Day Six -- Tuesday

Emotional Confusion
I would tend to consider both Natalie and myself as generally pleasant, happy people. We are both even-tempered, and we love to laugh. And up until this point, I never thought there existed such a disease as being too happy or smiling and laughing too much (within reason). But today when Natalie and I were sitting in the chairs at the pageant site, talking and waiting for rehearsal to start, Paul (the actor who plays Parley P. Pratt) came up to us and said: "There have been complaints that you two are too happy all the time. We're in Nauvoo! Stop smiling so much, and just endure." Although I knew full well that he was teasing, this caught me by surprise. I don't remember reading cheerfulness in the list of sins. Ever. Anyway, as Parley P. Pratt greeted us during the show as we immigrated to Nauvoo, he was again compelled to remind us that smiling was prohibited.

The Man in the Trailer
Yesterday, Natalie and I borrowed a CD player from Sis. G. (a children's caretaker) so we could practice our Irish dance. This morning, we crossed the lawn to enter the other part of the building to return it. Natalie reached the door first and pulled, only to find out that it was locked. She tried again with the same result, so we decided to go around to another entrance. Then, an old man on a small trailer saw us and drove over, easily opened the door, and drove away. The door had been open the whole time! It was quite embarrassing.

Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall
Humpty Dumpty, in this instance, is not an over-sized (not to mention overdressed) egg as commonly depicted, but is the biggest moving trailer you've ever seen, filled with metal folding chairs. It all began with our cast service project: to set up thousands of chairs at the pageant site. It was an amazing scene: we quickly organized ourselves into fast-paced assembly lines, beginning with a couple men inside large trailers that were unloading chairs to us, which we would pass down the line and then set up. The phenomenon occurred when approximately half of the chairs had been emptied from the trailer. Of course, they had begun unloading chairs at the front and moved their way back. Herein lies the problem; once the trailer had been emptied halfway, the back end of the trailer was significantly heavier than the front end. All of a sudden, we heard the crash of the front end of the trailer hitting the ground, all of us knowing that the men in the trailer had also fallen the length of the vehicle. Fortunately they were just fine, which immediately switched the situation from one of horror to one of hilarity. Out whipped the camera phones, and that experience will forever be remembered among over a hundred Latter-day saints who now know that service can be a rewarding, humorous experience.