Ardis, I loved your alternate names for the characters, so I am now imagining how their voices sound. Catherine sounds like the nasally falsetto English voices used by the Monty Python cast when they were dressed in drag playing older female characters. Lott Gascom now sounds like Manuel the waiter from Fawlty Towers, and Jonas looks and sounds like George McFly from the first Back to the Future movie.

And your prediction that there are even more trials to come sounds exciting, just like watching the movie Santa Claus vs, the Martians. “Make it stop, no, wait, don’t make it stop!”

Yes, Mina, pictures! Now who do we know who is something of an artist who could provide those?

Spoiled English Woman with Hairdressing and Clotted Cream Fetishes, and

Bizarrely Handicapped Little Girl With Special Skills Needed In the Plot, and

Lazy Adult Son, and

Father in South Africa Who Probably Tears His Own Envelopes to Fool Family Into Thinking He Tried to Send Money,

wouldn’t it?

The other thing I wonder is how stories like this were received by readers of the Church magazines in the 1930s. Did they think they were great? Did they pull out the popcorn the same way we do? Did the editors ever think twice about publishing them? I just don’t know.

I promise you that neither the Easter Bunny nor anybody’s fairy godmother will make an appearance in this story. Other than that, though, I make no promises.

And I’ve already picked out a lighter, much more recent, more Mormony story for our next serial.

Catherine is too much the comic book character to take very seriously, although some shred of humanity does seem to drop on her unexpectedly. I should be used to Ivy Stone’s dysfunctional families and totally weird plot developments at this point, but it is still just really jarring to read some of this.

So my guess that Gloria’s father would step in and save the day at some point is off, but I should realize by now that Ms. Stone is not into telegraphing her plot points well. She is aspiring to that level of mediocrity in my humble opinion.

But what this lacks in good writing (ie, plot development, fully developed characters, etc) is somewhat compensated for with just plain watch-the-train-wreck weirdness. Maybe if she turned her story ideas over to Joss Whedon (Buffy, FIrefly, The Avengers), we might have something more interesting. Like fully empowered heroines, an appreciation for the unappreciated, and truly developed characters, quirky or not. Whedon could have done something more with the poor Anna. I kept thinking of Cipher in ths Snow when I read about her.

Well, I am in it up to my knees at this point, might as well keep going forward, as I really have only one idea of what is going to happen. I’ll just have to wait and see what will next make me drop my metaphorical popcorn. I have already figured that there is a stand-in for her father already on scene. Gourds, anyone?