(Continued)

She was followed by Virginia Hamm, wearing, you guessed it, a pink gown criss-crossed with brown threads and studded with what looked suspiciously like cloves. May the Gender-Free God help us. Next came Keisha LaReigne, wearing an egg-yolk yellow caftan streaked with reddish brown strips. A bejewled golden tiara nested in her bouffant hair. Close on her heels was Lady Fingers, in a vanilla-colored off-the-shoulder number that split into separate panels from her waist down to her knees.

The four Holy Rollers lined up next to me at the altar, awaiting the arrival of their final member, Honey du Mellon, so they could launch into their harmony. But she was nowhere to be seen. Nervous titters passed through the assembly as we waited. Finally, she rushed in, out of breath. She’d managed, miraculously, to prop up a set of knockers the size of … well, honeydew melons. If her supporting infrastructure was anything like mine, I could see why she was out of breath. But apparently that wasn’t the reason. Arriving at the altar, she puffed, “So sorry, loves. My Hog had some mechanical trouble on the way over. I just got here and changed as fast as I could. Okay, ladies, let’s rock and roll!”

With that and a nod to the organist, they launched into “We Shall Overcome.” Now, this particular selection, as I understood it, was an homage to the Church of the Gender-Free God and its founder, the Reverend LaVerne Botay. The good reverend had grown up attending the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in the fifties, listening to Martin Luther King, Jr. preach the social gospel of service to the world’s oppressed. Like the late great martyr, she’d rejected religious fundamentalism in favor of the Golden Rule.