Which makes the activities of the Jesters not just un-masonic and illegal, but a sort of creepy anachronism for a group to be engaging in. But it's just not a wink-wink-nudge-nudge kind of activity in US society anymore. That hasn't stopped the business entirely, as Elliot Spitzer proved in New York by dropping 80-large to have his clock cleaned.
#National court royal order of jesters professional
And STDs have helped to make the regular practice of playing rumpy-pumpy with professional girlz a less than harmless indiscretion. Online porn and the Playboy Channel have brought voyeurism and private personal prurient gratification into the home. It is arguable that men don't step out on their wives as much anymore, they just get divorced - or don't get married to begin with. Such outlets of middle-class frustrations may have been a staple of the pre- and post-WWII culture, but it has not been embraced by the children of the Baby Boomers. The stock 1920-50s characters of sad-faced George Babbitts, Willy Lomans and Crazy Guggenheims lined up at the bar, comparing lodge pins, pinching waitresses and sneaking out on the wife have largely passed on to the choir invisible. I suspect that argument has gone on since the 1870s when the teetotalers found out the Knickerbocker boys were sopping it up in town because the Methodists threw the booze out of the lodge.īut on a larger level, these guys are living in the past. On the other hand, I don't disagree with the sentiment of those who say that some of the Shrine's institutionalized excesses are at odds with Freemasonry's tenets of morality. And if they get paid for by grownups who sometimes act like high school imbeciles, well, maybe society needs to loosen its corset a bit. The hospitals are among the finest philanthropic missions in this country.
#National court royal order of jesters free
He had received free care from the Salt Lake Shrine Hospital as a child that had allowed him to walk. A man perhaps in his twenties came out and said he wanted to shake the hand of every Shriner in that bus. At the truck stop, I had one of those defining moments, curiously. You know, the stuff guys generally do as teenagers, and living up to the mission of putting some of the boy back into the man. It was bitter cold, and we drove through town acting like, well, Shriners, with the top down, yelling what we thought were zingers to pedestrians, and generally lowering the property values. Salt Lake City guys get their bus weighed. Some Shrines get drunk and bring in the strippers. Patrick's day, about a dozen of us fez-wearing loud-mouths (all perfectly sober, I might add) drove to the suburbs to get their 1939 Yellowstone tour bus weighed at the local truck stop. Something slightly less than the Masonic ideal.Īfter the Shrine parade in Salt Lake City on St. I actually had a man try to sell me on Shrine membership by saying, "You can drink all night for five bucks, and besides, we un-f***-up the crippled kids!" Not all men join the Shrine out of the altruism of helping crippled kids. They are looking for the secret society that has the strippers and the hookers and the county sheriff guarding the door who sees they get home okay. There is no wonder that a certain percentage of men who join the Shrine have specifically come looking for the Shrine they've heard about. Lest anyone forget George Carlin's punctuating 1976 punch line, "Drink up, Shriners." Or 1960's "Bye Bye Birdie's" musical number in which a group of Shriners think a young lady straying into their dinner is the stripper for the evening. And while some of us can sit in the parlor and tsk over it being antithetical to the tenets of Freemasonry (which it is), the Babbitry of the past, combined with the Shrine's post-WWII excesses, has been institutionalized by both the Shrine and the public's perception. Shriners, strippers and hookers have been keeping each other company for over a century. On the one hand, for anyone to say they are shocked - shocked! - to discover Shriners having anything to do with prostitutes is intellectually disingenuous.
I'll leave you to discover the BTs blog entries on your own for the details, but there are at least two major investigations going on concerning the group involving prostitution and violation of the federal Mann Act. The Jesters are an invitation-only group within Shrinedom whose motto is "mirth is king," and is considered by some to be an inner circle within the organization. There has been much "who-shot-john" going on over at The Burning Taper for the last few weeks over the reporting of scandals involving the Shrine's Royal Order of Jesters.
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