the 80s on the Word of Wisdom. Now that we’re all sober, I bring you Love is for the Byrds, from 1965. Yes, that’s how it’s spelled. It’s very very clever. Don’t worry—you’ll be severely beat over the head with the creative symbolism in a minute.
There seem to be an endless supply of old LDS church films depicting teenagers or young adults courting and marrying and I’m responsible for telling you about these so you don’t have to live through them yourselves. Fortunately I recently discovered how to watch Youtube videos at double speed and this has made my job so much easier.
I was already familiar with a lot of these films from my childhood. They’re all sort of the same: a promiscuous young woman in biology class pressures a girl who has the haircut of a 65-year-old schoolmarm to sleep with her boyfriend. You could immediately identify the hussy onscreen because she always had a perm and access to a convertible. In the end, either righteousness would prevail or we’d be treated to a sepia-tone repentance montage where the recently-defiled drapes herself across a bed sobbing until she is fully reformed. Sometimes the song “Sorrow For My Sins” plays and Aaron Eckhart looks on, disappointedly.
I was in high school when the massive Jordan Commons complex sprouted off of State Street in Sandy. At least, it seemed massive to us. This was 1999 and I lived just across the way in South Jordan, which at that time was a cluster of quiet spotty suburbs that were quickly suffocating a handful of nineteenth-century farms. This was before Walt Disney purchased the western half of the city to build Daybreak, a neighborhood that if it was an item of clothing would be a men’s romper.
So, yes, we were thrilled that an entertainment venue so ostentatious was opening up on the edge of our budding town that at the time had only one restaurant (RIP, Grandpa Maddox Steakhouse). The building would house a few movie theaters—but with massive screens unlike anything we had ever seen before—theaters we soon learned were called “IMAX.”
I saw right away that this article was about the terrorist attacks that had emotionally debilitated all of us only a few weeks before. I was 17, a senior in high school, and this was the first major national tragedy over which I remember feeling a true collective sadness. I couldn’t believe The Onion could possibly make a joke at a time like this.
Three years ago during a particularly stressful few months with my job I got a little dog from a small rescue organization. It was probably reckless to suddenly take on the responsibility for rearing and loving a needy and traumatized puppy while feeling similarly needy and traumatized, but my entire energy at that time was a little reckless, so the drastic life decision was par for the course.
I was 15 when Julie Stoffer showed up on The Real World. My family’s access to MTV was only about a year old at this time; my parents had resisted paying for cable despite their children’s pleas for the better part of a decade.
The Real World was first class television. A handful of young adults experiencing real issues in a real place from inside an outrageous mansion and with access to basically unlimited resources. They had jobs. They had conflict. We teens were enamored with the responsibility of it all.
As a Mormon child of the 80s and 90s, hokey church films were a near constant companion—like a third parent to me. We were shown Johnny Lingo as a reward in Sunday School classes. We were presented with depictions of Biblical stories as a teaching tool in seminary. Last year I wrote a thorough recap of Saturday’s Warrior, a film that spurred controversy and debate in my Utah neighborhood. “I heard the prophet walked out of it because it preaches false doctrine,” a girl told me in my second grade class.
While none of these films were any good, some were worse than others.
In 1993, Jordan Ridge Elementary School revamped its earthquake training efforts. “We’re going to take emergency preparedness more seriously,” we were told. Prior to this, there had been an assembly once a year during which Principal Anderson stood on the two-foot stage in front of several hundred kids sitting with their legs criss-crossed on the gym floor, telling us to “duck and cover” if ever called upon by mother nature.
That was pretty much it. There was no actual earthquake practice. No specific conversation about what one would really look like. Not even doomsday warnings of The Big One wreaking havoc on our community.
It was 2008. I had enrolled in a conflict resolution class at BYU. I needed the credits to finish my business minor. I had been in Provo for three years by this point and I was getting ready to graduate with a bachelor’s degree. The coming fall I would start attending the law school just on the other side of campus.
The class was small—only ten of us. We were supposed to do an exercise that day. The instructor had asked us to share with the group an opinion that might be unpopular so we could practice disagreeing without arguing by using some tactics we had just studied, or something like that.
As of the date you are reading this, there are over 19,000 articles on major websites across the internet that start with the line, “Today we are more connected than ever, but people feel more disconnected than at any other time.”
I didn’t fact-check myself on that. I don’t get paid enough to do my own fact-checking. It could be a wild and bogus claim but you can’t challenge me on it because we don’t allow comments on this site.
“She met him through the internet,” I heard a woman whisper in the tone of scandal. This was 1999 and I was fifteen. The woman was a family friend, and she was gossiping about a mutual acquaintance who recently found love.
“Oh dear,” my mother responded. “How dangerous.”
It all started with a family meeting. We had a family meeting about this.
“Your mother and I have discussed it and we’ve decided you can see the movie, but we are going to go as a family.”
My father issued the decision in the tone of a president contemplating war. My mother nodded slightly as he spoke, her lips pursed, her hands resting dignified on her lap.
“Did you hear Steve Martin is Mormon?”
I must have been told that, in question form, fifteen times a year by fifteen different people during the entirety of the 1990s.
It started right after the first Father of the Bride movie came out, a film that, if turned into a lightbulb, would most definitely be called “Hue White.”
