I hope you won’t mind a bit of Friday-induced levity. . .
When my wife Macy worked on Capitol Hill, she often went to lunch with the all-male group of guys in her office. As they’d walk across the hill at lunch time, Macy (who was strangely connected in the Mormon singles scene at the time, even though we were married before coming to D.C.) would greet all her Mormon girlfriends as they passed. This always led to discussions among her guy friends about how Mormon girls are all so amazingly hot. Macy always demurred, but whenever I hung out with this group, I always made sure to confirm their fantasies of Utah Valleys packed to the peaks with gorgeous women, 90% of them blonde, and all of them meticulously done up.
I know this not to be the case, of course, but it was fun to play on their hopeful gullibility (I won’t even tell you how I answered the question of a member in Portugal who asked me “Elder, the girls in America, do they all look, and dress, like in Baywatch?”). Still, there’s a chance that Mormons are better looking than others, and we inside the church seem happy to believe and propagate this claim regardless of whether it’s true. How many ‘surveys’ done in national magazines of (whether of good or ill repute) have you heard of that place Mormons high up in the ranks of the beautiful? Yeah, me too. Ever actually seen one of those surveys? Me neither.
Here’s my piece of very reliable anecdotal evidence, to begin what I anticipate will be a thread full of it. While living in D.C., I never noticed ‘beauty.’ It wasn’t really a concern as I pushed my way through the masses of people pressing into metro trains and through security stations. Every once in a while, we’d come back to Salt Lake City, and then, suddenly, beauty was consistently popping out at me all over the place. Everyone was beautiful, suddenly. This was no doubt made more noticeable because of the contrast, but still, I couldn’t help concluding at least the following: Residents of Salt Lake City are, on the whole, better looking than residents of Washington, D.C. (Or, maybe it means that residents of one’s native land are better looking than those of other places, or that Salt Lake City people dress more flashy, or that D.C. people don’t do themselves up, or that . . . )
Anyway, what is your collective experience, readers? Is this true, false, possible, stupid, or irrelevant? What experiences or anecdotes can you share about the effectiveness of Mormon wimples and crisping pins?