POST-MORMON STORIES
Only a Lad: How a Sex Worker Came Between Me and Oingo Boingo
Sometimes an older relative tries to do you a favor, when you really wish they wouldn’t.
When I was eighteen, my father and I drove from northern Utah to Los Angeles for my cousin Delia’s wedding. I had recently put in my application to become a Mormon missionary, and I had yet to learn where I’d be spending the next two years of my life. It wasn’t for the sake of one last road trip with my father, though, that I agreed to tag along. I was hoping to meet Danny Elfman.
After the wedding—a brief affair in a tiny chapel like a sugar-frosted cake—the entire gathering moved down the road to the Arcadia Women’s Club, a large banquet hall for rent, where a shaggy trio played jazz on a spare proscenium. A dozen long tables were set up in ranks across the room, and we enjoyed an abundant feast of cold cuts, casseroles, and cakes as the music played. “Hey,” I said to my aunt Deborah, who sat across from my father and me, “I thought Oingo Boingo was supposed to play.”
“All Delia and Sammy’s friends are musicians,” she said, “so lots of different people are playing. I don’t think they’re on until later.”
