Elna Baker goes to the New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance every year.
It's sort of a middle-school-style affair, with generic Oreos and lemonade, set up in a church gym, with the purpose of getting young adults together to find someone to marry.
"They have a costume competition, and the popular people versus the people who aren't popular, and you get all these feelings that as an adult, you just are kind of over," she said.
"I swear I'll never go again, and then I find some reason each year to talk myself back into it. It almost functions like purgatory -- I just keep ending up back at the same place."
Readers relive each painfully funny experience with Baker in "The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance, A Memoir by Elna Baker" (Dutton, $25.95).
At one dance, Baker watched a 35-year-old man, dressed as a duck, doing the Electric Slide. It was a low point in her search for Mr. Right.
Baker's search for love may be troubled, but at least she's experiencing success in other parts of her life. Her book was released in October, and sales are going well.
"It's sort of the little engine that could, in that I'm a first-time writer," she said, by phone from New York City.
But Baker's not a first-time storyteller. The 27-year-old performs with The Moth, a nonprofit storytelling organization based in New York. She's shared her tales on public radio's "This American Life," on stage at the New York Fringe Festival, and in comedy clubs.
"She's a very funny person, in general, and takes on some heavy topics sometimes," said Jenifer Hixson, senior producer for The Moth. "She has great timing, and a great sense of the absurd, and just knows how to arrange a story."
Big-city challenges
Baker was born in Seattle, and raised as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Because of her father's job with Boeing, she lived in Madrid and London. At 18, she moved to New York City to attend New York University -- even though she was accepted to Brigham Young University.
Her mother worried about her going to the big city, even telling her she couldn't take a rainbow scarf or people might think she's gay.
Baker admits living in the Big Apple has been challenging.
"On the East Coast, there are very few people who are Mormon, and oftentimes you're the first Mormon anyone's met," she said. "It's frustrating because, in general, when you meet someone you have the liberty to be anyone and anything you want to be -- but when they ... find out that you're Mormon, they attach a stigma to it, and they decide that you are 'A,' 'B' and 'C.' In addition to that, there are people always trying to test your values, just to see if you mean it."
And Baker's stories reveal that she hasn't always been sure she meant it.
"You start to see there are other ways to go about living, and you gain a sense of empathy for choices you were taught were black and white, just wrong," she said.
Premarital sex is normal in New York, Hixson says, and for an added challenge, Baker works in comedy clubs.
"She is wrestling with things that I imagine other Mormons are, but it might be harder for her, being a fish out of water," Hixson said.
When people listen to Baker's stories, they're shocked, Hixson says.
"You're how old and you've never had sex, coffee or a drink? That's crazy," she said. "But she sells it, and sort of makes you understand in a very earnest way."
The dance
Baker's stories are drawn from her experiences growing up as a "big girl," then dropping 80 pounds at age 22, and yes, attending church dances.
After her weight loss, a whole new world of dating opened up. When she finally fell in love, it was with an atheist. They eventually broke up because of religious differences.
"So I decided that I was going to try to just date only Mormons, because that's what I had been taught, and I think that if I'd done that, it probably would have spared me a lot of heartache," she said. "But I tell God that if I'm going to do that, he has to bring me, essentially, the Mormon man of my dreams. Then I get a flier for the dance, and I'm like, 'This is it,' " Baker said.
It seemed like a sign, so she decided to go to the dance. But if she was going to catch the attention of her dream man in a room full of unmarried Mormon women, she was going to need the best costume ever.
"I decide to be a fortune cookie, and then when the guy pulls out the fortune, it will say 'You will meet a beautiful woman tonight,' at which point I can say, 'Look no further.' So I buy a beige mattress pad, and I build this structure," she said. "I arrive at the dance, and while I was walking, the cookie had started to fold in on itself so that I do not look like a fortune cookie. ... I looked in the mirror, and realized that I looked like a giant piece of the female anatomy."
Purgatory revisited
Baker is still single, still Mormon, and still in New York. So she went to the Halloween dance again.
"I wasn't going to go to the dance this year," she said. "Finally, I was like, 'I guess I kind of have to go -- I wrote book about it.' ... So I found the reason again."
After so many miserable dances, Baker's finally starting to appreciate the experience.
"It's almost like when something is just so bad, you almost gain a sense of nostalgia for it," she said.
She may just have to go again next year.
'I'm just writing to the honesty of my experience'
Elna Baker is a Mormon who's never lived in Utah. After moving around the world with her family, she now lives in New York City -- a city filled with temptations that test her convictions on a regular basis.
"The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance, A Memoir by Elna Baker," released by Dutton in October, is a series of essays on the author's adventures working and dating in the Big Apple.
The book has been noticed by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as the mainstream audience she wrote it for, but it's not for everyone.
"I do find people who are more liberal, people who have heard about me from 'This American Life' and the radio shows that I've done, they are an ideal audience for it," she said. "More conservative Mormons -- someone who doesn't rent movies that are PG-13 -- I don't think that they should read it; it'll just upset them."
The book dedication warns her parents of many words -- and entire chapters -- they should avoid.
"I'm not writing to try to upset people," Baker said. "I'm just writing to the honesty of my experience."
That includes explicit talk about the challenges of sticking to her values.
"In the mainstream world, it's really controversial that I've chosen to wait to have sex until I'm married, so you have people sending me e-mails or mocking it," she said. "But then in the religious world, because I joke about it, or because I admit that this is something that I'm certainly tempted by, I'm also scolded or frowned upon."
While writing the book, Baker says she tried to take a step back from her church and see it from a different angle.
"It was kind of an unsuccessful attempt, because Sunday would come around and I'd be like, 'Well, I should go to church, though,' or people would offer me a drink and I'd be like, 'Well, that has too many calories in it anyway,' " she said. "I began to realize that, for the most part, my values were similar to the values I was taught."
Possibilities
Being Mormon isn't the main idea of her book, Baker says.
"It's really about a time in your life specifically, which is your early 20s, and this feeling of possibility that you have about life -- that you can still become anyone or anything that you want to -- and falling in love with that possibility so much that you don't want to make any specific choices, because once you choose, you narrow the possibilities," she said.
"And yet discovering that until you do that, whether it's the right or the wrong choice that you made, you won't learn what you need to know. So that's kind of the coming-of age story, or the journey.
"Also, it's funny."
There's a possibility that Baker's book will be the basis of a television or movie project -- she's in meetings.
And there's also interest in more books.
"But I feel like I put most of my experiences into this book," she said.
She can't exactly stand on a street corner saying, "OK, something come on, happen to me. You know you want to happen to me.
"That, for some reason, just isn't the right way to go about it. These things sneak up on you."
-- Becky Wright
Comments