As they cut for commercial, Mark reaches behind the plush couch he's been sitting on and pulls out a fifth of Jim Beam. Hastily he fills a shot glass, retrieved from beneath one of the couch cushions, and slams it down. Observing this, the Reverend scoots his chair over closer to Mark and entreats, "You wouldn't mind if I had a slug of that myself, would you?" Mark replies, "Of course not," to which the Reverend grasps the bottle eagerly and sates his craving with a long swig. A voice is heard from stage left, "30 seconds Mark." The bottle and the glass are quickly replaced as the on air light resumes its laborious glow.

"Hi, we're back. How about some questions from the audience, Reverend?"

"Sure."

Hands spring up throughout the audience. Mark rushes to a scantily clad teenage female in the twelth row. Her deep blue eyes complement the royal blue half-shirt that skirts her chest, which complements the faded, skin-tight blue jeans that clench her firm ass between their lascivious cotton fibers, to create a very stunning ensemble.

"You have a question?"

"Uh-huh."

"And what's your name?"

"Judy."

"Great, Julie. What did you want to ask the Reverend?"

"I marched with him and his followers last month in Washington for the Save the Serbs demonstration. It was then that I realized I was supporting a man who advocated salvation for only those of Serbo-Croatian descent. I'm not Serbo-Croatian, and I wanted to know what the Reverend thinks will happen to un-Serbs when they die."

"Have you ever read Dante's Inferno, dear?"

Shakes her head.

"I didn't think so. All un-Serbs will be relegated to the Seventh circle of Hell with all others who do violence unto themselves. By being un-Serb one immediately condemns himself to Hell for St. Peter will accept none other than Serbs. I would certainly consider condemning oneself to Hell to be violence against oneself. As a matter of fact I don't see any other violence greater that one could do to oneself than eternal punishment. All those who do violence against themselves, which includes being unhappy, doing things for others at the expense of one's own liberty, giving blood, exercising, etc., reside in the Seventh circle of Hell, which isn't as bad as the Eighth or the Ninth. The sinners in the Eighth are the fraudulent. The sinners in the Ninth are the treacherous. So my advice to you is to stay away from fraud and treachery, so you don't find yourself even lower down than the Seventh. Don't throw away what you already have, which is eternal punishment slightly less painful than what might befall you."

"Good advice, Reverend. Thanks. We've got another question over here. Sir?"

Mark holds the mike to an elderly, slightly balding male in his late fifties, early sixties. The man holds a walking stick in his left hand. He has wrapped a thick wool coat around his shoulders. His legs are lost in balloon-like, Sienna colored trousers, very dirty and worn with hard use. On his feet, haggard wool socks find themselves tucked beneath the leather thongs of a Serbo-Croatian shepherd.

"I've been a Serbo-Croatian all my life, and I don't know that it's all it's cracked up to be. I have to work as hard as everyone else. No one understands me when I speak because I have this heavy Slavic accent. And to top it all off, I can't get a date because of the profuse black hair that covers my back and makes me look more like an ape than a man. That's why I became a shepherd."

"Now, now, brother, don't fail to look to the future. Sure life here may not be anything special, but when you reach the Pearly Gates things begin to look a little better. For one thing, your back hair turns into feathers. So be happy that you have a lot. You'll be able to fly faster than most. Also when you take a peek beneath you, you'll be able to see all the un-Serbs and Serb sinners in Hell that didn't make it to the exalted abode where you now reside, and this will make you very happy.

"Have you ever noticed that no one really attempts to explain the nature of bliss in Heaven? They just call it bliss or eternal happiness. I'm going to tell you exactly what causes this happiness. It's seeing people below you suffer, and not having to suffer yourself. It's being better than everyone else. Heaven and Hell aren't far separated from each other, as most would have you believe. They're adjacent, to provide a better view for those in Heaven. The bliss is heightened when the skewed faces of those in agony can be seen clearly. And as a matter of fact, even Heaven is divided into levels, with the best on top. This compounds their bliss by being better than more than just the sinners.

"Don't ever think of heaven as a giant communal camp-fire of universal love with everyone singing Cumbaya together in harmony. It just isn't that way. Heaven's a dog-eat-dog world with those on top not hesitating to scoff and gibe and tease those below.

"So brother, don't pull out now. You've made it fifty or sixty years as a Serb. If you can manage these last years, the bliss you find will be well worth the wait."

"All right, here's another question back up here."

Mark races to the back of the audience, goes down on one knee, tucks his head against his chest, and holds the mike out, like the statue of liberty, to a middle-aged women with shoulder-length permed hair, and holding a baby.

"Many arguments have been put forth to prove Bugs Bunny had a left wing guerilla mentality, rather than the reactionary stance that has come to be so accepted in this past decade. I see him as an anarchist myself. What type of political motivations do you think Bugs harbored, Reverend?"

"Self-preservation."

"Oooh, there's a new twist."

Mark hustles to another question in the front row. A monstrously fat Asian lady, probably the mother of several Sumo's, stirs from the gello-like mold she had formed against the chair, enough to achieve a somewhat standing--squatting is more appropriate--position to ask a question.

"Go ahead, ma'am."

"I'm fat, Mark, and I want to know what the Reverend thinks of it."

"Well, ma'am, from a Freudian perspective, fatness is just a fixation on the oral stage. You need to eat to achieve the oral satisfaction that you missed when you were a child. Were you breast fed?"

"No."

"How come?"

"I couldn't get my lips around my mother's nipple."

"That explains it. But continuing from this perspective, the desire for food, or in your case, feed, can also be a replacement for love and affection. Since you missed out on the whole breast feeding experience which entails the mother holding you and loving you and nursing you, this void in your life has been filled by food.

"It could also be that you're just bored, or that you're sex life is a little slow."

Mark arrives with the mike at a youngster of maybe fourteen years, wearing plaid pants and circular, wire-rimmed spectacles.

"Who is Guido?"

"I think you're a little young for that. Ask me that question three years from now. Children your age shouldn't be privy to that kind of perversity. The recounting of such macabre, grisly, and yet flamingly erotic, details can have a profound impact on a young child's unformed psyche. It can warp the mind, like a Simpson poem, and I wouldn't wish a Simpson poem on anyone."

The Reverend shudders, recalling the several lines from a recent Simpson poem:
'Now Vinnie's no technician,
but he could write a treatise
On just the right way to yank the wire
And pull out a stillborn fetus.'

As Mark returns to his place on the stage he notes, "We're nearing the end of our show today, but before we go, Reverend, do you have any closing remarks."

"I just wanted to remind everyone not to worry about sins and sinning. There are several technicalities that will allow you to circumvent the usual damnation that is associated with excessive sin.

Option number one is to repent for a lifetime of sinning just before the moment of death. God, because his PR men have sold him to the people as a kind and forgiving being, is bound by his image and therefore has to forgive you. Nike would cancel his contract if he tarnished his immaculate reputation by reneging on promises.

The second option is a safeguard that was inserted into divinge law by some unscrupulous philanthropist. It requires no effort on your part; it is there for your protection, and the only person it might inconvenience is the lawyer who has to argue your case in the Celestial Court System, or maybe the Devil. The safeguard is explicated in Dante's assertion on the Age of Moral Responsibility. The reason unbaptised babies can reach Heaven, Dante relates in the Divine Comedy, is because they haven't yet reached the Age of Moral Responsibility. They are not held accountable for their sins until after a certain point in life. The same is true for all humans; only after the Age of Moral Responsibility do our sins count. So the next question is: when exactly is this Age of Moral Responsibility? My answer is that I don't know for certain, but the angel that visited me told me it was just after mid-life."

"Great. Thank you for joining us today, Reverend. We appreciate you taking time out from your busy campaign on the Jesus issue to be here."

"My pleasure."

Audience applause drowns the sound of the shot glass which falls from the Reverend's lap and shatters on the floor as he rises, unnoticed by the jubilant crowd. Mark shakes hands with the Reverend, and then heads back to his dressing room while the audience slowly files out the exits located to the rear of the auditorium.

Back where you came from