Bloopers, Bleepers and Whoppers

I have been blessed (cursed?) to find humor where others would not even look. Let us consider the difference between “bloops” and “bleeps”.
When I was young, a neighbor of mine once quoted a little poem that my Aunt Lidia found particularly amusing:

Beans, beans
Good for your heart;
The more you eat,
The more you [you know what].

The seven-year-old Benny Gardner was too respectful of my great aunt’s age to fill in the missing word, but to her delight, she knew exactly what he meant.
What he didn’t know is that Aunt Lidia could tell some pretty good tales herself. In one story, she told of a little boy who was bad to let [you know what’s] at the table. She wasn’t talking about “bloops” and “bleeps”, either. The boy’s mother told him that the preacher was coming to dinner that Sunday, and that he needed to not “let ‘em rip” at the table, as was his custom. He just needed to “let ‘em “slip out”.
Sunday, dinner and the preacher all came together, as scheduled. The little boy was doing a lot of squirming, but thanks to “that look” from his mother no sounds were heard. Shortly in frustration the little boy reached into his britches, pulled out some solid waste, and held it in his hand, over the table, toward his mortified mother. The little boy said to her, “You see, that’s what your [blank] slipouts done!”
Just in case you wondered, my personal definition of “bloop” is a shortened form of the word “blooper”. This simply means a mistake, usually in a movie. An example might be a bright red convertible in the background of a shot in a western film. A “bleep”, on the other hand, is a correction of a verbal blooper, such as a high-pitched tone used as a voice-over of someone using profanity on television.
Some of my favorite humor has come from movie lines. Though not technically a blooper, my favorite line in the movie Forrest Gump comes when Lt. Dan asks Forrest if he has found Jesus. Like a true innocent, Forrest replies, “I didn’t know I was supposed to be looking for him, sir.” Other similar replies to this question from others might elicit a reply such as, “I didn’t know he was lost.”
This reminds me of a blooper once printed in a church bulletin:

The sermon this morning: Jesus Walks on the Water.
The sermon tonight: Searching for Jesus.

Church bulletins themselves are becoming nostalgic items of the past. I have a couple of church bulletins from the mid-1970s from Maynardville Baptist Church. They were printed by the church’s first and last full-time pastor, Rev. Ben H. Knisley. A fountain of information was available, even congratulations to a couple on the birth of their child and the list of others in the hospital. Included were the facility and room number—I’m afraid that might presently be a HIPPA violation. Thankfully Rev. Knisley’s bulletin didn’t include bloopers such as these:

Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our community.
Smile at someone who is hard to love.
Say 'Hell' to someone who doesn't care much about you.

For those of you who have children
and don't know it,
we have a nursery downstairs.

Could a person have a child and not know it? I recently heard a story of a man who was approached by someone who told him she thought she was his daughter. DNA doesn’t lie. More interesting are stories of mothers who didn’t know they were going to have children. My mother’s sister, Mary Lillian Munsey (aka Boots), made the headlines when she lived in Detroit in the late 50s or early 60s. She was feeling ill and went to the hospital. Turns out she was about to deliver her only son, Danny. Mother noted that Boots was infamous for telling “whoppers,” and Mother always thought Boots made up that particular story.
If you would like to hear another similar, very amusing story, check with the Union County Historical Society to see if you can find a copy of Ms. Myrtle Washam’s recording made for the Bicentennial Celebration. Ms. Washam was quite elderly when she made the recording, and I haven’t seen it in many years, but I remember it well because Ms. Washam used to visit my home when I was growing up. She bought okra from my father. Ms. Washam was widely known as a truly God-fearing Christian woman (in the truest sense of the phrase, no cliché), so I do not doubt her story. Ms. Washam recounted how that in the early years of her marriage she became ill. She either went to the doctor or talked with another woman, I forget which. Ms. Washam said she was told that she was pregnant. She asked, “What’s that?” Oh, imagine the innocence of that poor young bride! Thanks to so many modern conveniences, such as social media, most kindergarten children probably know more now than Ms. Washam did as a young bride!
Rev. Nicely’s bulletins also included the songs to be sung, even the prelude and postlude the organist would play. My surviving examples don’t include special songs by individuals, but if they had, hopefully a blooper like this would have not occurred:

Miss Charlene Mason sang
“I Will Not Pass This Way Again”,
giving obvious pleasure to the congregation.

Church bulletins also used to have beautiful photographs on their front covers, many of them captured on film by H. Armstrong Roberts (an interesting Google search) and other stock photographers. When I played school, and even after becoming a certified, employed elementary teacher, I used some of these bulletins to make bulletin boards.
The backs of those bulletins had short inspirational stories that provided further food for thought. Later bulletins from the church became much less informative with only basic announcements of church service times and activities. The devotionals on back have been gone for a while, though as recently as the early 2000s an article by Linda Thomas, wife of former Union County Director of Schools Charles E. Thomas, was included on the back of one. The church I currently attend doesn’t even have bulletins, just standardized card stock handouts that provide graphic representation of announcements on the front, a listing of the same on back, and space to take notes on the sermon of the day.
Many churches have signs that allow for messages to be posted under the church name. Some of these signs are now digital, but older signs came with plastic squares with letters on them that had to be arranged to spell out the intended message. Space was often limited, so messages had to be compressed and carefully thought about before posting. Such a sign on a local church caught my attention:

GOD IS LOVE
RUMMAGE SALE
12 13

Perhaps the church bulletin for that week might have included this announcement:

Ladies, don't forget the rummage sale.
It's a chance to get rid of those things
not worth keeping around the house.
Bring your husbands.

While I agree that God is love, my ideal Heaven will not have one rummage sale. I might have agreed before I married that God’s love might be manifest in a rummage sale, but my wife is (at least was) a rummage sale aficionado. To her rummage is joy, to me it involves exhausting work of moving the same merchandise over and over again. That equates to work, and work was not created until man fell from grace in the Garden of Eden.
Many times rummage sales remind me of my father. He used to go fishing quite often, but rarely caught anything. If he came home with fish, it was usually because someone nearby gave him part of their catch. Mother once asked Dad why he kept fishing when he never caught anything. His reply, “I keep hoping.”
Thank you again for letting me share my thoughts, Dear Reader. Next time I will share thoughts on another church institution that seems in danger of extinction—the church choir.