The day Elvis Presley died is how I remember Frank Moore.

 I had been going to revival every night for the month of August in addition to vacation bible school.  My parents decided that this would be the summer I would be baptized.  I was ten years old.  In the morning, around 8:00 a.m., my mother dropped me and my sister off at the tent grounds and would pick us up around 12:30 p.m.  At 7:00 p.m. my father would bring us back for Bible study and the revival at 8:00 p.m.  Sitting in the metal chair, I had been dreading the revival all winter and spring.  My parents hinted that this would be the year and , as winter and spring passed,  I had hoped they forgot.  They didn't.

There was nothing about church that I did not hate or fear.  We were Seventh-Day Adventists, which meant that sundown Friday to sundown Saturday was for religious observance.  To me, they were systematic rules which I had always forgotten.  Once could not talk of business or money on the Sabbath.  You weren't supposed to buy anything on the Sabbath.  You weren't supposed to cook on the Sabbath.  No T.V. or newspapers.  Then there were laws that applied to life everyday.  No smoking or drinking was OK with me..  I was only ten, but I knew that the church would not approved of the fact that I liked pepperoni, which was pork, on my pizza, or that I loved chocolate, which had caffeine.  I didn't even have to wonder what they though about masturbating.

We weren't supposed to dance or listen to rock and roll.  Right up to 1975, women had not been allowed to wear pants, but the fear that underwear would be exposed in strenuous or recreational activity overruled the fear that women would want to start wearing man-tailored clothes.

What I feared was not being saved or, rather, the consequences of it.  At times I stayed up in bed thinking about the end of the world and wondered why the bother if God was coming anyway.  Another fear was simply that I was afraid of water.  I wondered what would happen if the Pastor dropped me, or what if he held me down under the water too long.  I was particularly dreading getting in front of people in a white robe and white socks, bathing cap in my hand.  I felt shy, as if I were taking a bath in front of everyone.

But one image of religion always frightened me the most and that was the crucifixion.  During the revival, the appeal ended with a slide show with pictures of the crucifixion, the devil, and people running in terror at Christ's coming.  The pictures of Christ on the cross never ailed to scare me, and yet I could not stop myself from looking.  The brutality of it was the first image of violence that I had ever become familiar with.  I watched the final hours of Jesus of Nazareth on television chic resulted in my lying awake in my bed, not wanting to be alive when Christ came but not wanting to die either.  I wanted to live my life watching cartoons, or listening to secular music, and even touching myself in bed, sometimes, if I felt like it.  But sometimes I thought of Frank Moore and my circumstances were a little more tolerable.

Frank Moore was a new believer, baptized that winter.  A sizeable group of people in their early twenties had been converted and brought into the church.  They diverted wildly from the older, established members, bringing in the Andrae Crouch songbooks to sing instead of the standard Protestant hymns, choosing to play Bible charades instead of sticking withthe question and answer quizzes at socials.  They started their own choir, had pizza parties, and had rap sessions instead of Bible study.  But Frank was really on fire.  When he wasn't at church, he would be passing out pamphlets door-to-door in the neighborhood, as far as his bike would take him.  He brought in drunks, drug addicts, mysterious friends and relatives.  He could not stop.  The young people in the church were drawn to him, and while the other were still receiving counseling from the pastor to hold up their faith Frank was a fixture around the church we rented and the surrounding neighborhood, talking to someone on the street corner or discussing scripture with the elders.

Frank had a pureness of heart that put the older members to shame.  He was not judgmental; he managed to keep his sense of humor; and there did not seem to be anything that too shocking to him.  During the winter at the youth programs, he  talked about his experiences with drugs and alcohol, and sometimes, much to the dismay of other church members, talked about sexual desire.  What I liked about him was that he had been involved in modern dance in a community art center in the neighborhood before he converted, and he sang.  Youth choir was a breath of fresh air from the dry monotonous hymns our older choir sang in church.  I wanted to join, but it was for ages twelve and up, so my sister Michelle was allowed every Friday to socialize with her friends while I stayed home and took my bath.

One night, in the spring, Michelle came home from rehearsal very excited.  I was in bed reading my Sabbath School lesson when she came upstairs to our room:

"Guess what?" she said, "Frank is teaching us a new song!  We're going to do something different!"

"What?" I asked.

"You'll see" she said.