Holy Orlando!
An Easter Week breather.......
I generally consider myself a Christmas guy, more than an Easter guy. Though in Christianity, we believe it’s all part of the same continuum: the birth, crucifixion, and resurrection. Or as the prophet Townes Van Zandt singeth: All born to grow/and grown to die.
Yet I don’t know why Easter’s always left me chilly, if not exactly cold. Maybe it’s because I don’t look very fetching in an Easter bonnet. Easter peeps are good, I guess, if you enjoy diabetic comas. Or maybe I find overgrown rabbits slightly unnerving. The Easter Bunny’s lethal incisors are almost perfectly aligned with our jugulars. What if he snaps?
To me, the trappings of the season always felt disconnected from the real deal. It’s like @ThePeoplesJesus over at Elon’s disinformation emporium puts it:
But this year, I am celebrating Holy Week like my sanity depended on it, perhaps because it does. For a change, I welcome the opportunity to hear people say “Jesus Christ” without them then slapping their foreheads, asking, “Now what did Trump do?”
Yeah, I made it all of four grafs in without mentioning our Dear Leader — probably a new personal best since his inauguration. But when the country you’ve always loved slides toward authoritarianism, it does have a way of monopolizing one’s attention. Still, despite Trump’s continuing war on the rule of law, the press, the federal government, legal immigrants, private industry, science, health, our allies, law firms, the truth, common decency, the academy, the Kennedy Center, the National Zoo, my IRA, etc., I’m not going to write about Trump this week. And in fact, I’m not going to write much at all, other than this intro. (If you’re truly jonesing for me to ridicule our naked emperor, there’s some of that over on Substack Notes.)
For I’ve had an Easter traffic snarl, responsibility-wise: making culinary preparations for a huge Easter dinner at my house, getting the yard in shape and needing to repair my ancient, temperamental lawn tractor in order to do so, having to straighten out an income tax overpayment snafu from my soon-to-be-former accountant. And all of this, distracting me from what I truly prefer to concentrate on during this sacred time of year: shad season. (That is not sacrilege. J.C. hung out with lots of fishermen. He understands.)
So I’m not going to have time to crank out yet another highly-acclaimed, award-winning, fully-formed essay on the subject of my choice. And besides, that subject might very well have been the continuing gang rape of our republic by our president, his billionaire co-conspirators, and his child-soldier DOGE cohorts. Man cannot live on outrage alone, even if I’ve given it a pretty fair shot for the last 90 days.
Instead, in keeping with Easter week, I looked into my vast oeuvre of Jesus-themed stories. (“Oeuvre” being a French word that means “I’m about to recycle”), and came up with this deeply entertaining adventure that I had the pleasure of documenting back when being a roving magazine correspondent was my full-time occupation. I spent some quality time at the Holy Land Experience, Orlando’s only Bible-based theme park, which has since closed, with its property sold to AdventHealth for $32 million.
But back in the day, it was a controversial wonderland, and I detailed it all: the “Thirsty Camel Coolers” in King David’s Alley, the park’s slick but hilarious P.R. man, Jesus’s mom (Mary) who was also a singing waitress at the Macaroni Grill, the Garden Tomb with the air conditioner on the blink, the “Revival In The Land!” dancers, and much, much more. If you’re Jewish, and suspect there’s nothing here for you, you would suspect wrongly. For because the Holy Land Experience caused religious warfare between the Messianic Jewish park owner, and O.G. Jews who accused him of religious appropriation, I actually brought Orlando’s only orthodox rabbi with me to sample the goods, so I could see the park through his eyes as well. In other words, there’s something for everyone. Even for atheists who just enjoy laughing at us religious nuts, much as we laugh at you behind your godless backs. So enjoy, and Happy Easter:
Orlando, Fla.
From the moment one walks through the distressed-stucco Jerusalem city gate at the Holy Land Experience, Orlando’s newest and only Bible-based theme park, it is clear that the generally useless French postmodernists did occasionally pin the caption on an epoch. It was a Disney-studying Jean Baudrillard who christened ours the “Age of Absolute Simulation,” where simulated worlds bear stronger resemblance to reality than does the increasingly artificial real one.
And so it seems at the turnstile, where a costumed ticket-taker utters a hearty “Shalom.” Though none of us knows for certain exactly how Jerusalem looked between about 1450 B.C. and 66 A.D., it was surely a lot like the park’s recreated street market. Here, Middle Eastern soundtracks blast over an unseen PA system, while one meanders into the Methuselah’s Mosaics art gallery to pick out a $ 5,000 Abraham-sacrificing-Isaac painted in oils (not on velvet). Just off King David’s Alley, a guy named Mark (in period smock and flip-flops) loudly hawks the “ninth wonder of the world” — his milk-and-honey ice cream — which is moving much more briskly than the eighth wonder of the world, the lemon slush, known in antiquity as the “Thirsty Camel Cooler.”
The very words “Christian theme park” tend to elicit ridicule. It was 13 years ago that P. J. O’Rourke visited the last Christian theme park, Jim and Tammy Bakker’s now defunct Heritage USA, with the intention of scoffing. Instead, he wrote, he came away converted — “to Satanism.” Unlike Heritage, however, the Holy Land Experience, which bills itself as a “living Biblical museum,” doesn’t favor air-conditioned doghouses, 52-foot water slides, or slutty church secretaries. It is intended to create a “total immersion experience,” dramatically demonstrating that “the Bible is God’s word to man” and sharing the message of God’s grace to man through the “death, burial and resurrection of His Son.” But that hasn’t kept discount O’Rourkes at bay.
In fact, it seems to have attracted more of them, says a buoyant park spokesman, Ryan Julison, who has used the media controversy in a bit of public relations aikido. (The park has filled to its 800-person capacity by mid-morning every day since it opened on February 5, causing a run on tickets and a shortage of milk-and-honey ice cream.) “Check this out,” Julison says, handing me a copy of an article from PR Week honoring Gilbert & Manjura (the park’s outside PR firm, which employs Julison) for pulling off the “PR Play of the Week,” generating thousands of television and print stories. The magazine is “the PR bible,” he says proudly.
Well-tailored and good-humored, Julison is earnest enough to declare that he personally plays for Team Jesus, but earthy enough not to be religious about it. While the general tone of news coverage has been restrained bemusement, Julison says, “We’ve had every satirist in the country invent rides for this place — the Satan’s breath roller coaster, the John the Baptist flume — that kind of thing.” Since the park doesn’t actually have rides, I ask Julison to start our tour at the water-to-wine bar. “You’re the fourth guy to think of that,” he says. “C’mon. You’ve got to do better than the Apopka Chief weekly.”