To Jonny Victor, Comic, About a Bullhorn and Radio Preacher

Hullo JV;
I tore open your email, throwing shreds of bits and bytes, and whined in angst when you asked me to open another website to see your JPEG. I'm into gratification, and it doesn't have to be instant, like my potatoes have to be. But kindly drop that link into all your emails. Sell like no one is looking, plug like you've never been hurt. Oops, wrong teeshirt motto.

Speaking about pitching, I've finally come full circle on a "North American Legend" I've taken note of during journeys. Her name is Aimee Semple McPherson, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimee_Semple_McPherson). She started life near Ingersoll, Ontario, twenty or so miles north of the Lake Erie shore, about halfway to Buffalo. I'll admit it. I stop for historical markers, which makes it slow going through Ontario. I never met a cairn I didn't like. McPherson had already put a husband to rest in Asia, victim of Malaria, when she began motoring the United States, typing sermons in the back seat of a 1916 Packard. She would stop and mount her Packard, maybe standing on the backseat, and deliver powerful sermons to standing audiences of hundreds, booming into a bullhorn.

Her journey led to Los Angeles, where she built the Angelus Cathedral in Echo Park, adjacent to Hollywood. I am betting that Sinclair Lewis modeled his Sharon Falconer character from Elmer Gantry upon Aimee. Falconer dies clinging to a cross as her church on a pier burns to a singe and Elmer Gantry and the audience jump into the sea. I am wondering if he modeled this pier-built church on the Santa Monica pier, which now houses a ferris wheel and even a Bubba Gump Shrimp Company restaurant. Consider that when Aimee vanished, a vanishing she blamed upon a kidnapping, mourners gathered in nearby Venice Beach, and two divers lost their lives plumbing the depths for her body, once drowing and one from deep body cooling of exporsure and hypothermia. All the producers in Hollywood, not yet the center of film production yet, checked out Aimee's church services for stagecraft and broadcasting to the masses tips. She is noted as the first women to deliver a radio sermon.

Last Friday, I dropped by a Topanga Canyon inn called the Inn of the Fifth Ray, and Aimee once drove up the canyon from the Malibu coast to her retreat there. She also started the first church in Topanga Canyon upon this site, a Four-Square Church. The Inn of the Fifth Ray is very spiritual; the brick spiral stairway to the loos are marked with statues of Krishna and Buddha, illuminated with votive candles. Two of the churches in Topanga Canyon are just up the hill from the site. But when I read that Aimee had driven up the canyon, maybe in the Packard, along what was then a dirt road prone to washouts, I knew I had come full circle with another North American legend. Tecumseh is another. So why am I telling you all this? First, you listen and writing to you is a gratifying act. Second, I've followed your career (you make it easy) between Detroit and Ann Arbor. Where does the journey, the call to adventure take you next, Jonny? And next, have you ever promoted yourself so strongly, you took your message on the road in the back of a used-car? Used even a bullhorn if necessary? Well, the story of Aimee has parables for you. Will

WanderingWilbo is written by Wilbo in response to his travels for business and pleasure.