This may come as a shock to some of you, but I have never been cool. At first, it was an unconscious decision, owing to the fact that I was the first-born child of a couple of nerds, with no elder sibling to tell me when I was being a dork, and within a school district full of children so deeply uncool I never realized it was something I should aspire to*. Except for the kids who were part of the families who were Big Shots. That kind of cultural cachet, which could only be conferred by accident of birth, and not by diligence, wisdom and grit, transcended peer groups. My school-age years were spent in Utah, where the Little House on the Prairie TV show was conflated in my mind with the Ancestor Obsession of the Mormons. In Utah there are two holidays in July – the 4th (of course), but at least when I was there, the REAL big deal was July 24th, Pioneer Day! It was the culmination of parades, ancestor worship, and srs 19th century settler cosplay. There was the kind of “cool” that wore a roach clip as a barette and drove a Trans-Am, and then there was the sort of Cool that was conferred upon you because of other people you happened to be related to.
Having Mormon ancestors who were part of the settling of Deseret gave you a shit-ton of Mormon street-cred, both in church, and out (it was Utah – there was very little difference). It really bordered on a caste system, of haves and have-nots, of cool kids and nobodies, of Star-bellied Sneetches, and those with no stars upon thars. My family didn’t start in Utah. I was born in Chicago, and from what I knew about my parents, they were also from Chicago. We didn’t talk a lot about genealogy, although I knew it was done. My mom’s parents were adult converts originally from Samoa and Bohemia, and I knew dad’s parents were divorced and I didn’t know any divorced Mormons. Furthermore, my maternal grandmother SMOKED! Which, of course, meant that avenue for Ancestral Legitimacy was a dead end. People got up in Fast & Testimony meeting, and gave a quick oral genealogy before launching into a meandering story that had little to do with anything**, and more to do with letting you know they were part of the Original Mormons, while the rest of us tried to think of something inspirational to say that didn’t have anything to do with our great-great-grandmother’s sister-wife.
The religious culture seeped right into school, where social studies and history classes were dominated by Utah History, which was itself dominated by the origins of the Mormon Church. Oh, passing reference was made to the Ute Indians, who were sadly extinct now that White people were here (this was taught at several points when there were actual, for-real, Indigenous kids sitting right in the classroom. My generation was taught that Indian = feather headdress and loin-cloth, and jeans and a t-shirt meant… not). A proud moment was always the coverage of ways in which Utah (and therefore Mormons) were important to the whole (secular) country. Cue the exciting classroom documentaries on the meeting of the Transcontinental Railroad in Promontory, Utah – always with this picture:
Years later – and long after we left Utah – I learned we did in fact have several notable ancestors who made their way west with the Mormons, including a woman who emigrated all the way from England, and a man with so many wives and offspring they named a town after him. If you go to this link, you can find a key that shows Abraham Hunsaker as #18 in that photo. Had I known that he was part of that famous “Golden Spike” picture showing the culmination of the Union and Central Pacific railways, I would have been the coolest fucking dork in my 4th grade Utah Studies class. Looking back, I think my dad was right to keep me from knowing I had as much a right as anyone to march in the Pioneer Days parade in a sprigged muslin bonnet. That was a really stupid way to create a hierarchy in a culture that was meant to be communitarian, and probably save my mom a lot of time she didn’t have for sewing gingham bonnets and pinafores.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*the first time I remember consciously eschewing coolness and heading straight to unrepentant dork was when I was 14, and we had just moved to the midwest, where I did not yet know everything I loved would be hated and mocked, and during back to school shopping, selected a giant oversize acetate shirt (you know, the fabric used in cheap graduation gowns and halloween costumes where you can never get the creases out because to iron it would be to melt it?) with brightly hand-painted, glittery fruit pieces on it. My mom asked if I was sure. The saleslady asked if I was sure. And I was like DUDE THE WATERMELON IS SPARKLY PINK AND THE TANGERINE PRACTICALLY GLOWS IN THE DARK AND IT GOES DOWN TO MY KNEES WHICH IS APPROPRIATE FOR MY WARDROBE OF STIRRUP PANTS. It went about as well as you can imagine once I got to school, where my peers had already decided I was a pariah because I did not wear blue eyeliner. That shirt was beyond the pale, and you know what? I didn’t care because that plasticky tarp made me fucking happy, and those bitches were dumb.
**and on one memorable occasion, led to a giggle fit originating in the third church pew on the left hand side of the chapel, when my parents couldn’t be reverent long enough while that neighbor-lady with the heavy Wasatch accent talked about her ancestors, who lived in a fart, and when the Indians attacked the fart, they prayed that the Lord would save the fart.
nerdycellist 