We were in Phoenix for Christmas, where my father has gone to retire.  It was Sunday, the 28th of December, and my stepmother had promised to take us on a real treat, a visit to Glendale Glitters, an outdoor holiday festival in the Arizona suburb of Glendale.  That morning my wife and kids and I had gone to Mass in downtown Phoenix, in the hopes of avoiding the Suburban-Mall-Parish-Marty- Haugen-Syndrome, where the homilies the music and the architecture are insipid.  By going downtown we managed at least to find a church with good architecture.  One out of three ain’t bad.

We drove around Glendale that night, surrounded by the flat desert and the endless sprawl of Phoenix.  The festival – Glendale Glitters – was over, and trying to figure out what to do since we had missed it, we drove past a coffee shop where a man was doing some sort of show outdoors, before a small audience on folding chairs.  The man had a coal black Mohawk, pasty white makeup, and black fingernails.  And he was wearing a dress.  We stopped.  He shouted at us into his microphone to get out of our cars and see the show.  “Who are you?” we asked.

“I AM Glendale Glitters!” he responded.

This we could not pass up.

It turns out the performing transvestite was Paisley Yankolovich.  His act consisted of his shouting odd rap or hip-hop type songs into a karaoke system to pre-recorded beats.  He had a loyal following of a dozen or so audience members, some of whom clearly had seen him before and knew the words to his “songs”.  A frowning bodyguard or boyfriend stood off to the side.

Paisley’s material was a kind of “poetry slam”, and he was presenting himself as a kind of “performance artist”.  And ridiculous as the whole scenario was, I began to notice than some of Paisley’s lyrics were a bit intriguing, and indeed everything he sang revolved around the same thing.

One song went something like this:

Where is your suburban church
Why is it so precious?
How white are its walls
How ugly the people
Do  you love me?  Can you stand me?  Do you hate me?
Jesus loves me yes I know for the Bible tells me so
Tear apart your hateful church!  Bomb your whitewashed building!
Yeah yeah yeah yeah.
 
In fact, every one of Paisley’s songs were a variation on the theme of Christianity.  At times he was clearly mocking the faith – or was he mocking the hypocrites who practice it?  It was hard to say.  His tone was supremely ironic and self-consciously kitschy, and his followers struck me as akin to the hypocritical Christians he was bashing – worshiping at the altar of Paisley and taking far too seriously – and also far too superficially – his tirades.
 
I leaned over to my son Colin.  “He’s working out some issues,” I said to him.
 
After a bit we finished our coffee and got up, about to head from one sprawling desert suburb to another.
 
I put some money in Paisley’s tip jar.  “You’re like a character from a Flannery O’Connor novel,” I told him.
 
His eyes lit up.  “Thank you!” he responded, as the bodyguard eyed me warily from the wings.
 
When we lost the Fear of God we lost an understanding  of Flannery O’Connor, Paisley Yankolovich, and the Destruction of the Temple, I thought, as we made our way through the desert, the lights of Glendale glittering behind us.