STEALTH MENNONITES

Summer, 2004. University City lay in ruins. Stealth Mennonites roamed the streets, many of them invisible to the naked eye. Cherry Rowbottom, after a brilliant ten-year run as President of the Varsity, had gone off to Langley to become Director of Central Intelligence after George Tenet’s ignominious resignation. While acknowledging that she had not quite managed to make University City the hip and trendy venue to rival Harvard Square for which she had once hoped, she bravely maintained in her farewell speech that she had done as much as any mortal human could have.

“When I came, the place was a fucking shambles. I came, I saw, and I built a brand new school for the little Negro chilluns. I put an Ann Taylor Loft and a fancy hotel on University Square. Hell, I put up the sign *designating* it University Square. An Urban Outfitters, a Barnes and Noble, a Cosi fan Tutti, and hey, don’t forget the Chocolate Guy. Crime on the Baltimore corridor has dropped by 72%. Suburban soccer moms no longer call up the admissions office inquiring ‘Is it safe?’ Penn went from being a laughingstock, the ‘Bottom of the Ivies’, to being a world-class university and shopping mall. We’re a Destination, for God’s sake. There may be a little shit left on the sidewalk in West Philadelphia, but hell, how long did it take Hercules to clean out the Augean Stables?”

In fact, a remarkable survey done by the Fecal Matter Inspection Committee of the Friends of Clark Park undertaken in August proved definitively that the Bowl was no longer a destination for doggie do. While off-leash pitbulls and Rottweilers continued to savage young children and old ladies in the Park, the volume of manure deposited there had dropped precipitously during the Rowbottom administration. Dog owners, for whatever reason, were letting their beasts shit in their own front yards, or perhaps their neighbors’, rather than taking the trouble to drive them to the Bowl to do their business.

Among her many achievements, at a humble and insignificant slot down at the bottom of a rather long list, Cherry Rowbottom listed the importation of Mennonites into West Philadelphia. Like Catherine the Great before her, who invited Mennonite farmers from Germany to settle the Ukranian lands recently vacated by the Ottoman Turks, Rowbottom, or at any rate her sub-provosts, recognized the industriousness of these quaint people and their utility in nicing down rough frontier areas.

The Mennonite coffee-house, the Green Line, at 43rd and Baltimore was only the first step in what would become a fruitful partnership between the Varsity and these quaint, gentle, hobbit-like folk. Over the decade the hallowed Philadelphia institution of the Farmers’ Market had experienced a resurgence. Mennonite and Amish farmers from Lancaster County had for many years brought their organic foods, free-range chickens, and shoofly pies to market in the big city. The Reading Terminal Market downtown was a showcase for the picturesque Amishmen with their grey beards, and their dumpy spouses in shapeless cape dresses and white head coverings.

But now, on Thursdays and on Saturdays, but mostly on the latter days, the Plain People set up their stands and marketed their wares in Clark Park. An enterprising poultry vendor, Amish Dan the Barbecue Man, even went so far as to launch a barbecue operation in Cedar Park, roasting hundreds of chickens a day, the fragrant but robust odors diffusing among the slums and ghetto alleys and pulling in the customers, until one day he got busted in a routine L& I sweep of the Baltimore Corridor.

Fortunately, a young Mennonite had just acquired the Firehouse Farmer’s Market at 50th St, and he brought Amish Dan in from the cold.

The Firehouse had been an actual, functioning fire station back around the turn of the century, with horse-drawn fire engines and stalls for the livestock. In the 1980s a coalition of enterprising neighbors had rehabbed the sturdy brick structure and turned it into an urban market, with a lunch counter, butcher and produce stand.

Under the ministrations of Yoney Stoltzfus, the new owner, it blossomed into a cross-cultural potpourri and showcase of diversity, featuring a Korean greengrocer, Liberian fishmonger, Cambodian flower merchant, Polish butcher, Japanese masseuse, and Amish Dan the Barbecue Man. Upstairs was the Anarchist Bike Works.

Thus from the Green Line at 43rd and Baltimore to the Firehouse Market at 50th and Baltimore, the Corridor was becoming recognized as Mennonite turf. The Mennonite church rented space in the Methodist cathedral at 48th St., preferring to let the Methodists handle the immense maintenance problems of the sprawling old stone church building, rather than to own property themselves.

The Mennonites kept a low profile. Millions of dollars from wealthy Mennonite businessmen in Lancaster and Montgomery Counties poured into the hood, and it was rumored that the Mennos owned perhaps 25% of the real estate outright. Another quarter was held through an intricate series of front organizations, hair-braiding salons, and pizza shops.

But unlike the colorful Amish, with their black hats and white coverings, the Mennonites were indistinguishable from other Village people to the naked eye. Hence the term “Stealth Mennonites.” The curious neighbors didn’t know what went on in the unspeakable Anabaptist rites in the chapel of Calvary church, since services began at 6:30am Sunday mornings, directly after milking time, but it was rumored to have to do with lots of food and four-part a capella singing.

But the Mennonites were newcomers to the big cities in North America, and one element in their stealth was the natural innocent bashfulness of simple farm folk emigrating into the decadence of Sodom and Gomorrah. Like the Amish boy in the movie “Witness”, young Mennonites were fascinated by the glamour of the majestic Thirtieth Street Station, but freaked out by what went on in the men’s room.

Ironically enough, the first Mennonites to voyage to North America had arrived in Philadelphia in the year 1683, from Krefeld, Germany. The good ship Concord brought a mixed load of Mennonites and Quakers. When they hit Philadelphia, the agriculturally inclined Mennonites trekked up to what is now Germantown, to hack farms out of the virgin wilderness. The Quakers stayed in the city.

The wandering Mennos who emigrated to North America were the first trickle of a persecuted people who had been hounded around Europe since their origins as the Anabaptists in Zurich in 1525. The Anabaptists were a diverse and amorphous radical religious movement in the Protestant Reformation in the early 16th century. Their insistence on adult baptism (Anabaptist = rebaptizer) signified a revolutionary break with the medieval ideal of the corpus Christianum.

This ideal and practice of a voluntary religious covenant outside the control of the state took them further to the left than mainstream reformers like Luther and Calvin. Their radicalism, frequently allied with a widespread revolutionary peasant movement, brought upon them the wrath of the established Church and State, whether Catholic or Protestant.

Thus they have been described as the “Left Wing of the Reformation” (Roland Bainton) and the “Radical Reformation” (George Williams). Their association with the German Peasant War of 1525 and the Anabaptist kingdom of Muenster (1534-35) led to widespread attempts to exterminate the movement, and by about 1540 most major Anabaptist leaders had been tortured to death.

In the Netherlands a former Catholic priest named Menno Simons pulled together the remnants of the more peaceful wing of the Anabaptist movement in the mid 1500s, and this wing has survived as the Mennonites (and their offshoot the Amish). In southeastern Europe another peaceful group of Anabaptist survived as the Hutterites. Both groups gradually emigrated to North America, although Anabaptist groups exist around the world due to missionary activity, today numbering about one million.

The actual practice of adult baptism can be dated to 1525 in Zurich, Switzerland, although the practice spread rapidly and apparently had multiple points of genesis in Switzerland, southern and central Germany, the Tyrol, north Germany, and the Netherlands. Although the Mennonites and Hutterites today are distinguished by their thoroughgoing pacifism, many of the Anabaptists in Europe in the 1520s and 30s were violent revolutionaries.

The great peasant rebellion of 1525 had many participants who identified as Anabaptists. In 1534 the north German city of Muenster was taken over by Anabaptists who instituted polgygamy and a community of goods, and who fought off the Catholic bishops’ armies until June of 1535. This revolutionary movement has been claimed by Engels, Kautsky and other Marxist historians as the genesis of Communism in Europe.

But from the beginning of the Swiss Brethren group in Zurich, there was an extreme pacifist wing of the Anabaptists which renounced any use of the sword. This meant a renunciation of military duties or careers, and usually of any public office which involved the exercise of lethal force. This did not account by itself for the brutal suppression of the movement, for Erasmus, an extreme theoretical pacifist, died in bed as a Catholic. It was rather the direct challenge to the medieval polity of the allied church and state, combined with the violent and revolutionary tendencies of some Anabaptists, which accounted for the attempts at extermination.

Since most Anabaptist leaders were martyred in their youth, a systematic theology does not remain, except in the writings of Menno Simons. Historians have reconstructed the movement from fragmentary evidence: letters, written confessions of faith, records of trials, and especially records of interrogations under torture. A vivid martyrology also grew up among remant Anabaptist groups and has provided a major devotional source for their descendants.

The history of the Mennonites is a long and tedious one. In the Netherlands, where they were tolerated, they became wealthy merchants and worthy citizens. Rembrandt married a nice Mennonite girl, and immediately wished he hadn’t. The paintings of dull, muted lowland landscapes painted by Mennonite artists Jacob and Solomon van Ruisdael hang drearily on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Vondel Park in Amsterdam, where the junkies now congregate to shoot up and smoke their hashish, is named after the great 17th century Mennonite poet Joost van den Vondel, who apostasized and returned to the Catholics.

For that matter, Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, once infested by hippies and homosexuals, is named after David Rittenhouse, 18th century clockmaker and descendant of William Rittenhouse, the wealthy Mennonite papermaker from Germantown. The tendency of the stolid Mennonite farmers has been to work hard, make money, go into business, and then assimilate and apostasize. Max Weber, in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, famously cited the Dutch Mennonites as epitomes of The Ethic.

Mennonites in Lancaster and Montgomery Counties made fortunes bringing their produce and livestock to market in Philadelphia. Longacre Farms and Rosenberger Dairies, administered by apostate Mennos and their descendants, are familiar to grocery shoppers in the city. Herr’s potato chips and Sauder’s eggs grace the tables of bon vivants and epicures in the University City Village.

Like the missionaries to Hawaiidramatized by James Michener, the Mennonites came to North America to do good and ended up by doing very well indeed. They can’t help it. They succeed in spite of themselves, with their clean-living ways and their tendency to squirrel away their wealth in the mattress. Whereas the mattress conjures up lewd visions of hanky-panky among the heathen, to the pious Mennonite it signifies hard work and money.

And so the years rolled on, and the Stealth Mennonites worked hard and stuffed the money away in their mattresses, trying hard not to think about sex. Their intricate and complex personalities nurtured a wad of neuroses, born of their heritage of being abused scum hounded across Europe, tortured to death by the Catholics and Lutherans, and looked down upon as bumpkins by the cosmopolitan Jews and Episcopalians. Even in the early twentieth century eminent German church historians dismissed them as a fringe sect, akin to Mormons, Adventists, or Jehovah’s Witnesses.

All that changed, of course, when Harold S. Bender, Dean of the foundling Mennonite seminary in the badlands of northern Indiana, stood up on the table at the Columbia University Faculty Club in 1943 and announced to the assembled church historians that he had had a vision. It was called “The Anabaptist Vision”, and it proved definitively that Mennos were not merely hicks from the sticks. No, they were the hotshot radicals of the Reformation, the firebrands, the weirdos, and in 1525 in Zurich (not coincidentally the birthplace of Dada) they had formulated a view of the church that was to shake Western Europe down to its skivvies.

The Anabaptist Vision, was, in short, that the church should be a voluntary association of adults, that there should be a strict division between church and state, and that the redeemed should not lift up the sword against no man, not even the dreadful terrorist Turks who were gnashing their nasty teeth at the gates of Vienna at that very moment.

Of course, in the twentieth century most of this didn’t seem such hot stuff, since the Baptists thought that THEY had invented the notion of the free church, but to the discerning it was manifestly transparent that the poor humble farmers, the hicks from the sticks, had an impressive European pedigree and in fact had something going for them.

Primarily what they had going for them of course was that they were so goddam NICE. This too was a function and an aspect of their knot of neuroses, for they had spent centuries letting the big guys walk all over them in hobnailed boots and letting their tongues be cut out, their women raped, and their children sold as slaves.

The Stealth Mennonites were so *awfully* nice. Emerging from their farms in the late 20th century and moving to the big cities, they had begun to be educated beyond the eighth grade, as had been habitual for earlier generations and the Amish. Now Mennonite boys and girls started their education at nice Mennnonite colleges and then went off to Harvard law school or Stanford.

However, since they were so fuckingly NICE, instead of making fortunes as trial lawyers or plastic surgeons, they tended to work in obscure legal aid clinics or as doctors in rural Nicaragua. Mennonites earned Ph.D.’s at elite Ivy League universities in esoteric fields like Assyriology or ancient Chinese Taoism, but then squandered their exotic talents by teaching Sunday School or working as deacons in urban churches in poor neighborhoods.

Mennonite historians devoted whole careers, under the inspiring but really stupid motto of “Culture for Service”, to writing the history of the poor black folks in Reconstruction. A Mennonite was the first white graduate of Morehouse College, studying under Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mennonite pedagouges tended to write books like “Education for Manhood”, or “Education for Peoplehood”, stressing that schooling was not a tool for gaining wealth or for self-aggrandizement, but of service to the people. Mennonite psychiatrists and scholars of international relations dedicated themselves to building programs in “Conflict Transformation” and “Restorative Justice”.

In short, Mennonites were so gosh-awful staggeringly NICE that they frequently made themselves want to throw up.

And there indeed was the rub. And it was a clue to why they were such shy, humble and stealthy Mennonites. For in the Mennonite mindset and personality, humility was a virtue. Centuries of abuse and torture had taught them to shut the fuck up if they wanted to survive at all. “Pride goeth before a fall” was the Bible verse cited in a 1997 survey as the most quoted by Mennonite parents to their children.

The dilemma of course was that now that the Mennos had become world-class achievers, they were experiencing severe cognitive dissonance. The Langian knot, the psychological paradox at the core of their being was that they aimed to be super achievers, and yet at the same time still viewed themselves as the scum of the earth. Many a psychiatrist who treated stricken Stealth Mennonites heard their subjects confess: “I’m omnipotent, yet impotent.”

And so the long summer wore on, with the Stealth Mennos doing good works and stashing the dough in their mattresses. But come fall, there was a new Presence in the hood. Ally Gutchnik, the 11th President of the University of Pennsylvania, was inaugurated.

Gutchnik, the daughter of a Siberian fur-trader and scrap dealer who had escaped from Nazi Germany in 1939 and spent some dodgy time in the subcontinent enroute to America, was conceived in a night of heathen passion in a Hindu temple in Coomaraswamy. Not quite a city girl, she grew up in a small town north of New York City, then went off to Harvard where she stunned the stodgy old male professors with her sparkling vivacity, brilliance, and golden locks.

As a political scientist and bureaucratic functionary at Princeton, she had dazzled the academic world with her series of nice discourses on “deliberative democracy”, the crux of which was her plea for “folks to just get along.” It remained unseen how this denizen of the pleasant acres of rural New Jersey would handle herself in a raunchy urban environment, but she truly wanted West Philadelphians, particularly the darkies, to love her, and her inauguration went off with a bang and without a hitch.

She seemed to have a particular rapport with the au courant African-American public intellectuals of the Ivy League, and indeed Skip Gates, Cornel West, and Snoop Doggy Dog were all on hand to give her soul hugs at the big events in October. The rumor went around that she had been a sixties’ radical, some said even a member of the Ladies Auxiliary of the Black Panther Party.

Her first official appointments were two “Presidential Surrogates”, one a white male and one a black female. She demonstrated her evenhandedness and sense of fair play in designating the bearded white male surrogate as the official bearer of her trademark little red pocketbook when she was too busy to carry it herself. She actually walked to work, apparently without a bodyguard, from the Presidential mansion through the dangerous streets of the Hood, infested though they were with crack dealers, purse-snatchers, rapists, graduate students in linguistics, and Presbyterians.

After no more than a few months in office, her first major crisis struck. Her personal cellphone was abducted from her official limousine by a black man. The Penn Police were immediately notified and rapidly found a dark-skinned Muslim who “fit the profile” walking brazenly through the middle of campus. Demonstrating their expertise developed during a summer workshop at Gitmo, the heroic cops grabbed the perpetrator, handcuffed him, smashed him up against a wall and proceeded to beat his brains out.

The perp turned out to be a young assistant professor of cognitive science who complained loudly of a false arrest. The next day over a hundred students and faculty stormed into College Hall inquiring of the new President just what the fuck was up. The memories of the previous year’s pepper-spraying of a faculty member of color by the campus cops still rankled the dark-skinned members of the Penn community, few and far-between though they were.

Facing up to the challenge, the new embattled President did the right thing. She apologized, and sent fruit baskets to all the minority faculty, all seven of them. Switchblades and knuckledusters were temporarily sheathed. Words uttered in the heat of the moment were retracted. All the parties to the incident sat down to a nice cup of cappuccino allegrosso vivante and tried to make nice.

After she caught her breath, Ally thought for a moment and then penned a nice letter to the student newspaper.

Letters to the Editor December 8, 2004

University is committed to safety, respect for all

To the Editor:

Penn derives much of its vitality from izzle students, who thrive in a university community that embraces diversity, defends intellectual freedom, 'n strives make every member of izzle community feel safe, welcome, cozy, 'n just swell n' shit. Therefore, that shiznit is troubling hear students report that they do not always feel respected 'n valued during they interactions wit other members of izzle community, fo' example when da campus fuzz shove 'em da sidewalk 'n put da cuffs on."

An investigation of what transpired between a Penn student 'n da Penn Fuzz on Nov." 21 is underway, 'n I has been promised that this investigation will be concluded shortly, know what I'm sayin'? The complaint that wuz filed raises serious issues, 'n I has been assured that that shiznit is being treated wit da care 'n seriousness that each 'n every member of izzle community deserves n' shit.

As I indicated da students wit whom I met Monday morning, we gots remain eternally vigilant in ensuring both that izzle campus is safe 'n that izzall members of izzle community, not just da extraordinarily talented Jewish intellectuals wit they advanced cognitive skills, but also da less fortunate 'n disadvantaged Negroes, are treated wit respect 'n dignity n' shit. Therefore, I has asked Interim Provost Peter Conn work wit students, faculty 'n staff begin a dialogue that will lead specific steps we can take address izzle mutual concerns, know what I'm sayin'?

The students wit whom I met agree that we gots confront izzle challenges heezee-on 'n work together constructively toward real resolutions n' shit. I has directed da sub-provosts give out extra large Hannukah baskets izzall da needy chilluns in da refugee camps in da slums of West Philly, know what I'm sayin'? By continuing work together we can 'n will make Penn a university that promotes excellence, equal opportunity 'n mutual respect fo' izzall members of izzle community."

In closing, I just want to quote a few words from my good friend Cornel West:

“I'm sippin on Tanqueray

with my my mind on my money and my mouth fulla gan-jay

R-A-G to the motherfuckin E

Back with my nigga S-N double O-P

Yeah, and ya don't stop

Rage in effect I just begun to rock

I said yeah, and you don't quit

Hey yo Rage would you please drop some gangsta shit

I rock ruff and stuff with my Afro Puffs

Handcuffed as I bust bout to tear shit up

Oh what did ya think I, didn't ever think I

Would be the one to make you blink eye, I'm catchy like pink-eye

Never will there ever be another like me

Um you can play the left, cause it ain't no right in me

Out the picture out the frame out the box I knock 'em all

Smack 'em out the park, like "A Friendly Game of Baseball"

Grand, slam, yes I

Kickin up dust and I don't give a god DAMN

Cause I'm that lyrical murderer

Pleadin guilty, you know from my skills I'm about to be

Filthy large, Rage in charge

You know +What's Happenin+ don't try to play large

this ain't no +Rerun+, see hon, don't ya wanna be one

How-evah, Rage'll wreck ya, cause I'm def

I kick my vocals, I loc' yo, coast to coast or local

Uhhh! I'll make 'em go coo-coo for my Cocoa

puffin stuff, aiyyo Snoop, you're up

Let these niggaz know that niggaz don't give a fuck!"

Dr. Ally Gutchnik

President

Universityof Pennsylvania

Christmas Morning, 2004. University City lay in ruins. Burka Bandits dressed in their seductive black female robes hefted their shotguns and robbed convenience stores and Chinese restaurants. Out on the perimeter beyond the Green Line on Sansom Street the police busted a crack dealer and found four million dollars worth of blow in the basement. On the 4600 block of Hazel Avenue a string of vicious murders baffled the police.

In the gorgeous Presidential mansion Ally Gutchnik lay awake in her big brass bed, unable to hop out and start her daily routine of chin-presses and ab crunches that kept her in trim. In fact she had been up all night, waiting for Santa to come, hoping against hope that He wouldn’t forget a nice Jewish girl who was just trying her best to be nice in a hostile environment. The glitz had worn off the excitement and splendor of her October inauguration and as she faced the prospect of another day in the Hood, anxiety gripped her tummy.

Finally she dragged herself out of bed and ordered a grapefruit and black coffee from her Guatemalan manservant. She didn’t even have the energy to put on her makeup.

Outside the sun was shining and the remnant chickadees and eagles that had not yet flown south for the winter jabbered and chirped. As she sipped her coffee, a daring idea popped into her forlorn frontal cortex.

She dressed quickly, leaving her trademark red pocketbook on the desk, and walked through the crisp frost to the stables. There was the sparkling red mountain bike the Deans had presented her when she arrived at Penn. She unlocked the special graphite lock with her Bic pen, a little trick Ice-T had taught her, and rolled the bicycle out onto Walnut Street.

The sergeant of her personal bodyguard quickly formed up a squadron of Harleys to escort her.

“No, Jose,” she said firmly. “I believe I’ll be going out by myself today.”

“But Madame le Head Honcho, we have our orders,” sputtered the Commandant.

“No, Jose. I’m going out by myself and that’s an order. I’m sorry to disappoint you and your men, but after all *I’m* the one in charge here. Comprendez-vous toute suite?”

“Mais oui, madame, a votre service.” The sergeant made a pretty little bow. Under his breath he hissed “Merde”, and gave a circumspect nod to his plainclothesmen, ordering them to follow the wacky Prexy at a discreet distance.

Ally biked across campus, taking in the sparkling greenswards and the elegant and charming dormitory towers. “All this is mine!” she thought happily to herself.

“Who would have thought it? Here I am in one of the suavest, hippest and trendiest venues on the East Coast, President of my own Ivy League University, with a two million dollar annual salary plus perks, and free cappuccino allegrossos whenever I choose. Oi vey, this beats Harvard Square and Princeton all to hell.”

Cautiously she biked out onto the sidewalk, being careful to look both ways. The streets were deserted. She rode all the way down 40th Street to Baltimore Avenue and took a deep breath. There were no colored people in sight, although one never knew, sometimes they hid in the bushes. Bravely she pedaled onto the thoroughfare and set off west along the Avenue.

“This is it!” she thought. “I’m going out beyond the Perimeter!”

Several heavily armored Penn Police humvees passed her and she drew curious stares from the cops, but without her trademark red pocketbook she was incognito.

“Hell,” she thought headily, “this is the life for me. The open road, a fire engine red mountain bike, and just a whiff of danger.”

As she was about to cross the Green Line at 43rd Street she heard an eerie noise, primitive drumbeats and unearthly caterwauling. It seemed to be coming from Clark Park.

She felt herself strangely attracted. Part of her wanted to keep to the Avenue; part of her, the wild part, wanted to explore the wilds of the Park.

Hesitating for only a second, she plunged into the dense undergrowth of Clark Park and headed for the mysterious sounds. The park was ankle-deep in beer cans and used condoms. At length she came to a clearing. There was a statue of an old man and a little girl.

“Is this the Rocky statue that I have heard about?” she wondered.

There was a motley crew of Villagers gathered around the statues. She crept closer and peeked through the crowd. She could recognize now, from her course in British literature way back at Harvard, that it was a statue of Charles Dickens and Little Nell. There, perched up on the statue, was a band of Amish, singing in a dirge-like chant. It sounded like -- yes, it was Christmas carols -- songs she remembered from her long ago unhappy childhood. Grouped around the Amish were Mennnonites singing in flawless four-part harmony, and, even more surprisingly, anarchists with their hair properly combed politely tapping on their drums and humming "Par rump pa pum pum."

Arranged around them, breakdancing and beating their congas, boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom were the Uhuru Mau Mau Jambo Bwana terrorists and the New Black Panthers. For a moment, she stood rooted to the spot, paralyzed.

“What if they kidnap me? Will the Trustees pay to ransom me back? Or will I suffer the unhappy fate of Patty Hearst.”

For a very tense twenty seconds, the Villagers all stared in her direction. Then a tall dignified black man with high cheekbones stepped menacingly from the throng.

“Oh shit, this is it!” thought Ally, closing her eyes.

“Relax, shizzle,” a gentle voice said.

She opened her eyes. Was it? Although one black man looked very like another, there was something familiar about this one. Could it be? Yes, it was her close friend Snoop Doggy Dog.

Tears of relief streamed from her eyes. She practically creamed in her jeans. Then Snoop folded her in a warm gushy soul hug.

“Welcome to the Hood, sister!”

--Ross Bender