my brief and bloody foray into mormonism

bit of a misleading title, full disclosh

My recent posts were engaging with the idea of trad wives, many of whom are mormon. In thinking about mormons as a kind of, I suppose, foreign concept, I was reminded of my only real life interaction with mormonism.

---

I used to be an actor and in December 2019 I was filming a short film. it was a bit of a character-driven drama with a tinge of gore set at a high school halloween party.

on the first day of filming, I showed up, as instructed, to an address in Edinburgh. I didn't know until I arrived that said address was a mormon chapel¹ that we would be filming inside. I didn’t even know Scotland had mormons! What football team do they support??

I met some of the crew at the door and was led in to where we would be filming for the day. it was a big room that looked like a primary school gym hall, if that means anything to you.

here are a couple of photos I took while the crew were getting set up. the halloween decorations were ours, not theirs. there was also a stage at one end of the hall, but that was behind me as I took these.

two women in charge of hair, makeup and costuming pulled me into a side room which, from memory, was a bit like a gym changing room, maybe. I did my own eyeliner following one of the women’s repeated instructions of ‘more’ and ‘heavier’ then she applied a liquid lipstick from her own collection. this was in December 2019. only a couple of months later, letting a stranger put her lipstick on me straight from the tube (definitely not cleaned) would have been unthinkable. also, illegal. she then handed me a Bride of Frankenstein wig.

the second woman, a member of the church and the reason the production was permitted access to the building, brought in what would be my costume. it was a long white dress she informed me was a temple dress. which, to my limited knowledge, is a dress the women wear to the temple which is a specific and significant and important thing in mormonism. so I asked if they would mind that I, a complete non-believer—worse, a lapsed catholic²—was to cut about in this important garment (I didn’t wear ‘garments’ underneath btw, I came in a bra and pants and I stayed in a bra and pants). she assured me this dress was about to be thrown out so no one would care. at no point in the lead up did anyone ask me what size clothes I wear or had anyone seen me in person but somehow the dress just so happened to be a perfect length and fit (???!!!). I wanted to ask more about who the dress belonged to and why it was getting thrown out and loads of stuff about the religion (I am, above all else, a nosy bastard), but she was the first mormon I had ever met and I didn’t know what would be offensive or touchy to ask about. so instead I asked her if she’d seen the Book of Mormon musical (which I had seen on the West End earlier that year and was just about all I knew about mormonism at the time) and what they generally think of it. apparently they think it’s funny (surprising, tbh) and they don’t mind that it exists and they often stand outside the theatre with real books of mormons (idk how to pluralise that so i’m just throwing spaghettis at walls). that’s what she told me, don’t shoot the messenger if any of that is wrong!!

the bottom of the temple dress

the top of the dress. I wish I had a better picture of what it actually looked like, but you can see the neckline and some of the lace detail that went in vertical lines down the bodice

remember that Girl Defined video about ‘how to wear makeup in a god-honouring way’? it’s been a long time since I saw it, but I’m fairly sure they specifically instructed us to wear black glittery lipstick. the one pupil being significantly larger than the other is not part of the costume, that’s a permanent feature.

back in the hall where we were filming, two older church members, a man and a woman, came to sit and watch. I suddenly felt uneasy, to say the least, about the fact that I was wearing a temple dress in such a secular/disrespectful/unholy (delete as appropriate) way, thinking I might at best cause offence, at worst be verbally condemned to hell in front of all the camera guys which would have been v embarrassing. although the woman did arguably hurt me worse even than that—she insulted my prized possessions: my gorgeous perfect very special 1980s white patent Doc Martens. my gorgeous perfect very special 1980s white patent Doc Martens that I found in a vintage shop in Glasgow, having wanted a pair of white docs for ages (at the time you couldn’t really just buy a pair as easily as you can now). I walked into this vintage shop on a whim one day and there sat one pair, in excellent condition and in a size 4, my exact size. so I bought them and wore them constantly for about a year (still got them; still wear them; still love them). the boots became much more ubiquitous a while after that, but mine were, and are, special to me.

took this to send to a friend when I was trying the boots on in the shop. while doing this, some woman tried on my shoes that I had taken off to try these on so I had to subtly follow her around the shop like, ‘excuse me…my shoes…’ I would perhaps take that as a compliment on my taste in shoes, but they were a pair of semi-destroyed adidas superstars so I don’t know what the fuck she was doing

I stood and chatted to the church members as I waited for the crew to get all set up between takes and they were perfectly nice. we were having a wee laugh about what we were filming and my costume and how ridiculous the massive wig I was carrying about with me was. and then the woman joked about me having to wear a pair of silly boots that looked like ice skates as part of my costume. except they weren’t part of my costume. they were just my boots, my gorgeous perfect very special 1980s white patent Doc Martens. in all fairness, they do look a bit like ice skates. one time I was in my aunt’s living room—in her living room, in her house, the floors of which are not made of ice—and she asked, in complete sincerity, if I was wearing ice skates. (‘no, Margaret Marie, I am not skating about on your linoleum floors. for christ’s sake.’)

anyway, shooting was fine, I didn’t offend anyone, and I accidentally ended up looking really incredibly creepy, so…result!

I really quite like those sleeves

this was supposed to be a ‘look, i’m wearing a temple dress!’ pic, but the poor photography made it slightly spectral. there’s something quite victorian about it, even though i’m standing in front of a uPVC door and holding an iphone. (it’s in black and white because this was the day of the 2019 UK general election so I made it b&w and sent it to my pals being like, ‘what’s spookier, this pic or the exit polls?’)

phenomenal Doctor and the Medics - Spirit in the Sky music video cosplay tbf.

there’s also this absolute belter in which you can see my eyeballs through my eyelid skin. content warning.

have you ever blinked but also not blinked? like, at the same time?

I then had a costume change into normal street clothes and removed the intense makeup. we were filming a scene in a bathroom that began with me spitting out a load of blood into a sink. so before every take I had to pour a decent amount of fake blood into my mouth, keep it there until ‘action’ was called, push through the door into the bathroom, shove another actor away from the sink, and only then could I finally spit out the mouthful of blood. rinse and repeat until director was satisfied (you need to film scenes several times, from several angles). I don’t remember now exactly what the blood tasted like — I think it was just, like, chemical-y — but I do remember at the time becoming very familiar with whatever the flavour was.

the bottle read very clearly ‘do not ingest.’ I probably ingested about half a pint. this photo was taken quite early on in the filming process. things only got redder from there.

before leaving the chapel I tried to scrub all the red off me but it was quite determinedly sticking to my teeth and tongue and lips and chin. eventually I had to give up and go home looking very much like i’d been in a bar fight. thankfully the black lipstick had come off easily earlier in the day or i’d have looked like I had a five o’clock shadow under the bloody tinge.

as much as I have been critical of mormons and their beliefs, I couldn’t say a single bad word about my experience with the Edinburgh mormons, who remain the only three representatives of the religion I have ever knowingly interacted with. all three of them were American, though. i’m not sure why that’s a ‘though,’ but it does feel like one. they were all perfectly nice to me and, this is perhaps betraying my own closed-mindedness, all seemed very normal. or at least normal relative to the rest of Edinburgh. nothing against Edinburgh! beautiful city! I did my masters there! it has a great law school! replete with weirdos, though.

reflecting on it now, maybe I should be offended that no one at any point showed any desire whatsoever to try to convert me. but what self-respecting church member would want to be responsible for bringing the incessant question-asking, loud-voiced glaswegian into the fold? fair enough, actually.

anyway… the takeaways are as follows. firstly: Scotland has mormons—who knew! secondly: they’re just, like, people. thirdly and perhaps my biggest lesson: if you walk through Edinburgh Haymarket train station and onto a train and ride that train for an hour and forty minutes looking like you were recently punched in the mouth, not one single person will express any concern for your wellbeing. and I just don’t think that would happen in Glasgow.

another Edinburgh-based adventure:

1. I don’t know if chapel is the correct terminology, but from googling that seems to be how they refer to it. it defo wasn’t a temple because it was only announced in April of this year that Edinburgh will be getting Scotland’s first mormon temple at some point in the future. I only found this out about thirty seconds ago.

2. I didn’t use any of these words.