Living Buddha, Living Christ

I’ve made some really good relationships with people from Alabama. The first person that I met from Alabama, Regina, became my wife. The second person that I met from Alabama was often confused as my sister. I met both, my wife and my friend LeeAnn working for an apparel company in Atlanta. Because of our similar look and style, LeeAnn and I were automatically drawn to each other like one’s reflection in a pond. In our twenties, we both were lanky, had large dark glasses and wore backwards Kangol hats. Our similarities didn’t end with our physical appearance.

We were both raised in small, religiously oppressive towns. We both had chihuahuas and we both had ties to musical theater in high school. Her brother, who actually did look a lot like me, even went on to become a well-respected theater director after his stint as a cruise ship entertainer. This was the first instance that I had heard of anyone using cruise ship entertaining as a career stepping stone. I thought that it was only the final chapter for semi-talented triple threats, but I was proven wrong.

Over lunch, LeeAnn and I would wax philosophical on politics, our families, religion and the most taboo of all subjects, movies.

Movies were the language of bridge building, empathy machines, as Roger Ebert put it. We filmed a night’s worth of footage for the 24-hour film fest in Atlanta, but ultimately decided that we’d trash what we had. If we couldn’t spend more than a day making our film, then we’d do it later and do it the right way. Movies would be our way to rebel in spirit to the injustices around us and solve the problems of the world. If only we had the resources, but we didn’t.

As a lesbian from Hokes Bluff, Alabama, LeeAnn was familiar with the looks of condemnation that came from being open with her sexuality in the Bible Belt. I know that some preachers have their check lists, but at her own granny’s funeral, the granny who supported her the moment she came out, the pastor decided this service was the appropriate time to aim his own fire and brimstone using Old Testament verses to damn LeeAnne, her wife and brother for being gay. She took it in stride and knew that if she could, her granny might actually spring from the casket, slap the preacher, turn to LeeAnn and say, “Don’t you worry baby, he’s as lost as last year’s Easter egg.” This had the potential to be a scene in the movie we’d one day make.

LeeAnn was gay and I was accused of being so because I had aspirations of being an artist and refused to hunt woodland creatures with my southern brethren. So, having grown up in rural communities that quickly denounced those who were different, one can see how LeeAnn and I may have both been drawn to the western interpretations of Buddhism even though we had been raised with the Lord’s Supper. Maybe it was our personal rebellion.

Maybe it was because one could be a Buddhist without evoking the concept of dogmatic punishment. We had had enough of the Jerry Falwells, Jim Bakers and Jimmy Swaggarts of the world. Our particular favorite Buddhist writer was Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. The small, soft-spoken friend and contemporary of Martin Luther King, Jr. suited us just fine.

My great-grandmother Marche passed away shortly after LeeAnn’s granny died. In the ‘70s, Marche moved to Georgia from Connecticut to be near her family. Marche had been a psychiatric nurse during the war, a lifelong lover of the night sky, a fan Carl Sagan, and like LeeAnn's grandmother, had supported the family’s black sheep, my mother. Marche was the lone financial supporter of my mom’s efforts to go to college and to one day become a teacher. My mom was different because she was only the second person in her family to value a formal education and Marche became her cheerleader.

So, when Marche died, not having a church home, we used the funeral home’s “on-the-spot” evangelical preacher to perform the service. Though, not nearly as horrifying as LeeAnn’s experience, the pastor did use our time to also warn us of the everlasting fires of hell. We all laughed at the juxtaposition of what was happening and who Marche really was and vowed never to use what was the equivalent of a Drive-Thru funerary service again.