It’s funny what sticks with you as you go thru life.. When I was a teenager, way back when, my father had one of those enormous satellite dishes. It picked up everything and then some. Regular TV without the commercials, some, uh, adult movie channels, fledgling cable channels we all know today and generally feeds from all over the world. For me the most striking was the 24 hour channel of Dr. Gene Scott. Gene-o was, for lack of a better word, a TV preacher, though he didn’t preach the same things as your local baptist preacher did.. He would ramble on and on for hours, about the Great Pyramids in Egypt, UFOs, Bigfoot and any other weird thing he could tie into the Bible. He’d smoke big cigars, sit in a big chair that resembled a throne to my untrained eyes, and pontificate on just about everything, all the while waiting on the phones to ring for love offerings. From out of nowhere, he would declare, right in the middle of telling us all just how those Great Pyramids were made, that he wasn’t gonna say another word, until all the phones lit up, every one,or till at least some monetary goal had been reached….. ….
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What??!! And just like that, there was silence…At that time, it was unbelievable, inconceivable even. And he made good on it too. The cameras would keep rolling, smoke billowing up from the cigar, sometimes with music, but often without. Just dead silence and a well lit stage with the occasional fern or elephant ear plant to offset the southern baptist baby blue carpet. Silence, for an hour, if that’s what it took. And like the consummate showman he was, as soon as his goal had been reached, he started right back up where he left off, to the word, like nothing had happened, and finished some incredulous story about fallen angels and extraterrestrials and/or some new, or new to us, translation of any given book of the Bible.. It was absolutley fascinating… Spellbinding ,day after day after day.. Not too far along after that, he branched out into shortwave radio and I listened to that too. I know of no one else who could command his listeners to stay tuned in during hours of silence.. Nobody dared turn away, who knew what he might say next… and was it even the truth? i figured out that sometimes it’s not about knowing, it’s about wanting to know..Dr. Gene died a couple of years ago, right after marrying his preaching protege, the now Dr. Melissa Scott, the oft rumored about adult film star, who roams the back roads of your local cable channel, or at least mine, after midnight. She’s got curly hair, and a grasp of the Aramaic language, the OG tongue (original gospel.. not gangster, silly rabbit).. Is she really good or really bad? I can’t help but watch…
JP and I are traveling again tomorrow morning, Nashville to Los Angeles, in the Big White Van of Questionable Yet Mysterious Intentions Tour 08…. As we hit I40 one more time, let me say I’m no Dr. Gene… but this is how it’s gonna be.. I”m not blogging another note until I get 10, no 15 interesting! emails at drlove@paulthorn.com.. not a peep….. all your divine questions will be answered then… read the blogs below to see if your question(s) have already been answered and let’s see how many people are listening…
Jeff and Silent Doc……