Dear all,
To those who used to read H2O last year, and have seen this, apologies. It's another reheat.
*****************
Dear all
Whereas for a period of about twenty years, I really didn't give Jehovah's Witnesses much of a thought, now since finding this site - and reading the posts most days - I find myself casting my mind back more often to the time when I was "in" and stuff which happened then.
The other day I remembered all about Paps and Weno. And it made me smile all over again.
Paps and Weno were two Elders in our congregation. We had, I don't know, only about 6 or 7 Elders in total , so between them these two took up a fair amount of Platform time.
John C. was "Paps" and Les P was "Weno". Their nicknames - which as far as I'm aware they never knew about - arose from their respective speaking styles, and mannerisms.
Paps was actually saying "Perhaps" , but that's the way he said it, and he said it in virtually EVERY sentence:
"Brothers, I wonder if - paps - you'd turn with me to 2nd Corinthians,
Chapter 3, and - paps - reading from verse 5... Jehovah here is - paps - giving us counsel which - paps - we should apply to our selves..."
And so on and - paps - so on.
Weno - of course - said "We Know" - and said it practically all the time.
"Well, We know, of course that Jehovah is guiding us in this time of the end, and we know that he has given us instruction in his word the Bible. Brothers, we know that we must listen to this wise instruction, because we know the end is ..."
There were a group of us pioneers in the congregation at that time. I
joined the group in 1970, and left it in 1974, and while I was in it
numbered between 4 and 6 (the makeup of the group churned over the years).
One of the things I remember was coming into the group all wide-eyed and innocent, and quickly learning the cynical group culture. The one big thing you learned pretty much straight off was how to cheat your time, making a call on a not-at-home early in the morning, going off to a café for an hour or two then doing some magazine route calls, walking around the shops, more route calls and counting the whole day.
The other big thing was taking the piss out of the Elders. Any mannerism or defect or mockable thing was latched on to and used in ruthless ridicule. Jon, the oldest pioneer (it was all young, single brothers) was the ringleader but I must admit, I was pretty good at this.
Hence we had Paps and Weno.
I remember sitting in the Willow café, over several cups of coffee,
laughing about how "The Paps and Weno Show" had gone the previous night.
Jon sometimes would keep count. "Well Paps went nuts last night! 61 times in a twenty-minute Instruction Talk! Unbelievable!"
Weno, in particular had a very distinctive, easily mimicked voice. We would order up coffee as Weno:
"We know we would like 4 coffees please and, well, we know that 3 of these should have milk, but we know that only 1 has sugar..." You had to be there, I suppose because I'm laughing at this even as I type, and I guess it won't look funny at all onscreen.
Oh, we kept it hidden from the regular publishers, of course - didn't want to "stumble anyone" after all. But, in fact, the secret nature of the mockery just reinforced the group identity all the more and made us feel superior to the ordinary publishers.
Remembering this got me to wondering... were we alone in this? Did anyone else make fun of "Those Reaching Out and Taking the Lead" in such a thoroughly reprehensible manner?
Anyone else remember anything similar?
Duncan