It is a harmless enough visit, though bad luck finds me carrying around a pound of fresh ground coffee through all the Mormon security check points I visit throughout the day. Before packing for my trip, a friend had advised me to bring beer and coffee to simplify my trip to Utah, but I'd forgotten to grind the coffee beans. The day I bring my coffee downtown to have it ground at a local coffee shop turns out to be the day I visit all the Mormon sites, prompting ongoing apologies as I subject the volunteers to interacting with my evil grounds. For future reference, they rarely continue the search of my bag after hitting coffee. I could have dynamite beneath the bulging pound bag, and if it means touching the aromatic opiate, they are willing to risk letting me pass through.
They send me to see the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and give me a seat just ten feet from the choir loft. The coffee in my bag fills the balcony with the smell of fresh hazelnut, and I feel like Whoopi Goldberg sitting up there with the sopranos.
OWEN PERKINS
Salt Lake resident and happy employee of the Olympic superstore Melyssa Bonnell shows off the gear.
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While I listen to the choir and guest clarinetist Richard Stolzman, volunteers at the Family History Library are furiously researching my ancestry. At the Mormon Media Center, I'd been challenged to supply the names and birthdates of my grandparents and promised that within an hour they'd find information I never knew about my genealogy. "We're family history Nazis," I was told with a giggle, and although my eyes widened at the provocative statement, it was said with no sense of inappropriateness.
The Tabernacle is an engineering marvel, and the acoustics are so good that we pick up the Brooks and Dunn concert across the street at the Medals Ceremony between movements of Beethoven's 7th Symphony. "They could at least play in the same key," conductor Barlow Bradford tells the crowd, but when the Choir's signature encore of "Battle Hymn of the Republic" is accented by the sound of fireworks across the street, right on cue, Bradford raises his fist triumphantly to the crowd.
The media is holding back from mistreating the Mormons, though a bus driver calls their founders "snake oil salesman" and ridicules the revelations that came in the "Salamander Letters," noting someone was "chewing on a leaf or smoking crack cocaine" when the lizards gave him their message.
After the Choir concert, however, the missionaries at the family history flex their Mormon muscles and do what they do best: they trace my family tree back to the early 1800's. No fewer than four volunteers jump into censuses, birth, death, and marriage records, and trace my family back at least a generation father than we ever knew about. Brigham Young called Utah the Bee Hive State in order to utilize the metaphor of the busy worker bees, and the family history drones live up to their busy-as-bees reputation in tracking down old Hiram Perkins. But this is a sports story.
THE ICE QUEEN COMETH
By the time the women's figure skating hits high gear at the end of the second week, the Russian federation has upped the ante on the controversy. Following the disqualification of a Russian Nordic skier for high red blood cell count, the snub they feel at sharing pairs figure skating gold with the Canadians, and the appearance of bad reffing in a hockey match the Russians ultimately won, the Russians threaten to pull out of the entire Olympics in the face of what they call biased officiating against them. We haven't heard talk about boycotts since the '80 and '84 games in Moscow and L.A., and there are even inflammatory references made about "Cold War" tactics being used against the Russians, but medal contenders like the Russian hockey team and figure skater Irina Slutskaya show no interest in walking away if gold is still within their grasp, despite a unanimous vote by the Russian Parliament recommending they head home.
The unfortunate effect of the Canadians getting gold after the fact is that now every loser with a hint of a gripe thinks they should get gold too. Korea is protesting the disqualification of their short track speed skater that set Apolo Anton Ohno up for gold, and since protesting disqualification isn't allowed in short track, they've gone one step further and consulted a Salt Lake City law firm about suing for the gold.
The women's figure skating finals look disastrous from the start, with one competitor after another falling throughout her program, losing her legs as the clock ticks on and forcing Smiling Scott Hamilton to make excuses about the effect of the altitude on these physically exhausting long programs. But how can you whine about the altitude at the Winter Olympics? Winter sports are altitude sports, and there's no excuse for losing steam in the sport's ultimate showcase. My guess is it has more to do with a Mormon-influenced coffee deficiency in Salt Lake City.
The first good skater of the evening is Sarah Hughes, fourth after the short program and not a serious candidate for gold. The 16-year-old hits every jump, putting together triple combinations in a challenging program and setting the standard of perfection that the three top skaters will have to meet as they follow her. She brings the house down with an astounding program and with the refreshing joy she can't contain from the moment she steps on the ice. She brims with wide-eyed sincerity, claps her hands when she lands her first difficult combination, and thrusts her arm up triumphantly as she finishes a flawless program. It is a moment of triumph, but if you know skating, you know Sarah Hughes is not penciled in as a pre-determined winner. She raises the stakes, demanding perfection from her peers, but there's always a way for the justifying judges to get the results the sport demands.
