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When you only have eighteen television channels and they’re all blurred by various degrees of static blizzard, you end up reading a lot. So Dods and I read a lot. But sometimes we get sick of reading and we turn the TV on and end up watching some of the most bizarre television programs that have ever been aired, like a show featuring Jesus, Stephen Baldwin, and a record-breaking ball handler.
Part of the problem is that we don’t get to choose which channels we get. This is because we don’t pay for our cable. The cable we do receive is free, but it comes with flaws, like an inheritance received from an uncle who leaves you his convertible but also his pet rhinoceros who is angry all the time and not housebroken.
We get all the networks, the WB, Spike TV, CNBC, four Spanish channels, and six religious channels, three of which are also Spanish. We don’t speak Spanish, so our options are generally limited to Congressional hearings, male-targeted shenanigans on Spike, and syndicated comedy blocks of Friends and Will & Grace.
I had never watched a full episode of Will & Grace before, but it’s actually pretty funny. The only problem is that two of the three main characters are going to hell because they’re gay, and the third character, Grace, is probably going to hell just for being friends with gay people.
After I watch Will & Grace for a while, I wonder if I, too, am going to hell because for the past half hour I’ve been laughing at gay stuff like when Will convinces Jack to come to an art opening by lying and telling him that Cher will be there. Of course she’s not going to be there at all, but Will knows Jack will come because Jack, like many gay men, is obsessed with Cher.
So when I feel sullied, like I’ve been watching too much television produced by Satan, I turn to EWTN, or the Eternal World Television Network. EWTN is refreshing because it reminds me that, yes, I am going to hell. It’s not because I’ve been watching too much Will & Grace though. It’s because I’m mostly Jewish, which means my great grandfather murdered Jesus.
One night Dods and I were watching EWTN and a show called “Praise the Lord” came on. We immediately got excited because the intro was high tech and took us around a computer-generated globe, with each continent in turn spewing blond lines of spirituality that connected to the next continent until the whole world was cross-hatched by these gold tendrils and it was like everyone was happy together and then the words, PRAISE THE LORD, exploded on to the screen, and then something even more incredible happened…
The announcer said, “…And introducing the host of ‘Praise the Lord,’ Stephen Baldwin!”
What?
Did he just say Stephen Baldwin, star of Bio-Dome, Fled, Slap Shot 2: Breaking the Ice, Celebrity Mole: Yucatan, and a decade full of epic drug rampages?
Yes.
That Stephen Baldwin.
The show opens with Stephen sitting on a couch in what looks like an Arizona drug lord’s house. I say this because there are palm trees in the background. Stephen looks tan and fat and the right side of his hair, which is pretty long, is swept around the back of his head and comes out on the left side with the rest of his hair, so it looks like he just received a flushy or attended a Flock of Seagulls concert. His wife, Kennya, sits to his left, clings to his arm, and looks pale, like a cadaver on CSI: Miami.
Apparently Stephen is just a guest host, this isn’t his normal gig, because he starts talking right away about how excited he is to be here and how this episode is going to be a little more fun than usual, a little more gnarly. “Gnarly,” he explains, is a surfer-term that means kooky and crazy, but also cool with the Lord.
Today’s theme is going to be “all things new” because Stephen feels like he was granted a new lease on life when he stopped doing drugs and found Jesus. Kennya mumbles, “Praise God.” This will be a persistent theme for the rest of the show – other people trying to talk, Kennya mumbling “Praise God” the entire time and totally undermining their points.
Praise the Lord is essentially a platform for self-calls, because no call is too bold when you’re about to deflect the credit to God. For example, Stephen Baldwin repeatedly mentions his dazzling career as a movie star and the luxuries it affords him. He talks at length about the travel, the kibitzing with fellow celebrities, and the easy access to drugs and booze. He’s just lucky, he says. God gave him the ability to act.
This ties into his next point – people stop him all the time on the street and ask him why he’s not making movies anymore. (I’m sure they also ask him why he’s not as cool as his brother, Alec, and why his hair is like that, but he fails to cover this ground). But he is making movies! At least this is what he tells his fans. It’s just that now he makes the movies he wants to make and somehow this all has something to do with the fact that he’s a born again Christian, as if Jesus directed him to act in such moral vehicles as The Snake King and Deadrockstar.
But Stephen is just half the fun, or really less than half. The guests are the true treats. The first is a woman who has written a book called God Hunger, which is about overcoming eating disorders like anorexia or obesity by asking God to help you out.
The next guest, Bruce Crevier, is in the Guinness Book of World Records for spinning the most basketballs on his body at one time ever. He reminds the audience of the Guinness Book of World Records thing probably eight times in the span of fifteen minutes. But remember: it’s okay to make self-calls if God is spinning the balls for you.
Bruce also has ten children, which God likes because it helps overpopulate the world and promote eating disorders, thus boosting the sales of God Hunger.
When Bruce cues the music, which he undoubtedly wrote himself with the help of a Casio keyboard and several of its pre-programmed drum beats, he starts dribbling balls like crazy. First there’s just one ball and he’s going between his legs, off his head, and spinning the sphere from one end of his body to the other. Then more balls are added and Bruce is doing pushups while spinning the balls on his thumbs.
Before his grand finale, Bruce calls on a member of the audience, an overweight unathletic man, and encourages him to do what Bruce is doing. The man fails comically and we all get to laugh at how bad this man is at spinning and dribbling balls while simultaneously marveling at Bruce’s God-given ability to dominate at an activity that nobody else cares about.
For more about Bruce, please visit Champions-Forever.com where you can meet his very large family, be overwhelmed by his extremely liberal use of the four primary colors – yellow, red, blue, and fluorescent green – and watch in horror as your computer crashes instantaneously because the overstocked graphics of spinning basketballs and walking Chuck Taylors can wreak havoc on even the fastest Pentium processors.
And what show on EWTN would be complete without a sermon from a preacher in a Hawaiian shirt? Our preacher begins by relating to Stephen Baldwin’s life story. The preacher says he was “blitzed out of his mind for four years” (self-call) before finding God. He continues reading a passage from the Bible but it’s hard to understand him because Kennya Baldwin keeps muttering, “Praise God.”
The ability to overcome obstacles, to self-improve, is certainly the take-away message from this episode of “Praise the Lord.” No matter how low you once sunk, you can always bounce back. Even if you were once a washed out, drugged out actor, or someone struggling with a weight problem, or someone who was the butt of every schoolyard joke because all you cared about was spinning your stupid basketball, you can still go to heaven.
I guess that’s why I pay my visits to the Eternal World Television Network. It reminds me that no matter how much Will & Grace I watch, I can always make my peace with the Lord. I just have to make sure I stop by EWTN before I turn the TV off.
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