Uncle Dingdong and Marianne

Every time I see Marianne Williamson in the news or on the timeline, it remains surreal. When I saw her name popping up in the late 2010s, I had to see if it was the same Williamson from my childhood. Surely, it wasn’t her. But it was.

I grew up in California in the 80s- early 90s. Have you heard the Rupert Holmes song “Escape?” You surely have. It’s the pina colada song. It was written in 1979, and some of the lyrics don’t really work now. In 2021, lines about looking for someone who is “not into health food,” “not into yoga,” and “has half a brain” have a different meaning. Right-wing nudist bodybuilders are “into health food” and millennial moms on facebook who pretend to care about BLM are “into yoga.” But back then, stuff like that was associated with New Age radical wingnut Californians who followed “gurus” like Ananda and Rajneesh. Outside of LA or SF, you bought your “veggie dogs” in a can from the one health food store in town if you happened to have one, and such a place was for hippy weirdos. Crystals and chakras and all that demonic stuff was novel (even if most of it was actually just rehashed theosophy and spiritualism) and hadn’t yet gone fully normie mainstream. Where it did exist, it was in a highly concentrated form.

Before I was born, my mother was in a UFO cult- sorry, a UFO commune. It kind of still exists, but has sort of run out of steam. I grew up hanging out with her friend Kathy at the one cafe in town, which served such exotic fare as yogurt and bean sprouts. Seriously- yogurt was regarded as weird (and possibly gay) by the general public. Even bagels were suspect. Kathy wrote a cookbook to raise money for the UFO group. The book is called Cosmic Cookery and you can still dig up old copies on the internet. If you have any interest in West Coast New Age groups, you’ll start to notice that many of them raised money this way, through “health food” related ventures. Ironically, whole wheat items featured prominently, including intentionally high-gluten preparations such as “gluten steaks.”

Anyway, one of the New Age fools in my life was an uncle with an anger problem. A perfect illustration of Uncle Dingdong would be the time that he, red-faced and with spittle flying, flipped off his wife and seethed, “THIS is what I think of NEGATIVITY!” The man hoarded New Age books and every self-help bestseller. I’m Okay, You’re Okay. Please Understand Me! Out on a Limb. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The Celestine Prophecy. Be Here Now. This stuff was everywhere, in the air, on the coffee table, in our speech. I was taking the Enneagram test, and taking it very seriously, in grade school.

Uncle Dingdong was known to sit on his waterbed, playing the harmonium, and chanting joy, joooy, joooyjoyjoyjoy. Meanwhile, his disturbed and ghostly children were quick to burst into tears. I remember his son, malnourished (vegetarian, natch) and daughter, in filthy clothing standing there while he showed off his new suede jacket, inexplicably in letter-jacket style, although he was a grown man and not a high-school jock. I also remember learning that he forced his wife to have an abortion before they were married. I think Uncle Dingdong could not stand to portray anything less than a picture of domestic bliss with his beautiful bride, and could not endure gossip or anyone thinking he’d been “trapped” in a marriage. So baby had to go. I remember his wife lying in bed at Grandma’s house recuperating, me being shooed away, and seeing bloody cloths. Back then they told me she’d had her wisdom teeth out.

I can’t imagine the abortion was a result of pressure from my grandparents, who likely would have regarded abortion as a reality unto itself, an actual event- even if kept secret- not as a solution to a problem. Many people have rose-colored memories of their grandparents, but I truly do not think any of us grandchildren would be anywhere near stable if not for Grandma and Grandpa. For one, they fed us growing children meat regularly, which the vegetarian fools weren’t doing at home. Second, their house was well-lit, impeccably clean and tidy, welcoming, and friendly, everything our homes were not. Their children, our boomer parents, went completely off the rails. Grandma and Grandpa surely made mistakes but could not have known the horrors that 1960s-80s California had in store when they set up a home in a little town and Grandma set to being the greatest housewife and kindest most patient human being I have ever known.

Aside from the general climate of 1980s-90s California, another important bit of context here is my temperament as a child. I was small for my age, extremely shy, deferential, eager-to-please. I was, to put it simply, desperate to be liked, and adults scared me. I was also frightened of the telephone. My parents came up with a great method of teaching me to use it. Mom got on the phone downstairs while I talked to her on the phone upstairs. Gradually, I overcame my fear. They also taught me phone etiquette, which I adhered to strictly. This made me feel like I was the one using the phone, I was the operator, the scary machine wasn’t going to do anything to me. It worked. But again, I was obedient in the extreme. I wasn’t stupid, just small and confused. If my parents told me “don’t get in a car with strangers,” of course that would override some stranger demanding I get in his car. But I was unprepared for the man who rang the house and had a violently pornographic chat with me, most of which I did not understand. I would not hang up on him, because that was against the rules. I remember crying and asking him, “can I hang up now? I want to hang up now” again and again. I tell this story to illustrate how obsequious I was when it came to adults and their ideas.

But back to Uncle Dingdong.

So after his divorce (no surprise), he set on a course to marry a wealthy woman. A doctor, psychiatrist, anything. Try to move in, propose, short engagement, then gets the boot. Eventually he flew too close to the sun, was not financially prepared to lose the girl, and had to sell his house. Without the filthy house or his meal ticket, he moved back in with his parents, kids in tow. My grandparents still lived in the family house so there was plenty of room. By this point it was the early 1990s.

For some time, my grandparents would watch me after school. Graham crackers and apple juice and watching TV with my cousins. And now, Uncle Dingdong himself. For a period of months it seemed like every time he was home (and not out lurking “Parents without Partners” events), he was lying on the guest bed with the door open- the same bed where his wife had recovered from her abortion. Hands clasped behind his head, legs crossed at the ankles. Eyes closed. Tape player on. No headphones, just blaring it.

Cassette tapes.
Cassette tapes from an entire set he kept in a special naugahyde carry case with a handle.
Cassette tapes of a woman speaking rapidly, excitedly.
Cassette tapes of Marianne Williamson.

It was, of course, A Course in Miracles. Or rather, it was Williamson babbling on and on and ON about A Course in Miracles, because she herself did not write A Course in Miracles. But Marianne Williamson was very, very excited about A Course in Miracles. Did I mention A Course in Miracles? Because it seemed like this was the frequency with which Williamson mentioned A Course in Miracles on those tapes about A Course in Miracles. It got so whenever I heard “a course in miracles” I would actually physically cringe.

A Course in Miracles (cringe) was written in 1976 by a psychologist named Helen Schucman. She claims it was dictated to her by Christ. It is a combination of demonically interpreted Christianity, modern psychotherapy, 12-Step miscellany, and various New Age ideas. Marianne Williamson read it, and apparently it blew her mind because she started giving lectures about it. Her lectures became popular and she rented church spaces to spread her ideas. Later on, she became a “pastor” about it. Williamson is Jewish, and explains the apparent contradiction thusly: “A conversion to Christ is not a conversion to Christianity. It is a conversion to a conviction of the heart. The Messiah is not a person but a point of view.”

I didn’t find all that stuff out until later. As a kid I just wondered who was this breathy, fast-talking, insistent woman? She seemed so important to Uncle Dingdong that he would lay there and listen to her for hours. At first I tried to listen to the tapes from the hallway. I’d been exposed to all kinds of New Age stuff, but none of it seemed consistent or particularly demanding. This grown-up, however, was very excited about her way of living and looking at everything, and she was so SURE about it. In my world, adults privately prayed over their own food while not explaining any of it to their children, let alone asking them to join in. This was the “freedom” we were so generously given, and from it we learned that the state of our souls and religion itself was not particularly important. And so I craved guidelines, routine, some kind of framework through which to see the world. An insecure, needy kid like me should have been a sucker for Williamson, even if I didn’t understand all the words.

Instead, almost immediately, Williamson completely disgusted me.

It wasn’t any one thing that set me off. And there had been adults I disliked, who frightened me, who I disagreed with, but like I said, I was extremely insecure and cowed by them. This, however, was something different. This was the first time in my life that I confidently regarded an adult as being STUPID. Maybe I couldn’t grasp the concepts, maybe I didn’t know all the words. Didn’t matter. I knew on some instinctive level that something was deeply wrong with this woman, that she was possibly insane, definitely full of shit, and that if Uncle Dingdong could not see it, then he was a fool.

What a revelation: he was a grown-up…but he was a complete and utter fool. I had suspected this was possible, but never held the feeling with such conviction. And Williamson was famous, so apparently a whole bunch of grown-ups liked her. That meant…they were fools too. It meant that there were many, many grown-ups who were obviously and dangerously stupid.

And so, for months afterward, my own secret way of assessing whether or not an adult might be stupid was to ask myself: “I wonder if this grown-up would listen to Marianne Williamson