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AOS has to be one of the great highlights of TWI’s hypocrisy...the production was to reveal the wiles of the devil and how a believer can be strong and stand up against all the deceptions and temptations...meanwhile the “star of the show” believer boy (craig) is boinking the “wrong seed” chick...oh no, Obi-Wan we lost another to the dark side!

For some reason, I was thinking that the premier was before VPW died. I was in residence at Gunnison in the spring of 1985, which was a horrible experience, and those that wanted to go were allowed to go straight to Ohio for the weekend, see it, then come straight back. As much as I would have liked to escape the gulag for a couple days, I did not think it was worth the effort. Earlier that block, in February I believe (LCM watched the Grammys with us), when LCM came to visit Gunnison, all he seemed to talk about was the costuming for the different categories he had determined of devil spirits. I found it extremely weird, and still do. I saw AOS once at the Rock of Ages 1985. It was a waste. I could not believe they made a coloring book of it for kids of the ministry to be exposed to it ...

Yes, that's it! A very bizarre flick, and at 11 years old, seemed kinda kinky. Wacky! AOS - We drove up with another couple for the premiere weekend showing. Stayed a night, and were back home Monday. We all discussed it for a long time on the way home - and remember we were broadly pro-the-ministry, and weren't looking to trash it. I had friends involved, and really really wanted to like it, to learn something from it, to be encouraged the Ministry was moving in a healthy direction that we could all grow with. Plus this was seeing our new Pres Craig in action and saw it to be something of a harbinger of his future. Buuuuuuuuuuut...outside of the dancers trying to do their best I thought it was a terrible production. It had no natural rhythm or flow that carried the viewer, no real story being told, no narrative quality, texture. Considering I was very well schooled in what they were trying to communicate I felt I knew less about the topic after seeing the production - seriously, the imagery was, to put it into a word, "corny" and took away from the realities being referred to. It removed all sense of horror from the reality of a rebellious adversary working contrary to God the Creator's will. It made it seem like an academic exercise - given Craig's failure and that he was about to have his defeated "Adversary" tying a plastic bag around his head while being drug into quicksand, he was being cavalier at an almost Shakespearean level. In the Way we were taught to see God as the sum of the things He does for us. We lost the magnitude of His glory, the breadth of His will as Creator by reducing it to words and definitions we could parse. We knew the greek nuances of the words that told us that God was beyond our highest perceptions but ignored what that meant and how it might affect our actions and attitudes. AOS was a perfect example of Craig's "flat earth" view of spirituality. Lacking grandeur and scope, but struggling with every wiggling drop of sweat to communicate. Anyway, I'd never show that to anyone. We never watched it back home in our fellowship. It eventually was shown locally buuuuuuuuut I barely remembered it. There was an incident on the road trip home from Ohio that has lived on our memories as one of the more hilarious travel stories we accumulated but that's another story. Anyway. Yeah.

"Opportunity"... Them: "Sounds like you have an opportunity." Me: "No, what I have is a big freakin' problem."

How about a showing with audience participation like "Rocky Horror Picture Show", we could all yell "A$$hole" every time LCM shows his face?