I started to subtitle this “a religious experience?” but decided as I and, I suspect, many others here aren't especially attracted to essays smacking even the slightest of the “r” word, and as this monstrosity is going to have a hard enough time luring and keeping readers anyway, I'd best not. Yet, considering you've made it this far I now feel more confident I can risk admitting a bit of superficial pondering on theological concepts did contribute to the development of this extended look at a recent experience that, well, whacked me.

The whacking and its fallout could also be considered under the aegis of something more distinctly secular, such as existentialism, as one of my earliest engagements with this philosophy was the “truth comes in blows” discovery in Bellows's Henderson the Rain King. I've dabbled with theologies as I've dabbled with philosophies and find sometimes it's not easy keeping the genres separate – if, that is, one accepts, as do I, that the value of each is in its capacity to help us understand our existence and in so doing help us transcend our suffering.

A slow thinker easily distracted and exhausted by attention deficit disorder, I'm reminded by the scars on my self esteem to be skeptical of glib, persuasive people despite how reasonable, knowledgeable, entertaining, enticing and comforting they might seem. Respecting that I'm most likely not unique in this outlook, I assure you my intent here is not to proselytize but to testify.

Here then is what got the buzzing bee into my bonnet: I was driving around running errands June 1, truck radio tuned to NPR, when a most unusual, provocative performance monologue filled my cab with an otherworldly mellifluously entrancing voice. It was one of several performances that hour on a segment from The Moth, a New York City club venue that features stand-up storytelling. Some of the tales are quite bizarre and all of them supposedly true. This was the craziest I had ever heard.

“Uh-h-H-H-h-h” came the amplified trembling voice of someone startled out of a deep trance, in this instance by what sounded like a club audience clapping, cheering and tossing in a couple of hip woot woots to boot. Then, with the audience settled and after a low nervous chuckle, the voice, deep and sepulchral yet sheathed in a gently soothing velvet, began to speak. “Mu-Uther used to always say to us, Savannahhh is a trap. It'll try to imprison you. Even if you manage to get away, it'll find a way to draaag you back.” Strange and ominous, the performance trapped and imprisoned me for the next half hour and has dragged me back again and again in the weeks hence.

My first revisiting of Apron Strings of Savannah was to post a YouTube video on Chicken Maaan's blog later that day of poet/actor/playwright Edgar Oliver's seductive performance. It was more of a “looky what I found” post, and drew mixed reactions from readers. Some were fascinated, others found it creepy. My own take was a blend of both and something more. I found it fascinatingly creepy, yet sublimely moving in what for me was a completely unexpected direction. A week later after considerable mulling I tried to address in a little essay just what it was that was tickling my frontal lobes. I fell short, although Nikki Stern published the piece in her online magazine, Does This Make Sense? I called it What the Hell is Love, Actually?

An odd title for a decidedly odd context. Yet, my aim was to parse the concept of love as it seemed to relate to what most people, including me, would consider a morbid childhood. As Oliver describes in his monologue, he and his older sister, Helen, grew up in a house in Savannah alone with their outrageously eccentric, paranoid mother. Other than attending school, Helen and Edgar were isolated from any intimate contact with the world. They spent most of their time reading in the only room they were permitted to occupy in the house, the upstairs bedroom they shared with their mother, whom Oliver refers to throughout the monologue only as "Mother."

The two children made the best of their cocooned existence, developing a fascination for France and the arts and learning to read and speak French, a language that also enabled them to communicate privately with each other in their mother's presence. Eventually, misleading her into believing they were attending lessons outside the home, they arranged an escape with money inherited from their father, and fled to Paris.

Edgar's most obvious scar from this cloistered childhood is also his most distinctive professional asset: a manner of speaking that would distinguish him in any setting. Think Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, imagining them teaching a child how to speak. The child learns to exaggerate and elongate vowels, melodramatically adding multiple syllables and voice levels to some of them, such as doOrknobs, beEells and buUorglars. In an interview following the aired performance Oliver said his sister taught him to speak this way, that she spoke the same way. He recalled that on one occasion, when the family was checking into a motel because Mother was afraid to sleep in their home that night, the desk clerk, in front of them, called to an associate to “come see the two little Transylvania children.”

I was taken aback hearing Oliver begin his monologue for the first time. Knowing nothing about him I assumed his performance would be some sort of spoof or parody of The Addams Family, a macabre TV situation comedy I knew of but had never watched. At home I might have turned the radio off at this point, figuring Oliver's performance was camp and would involve inside jokes that would be lost on me. But I was on the road. The radio in my truck is usually playing when I'm driving and it's almost invariably tuned to NPR. In the time it would have taken me to break the inertia of habit and change my cab's audio ambience, I was hooked, seduced by the hypnotic timbre of Oliver's voice, his peculiarly engaging delivery and by his incredibly intimate and horrifying story.

First thing I did when I returned home was try to find out more about the Olivers. I pictured them in my mind as appearing Gothic and ghoulish, dressed in funereal black, their faces severe and otherwordly in theatrical makeup. I especially wanted to see what Mother looked like and to learn what happened to her. I found a photo on The Moth's website. It answered one question and raised more. Mother looks young enough to be her children's sister. She looks sane. She's beautiful. The photo is of the three of them in a Paris café. Helen and Mother are seated in a corner of the glassed-in front. Edgar is standing, gazing affectionately at Mother who is looking up at him, her face radiating devotion. Helen, also beautiful, is smiling widely at something or someone in front of the café. Her face is alive with excitement, eyes sparkling. The three are dressed nicely. The women are wearing necklaces. An earring peeks out from under Helen's chestnut hair. These are young, attractive people excited to be in Paris and enjoying each other's company. What is wrong with this picture?

Not a thing, if Edgar made up the whole shebang, which is entirely possible. He is an actor, after all. I wouldn't quibble over a little exaggeration, such as Mother going on a strict diet of nothing but banana splits. I don't recall if Oliver says how long this lasted, but he leaves the impression it went on quite awhile. Leaving such an impression in a performance like this would be understandable and, to me, forgivable. But there are other clues that could lead one to wonder. The fact that while Oliver makes it clear in his monologue his and Helen's escape to Paris was virtually comparable to breaking out of Devil's Island it is obvious Mother either went with them or soon joined them there and was confident enough to have her photo taken in a public setting, looking sane and happy.

My Googling failed to produce anything about Mother other than what Oliver tells us, which does not include her name or what became of her. I found scant information on Helen, whom Edgar tells us became a painter and did the scenery for some of his plays and original portraits for the film Escape Artists, for which he was art director. Evidently she married, as she is known now as Helen Oliver Adelson. I found no photos of her other than the one in Paris and, also published on The Moth's website, a strip of photo-booth mugshots of the three of them, possibly also taken in Paris. There's a 2008 photo of Edgar reading in front of one of his sister's paintings in a gallery, but no indication if Helen was present. Perhaps, unlike her brother, she is uncomfortably self-conscious of her “Transylvanian” accent and shuns the public eye.

Perhaps she simply doesn't wish to blow Edgar's cover and ruin his career. If Edgar has been putting the world on all these years – he looks to be in his 50s now – he merits a lifetime award. I played several other videos of him performing and being interviewed. If he's acting, he's never out of character.

I'm going with real, that Oliver's childhood in Savannah was largely as he tells it. While the gaiety that's apparent in the Paris photo might seem to contradict his account of the madness in that dark and secluded house in Savannah there's a tenderness, there's affection in his voice when he speaks of those days. I've listened to it several times now, and I've heard not one regretful note of the kind often heard, and often understandably, from people with unfortunate childhoods. Edgar Oliver somehow managed to transcend the stifling, emotional stunting in circumstances that would have crushed or embittered most children, leaving them incapable of finding loving relationships in their lives.

In a way I hope the Paris photo reflects family members gleefully enjoying their roles in the budding career of a brilliant young actor who's developed a uniquely fascinating schtick. I sense this is not the case, that the reflection I see instead is of a family bonded by a love so irrational and deep it has withstood trials on par with those of Job. It is this sense I have of the Olivers that despite their unforgettably bleak and tragic saga they found in each other, if only for a short while, something of the human condition so pure and rare it ranks with diamonds and gold. It is this sense that brings me to my spiritual knees.

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I've embedded neither the video of Oliver's performance nor the photo of the family in Paris. I have put hyperlinks below to these as well as to the Oliver interview and to an audio recording of his performance. My efforts to embed an audio player were unsuccessful, but the link to Apron Strings of Savannah will lead you to an iTunes recording that might take several minutes to download. I urge anyone interested in pursuing the same epiphany that's whacked me to play the audio version first. It's far better at stimulating the imagination, a lesson I learned as a child when watching my first Lone Ranger episode on TV. I experienced a mixture of disappointment and fascination, with the disappointment dominant because the TV images came nowhere near those I had envisioned while listening to radio versions.