This Sunday, The Book of Mormon is a shoo-in to win the Tony award for best musical. I was just in NYC and if I had wanted to see the sold-out musical-comedy I could have purchased a scalped ticket for a thousand or so smackeroos. (I will wait it out, thank you very much.) There is a nightly lottery allowing 10 winners to buy tix at the normal (hundreds) price, but hey, who can expect such ... luck. I’ll wait for double digits.

Anyway, I have my own Mormon memory, not hilarious, not even funny, but filled with music and drama. Not a book, but my small, strange look into the world of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

My Mormon experience occurred in the summer of 1997. I was on a trip out west for a writer’s conference. The first week I joined a couple of other writers, and drove among spectacular Utah canyons, including Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Bryce and Zion.

We ended up in Salt Lake City and joined a group of about 20 others, including a man who had flown in from New York to see if we could get back together after a year-long separation. It was, alas, a rendezvous that didn’t last much longer than the trip. Another story.

We spent time in and around the city. Took a boat on the Salt Lake. Went to Sundance. And spent some time at the Family History Library, the largest genealogical library in the world, with records for over 110 countries, territories, and possessions. Many in our group found records of family members from years past, but with most of my relatives perishing in the Holocaust, this was a sad situation for me.

The trip ended at a 10-acre block called Temple Square. In 1847, when Mormon pioneers from Missouri arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, Church president Brigham Young proclaimed "Here we will build a temple to our God." And this sunny Sunday morning over 150 years later, our group was invited to hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir perform their weekly program at the spired house of worship at Temple Square.

Three tiers of hundreds of singers fronted a huge organ with over eleven thousand pipes. The singing was memorable, but what was coming right after was even more so. And not in a good way.

As our group was leaving the choir area, we were ushered up some stairs to a darkened room, a side trip not on our schedule as far as I knew. We watched a film about the history of the religion, beginning with Joseph Smith, who in the 1820s unburied a book of golden plates inscribed with a religious history of ancient American peoples, translated as the Book of Mormon.

A rumor now started that the door was locked, and we noted several young men guarding the door. The elders now were proselytizing, and our group was decided uncomfortable. Some of us got up to leave, and then all of us did. We didn’t sign up for this. We just came to write about the choir!

When the door finally opened we rushed down the stairs, each of us now accompanied by a young, wholesome-looking Mormon who continued extolling the virtues of joining their Church. My guardian was a slim, dark-haired woman in a long dress who kept repeating, “You could be happy. You don’t look happy, but you really could be.” Did she really think she could convince me with this line, or was she just going through the motions?

My guyfriend and I raced to get away from this Stepford-like woman. I kept insisting that I was happy --- at least until the last hour or so. But she just kept on talking, like a recording. And no matter how fast we walked to get away from her, she stayed right next to us.

Temple Square is surrounded by a high wall, and I felt like I was rushing to crossover to freedom. And sure enough, when we finally got to the tall gates at the edge of the Mormon property the woman stopped short as we jumped onto Salt Lake City pavement.

I realized how I had been avoiding the young woman’s intense gaze. I now looked closely at her, and despite her pasted smile she didn’t seem happy to me at all.

Although this was not my favorite travel memory, I do understand that proselytizing is one of the ways that Mormons have created one of the fastest-growing religions in the world.  It’s just not for me.

Never mind. I shall watch the Tony Awards on Sunday night and I look forward to eventually seeing The Book of Mormon, and having lots of fun. Because as you guys might know by now, I really, truly am a happy gal.