Baptists and Woody Allen ( in progress)

Samantha Anderson
Senior
Prose

Baptists and Woody Allen

I was raised by Baptists and Woody Allen. That is my reason for me. My mother stuck me in a Baptist school where my first grade teacher’s lesson plan usually involved death, disease, hell, or maybe, all three.  I would then go home where my mother would watch some Woody Allen movie where he denounces God, sleeps with inappropriate women, or a teenage girl, and basically lives a life that my first grade teacher would call sinful, and not just because he’s Jewish. With these two conflicting beliefs, tied in with the occasional preaching of an openly gay Ellen Degenerous, I am amazed that I am not a depressed, gay, neurotic, narcissistic, religious zealot.
I was baptized a Lutheran, went to a Baptist school, went to a Methodist church, spent most of my time with those of a Jewish faith, and now I think I may be atheistic or agnostic I can never remember which is which. I’m the one of those wishy-washy people that are pretty sure there’s a God, but not sure who he is. I love God and like the idea of Him being there, but I really don’t like church or temple or whatever you may choose to call it and am afraid that I would be wasting my time being involved in the wrong religion. Metaphorically, I am sleeping with God, but to afraid of the commitment of marriage. Not the best metaphor, I know, but it gets my point across.
For a while, at least, Christianity stuck. I was the exact pinnacle of what a good little Baptist girl should be.  I would pray every night, never cursed, and I loved and feared God more than anything. I wasn’t one of those kids that sat in the back of the church giggling and drawing on their hands, because if I did that God might smite me and nobody wants to be smote. I would sit there, diligently, listening to whichever holy vessel God had decided to speak through, instead of the other millions of regular vessels that just imagine God talking to them.
My old elementary school, as I said earlier was hardcore Baptist. I think my third grade teacher was just a hop and a skip away from running off into the woods and living in God’s nature away from the corrupting influences of men, or just bringing a bazooka to school and cleansing the earth of the future sinners.
Mrs. Easily was her name. And I actually had the pleasure of having her in first and third grade. In second grade, I had a different type of Baptist—the kind that would go out and drink heavily with her students’ parents during the weekends. The school actually decided that Mrs. Easily was too hard on the first graders, so they bumped her up two years to the much more emotionally secure and stable third graders. We had graduated from Barney and were on the much more adult level of Power Rangers and Harriet the Spy.
Just physically, Mrs. Easily was an intimidating woman. She was at least six feet tall, and had man hands, this gave her the proper tone and amplitude when she beat her Bible. Her hair was quite Sampsonesque: long, brown, and bushy. She had a very mannish persona, everything from her features to her husky voice. I always wondered if she was some man dressed up in women’s clothing, one of those kinky Baptist guys that was to afraid of the repercussions of his church that he ran away one night, stole a blind lady’s wig, got some very flattering dresses from the Amish store, filled up two balloons with sand and called himself a woman.   
She was very strict and yelled more than she taught. But she did manage to do some teaching. Now only half of it was math or English the other half was well, death disease and Hell, she was a true Baptist. I attribute my Purell obsession largely to her. Somehow she would be able to morph every subject we had that day to a disease or some sort of bodily ailment. Stuff like math to the plague (if little Jimmy caught the plague what percentage of you would be fatally ill in one week), Science to insanity (Darwin was mental unbalanced), and art to aids (damn gays).
In first grade I came to the eminent realization that I was going to die and to put it in dear old Mrs. Easily’s word’s “it could happen today ,tomorrow, or fifty years from now. Every day I was dying, one step closer to being six feet under. At the age of seven I was approximately 1/12 through my natural life—assuming that I wasn’t murdered, hit by a bus, infected with some lethal disease, or that I didn’t die of a heart attack from all of the work it was going to take to prolong my life—and had absolutely nothing to show for it. I hadn’t done anything in the name of the lord. I hadn’t gone to foreign countries to “enlighten” the barbarians of the beauty of holding Jesus in your heart, I hadn’t memorized the Bible, and I hadn’t donated a significant amount of money to the church. All I’d done is loved God and tried to live in his name.
Not to say that I didn’t wander of the path of righteousness a time or two.  A bible verse competition actually ruined my innocence. Let me elaborate. A few times a school year we would have a contest to see who could find a Bible verse first. I was always the quickest verse finder. I could find Matthew 12:12 faster than you could say brainwashing small children.
Right before one of our competitions I went to our local Christian book store to purchase a new Bible with my money from my good grades. I picked out a beautiful purple, leather bound Bible. It wasn’t until I got home that I realized it’s flaw and my initiator into the world of sin and debauchery.
This particular Bible had a divider between the Old and New Testament, thus giving me an unfair advantage over the other children in the Bible verse competition. It wasn’t technically against the rules, but there are no loopholes in the eyes of God. I should have put the Bible back on my book shelf, to save myself from temptation, but it was to late, I threw the Bible into my pink, Hello Kitty backpack, and with that swift move I would never be whole again.
         I won the competition. With sweaty hands, a dark heart, and a newly corrupted morality I would rifle through my Bible, using the bookmark at my will. I would raise my hand when I found the answer and take all of the undeserved glory. I was the class representative to the final. 
In the school wide competition, the school provided us with Bibles. I started out strong. Racking up verse points and in the last round there was a tie between myself and a girl few years ahead of me. It was then that my guilt caught up with me. Jesus did not want me on that stage. The only reason I was up there was  because I had fallen to Satan and used an illegal Bible in the preliminaries. The prompter said the verse and I knew exactly where is was and found the page almost instantly, but I could not raise my hand. It was almost as if God had temporarily disabled the muscles in my arms, so I couldn’t take that last step to undeserved glory. The girl found the verse fifteen seconds after me and the contest, like my innocence, was done.
From then on I was fallible. At the age of nine I probably prayed more than the pope. Now I know that it wasn’t out of love, a saintly duty, or because I felt a closeness with God, it was to avoid being smote. I wanted a direct in with God. A little like an actor trying to get a role in a play by bugging the director constantly. Except I was doing it for my eternal salvation.
Now, as I said earlier, I am agnostic. I seemed to have used up all the religious juice in my body when I was younger and now I am just looking for a refill. In about fourth grade God wasn’t there for me anymore. A pretty Woody Allenesque realization for someone that young. I stopped praying for a few years and never went to church. The disapproving voice of Mrs. Easily would echo in my ears every Sunday morning as I laid in bed, wondering if I should try church, just one more time
. It was in ninth grade that Mrs. Easily’s voice finally stopped. I realized that one didn’t have to be a part of a religious organization to be religious. Mrs. Easily would call me a “godless sinner”, but I prefer the term “unaffiliated agnostic”. Something inside of me knows, or wants to know, that there is a God up there sighing at our stupid mistakes and cleaning up our messes. A God that put people like Paris Hilton, Dennis Rodman, or George Bush on this earth, just to give the rest of us a good laugh. A God that will accept me as the girl who was raised by Baptists and Woody Allen.
         





I was a self-proclaimed communist by the time I was eight, before I even knew what communism really was. I liked the idea of the government looking out for it’s people, and everyone being treated fairly, and everyone working together for the good of the community. I was eight and a half when I realized that people were greedy and that any government with that much power would probably be corrupt in a matter of years, no, months. The perpetual optimism of children.
         I started drinking coffee when I was in fourth grade. I was probably semi-addicted by the time I was in seventh and fully addicted by the time I was in eighth. I, now, drink more coffee than water, have horrible stains on my teeth and keep espresso in my locker at school. I have actually eaten coffee grinds before and if I miss a dose, it is not pretty. The world goes cold and I am not physically able to speak in full sentences. Addiction is a bad, bad thing. I can not wait to graduate to alcohol.
         I don’t technically smoke. But I was raised by smokers and, therefore, the smell of smoke relaxes me. Yes, the toxic smell of a cigarette burning in an ashtray is the smell of my childhood. Unfortunately, I am not old enough to smoke, and better yet, I am much too cheap to smoke. So, if I get stressed I second hand smoke. I find the nearest smoker and stand down wind from them until I get my second hand fix. I will be the first person to join SSA (second-hand smokers anonymous… I thought it was witty at the time).
         In my room you might just find the eighth gateway to Hell. I, honestly, would never know the difference. My floor is literally covered in papers, trash, and week-old underwear. When I step I, often, hear a cracking sound and feel a small release of pressure under my feet. I always just hope I didn’t just break the back of some small defenseless animal that has made it’s home among my piles of rubbish. The last time I cleaned, it took me hours. I filled half the laundry room with piles of musty old piles of clothing.