29 May The Miss Velma Christmas Show
“Of course, you can’t forget Miss Velma,” Greg says. He grew up in the South Bay and remembers watching the annual Christmas pageant on TV. (Yet another friend providing yet another fascinating factoid for this book, making me fear I will never get done.) An IMDB search bestows on the show one out of five stars, and provides this synopsis: “You can’t quite imagine the level of kitsch until you watch the YouTube videos; well, you can’t actually watch, but you can fast forward through.”
Indeed. On YouTube Miss Velma appears dressed like a doll atop a birthday cake. She arrives onstage seated in a pumpkin, and on the back of a fake white horse. As I fast forward through, she descends out of the sky riding in a spaceship, and preaches from an eagle. There is a celebration of the 50 states, Miss Velma boogying in a tribal dance, and a sharp shooting expose. The longer I watch the more jaw dropping it becomes.
Later we find out that Miss Velma has masterminded the entire show: playing the piano and singing, preaching with great gusto, making all costumes, utilizing the most up-to-date resources of the time: strobe lights, vocal echo boxes, holograms. Always there is over-the-top showmanship, extravaganza, and surprise.
Velma “Miss Velma” Jaggers (December 12, 1919 – August 21, 2004) and her husband (and cousin) O.L. Jaggers were among the early televangelists in L. A., along with Aimee Semple McPherson (see page xxx). By the mid 60s they were creating their outrageous services at their Universal World Church which went on for decades. The Miss Velma show was televised hundreds of times and was seen in 70 countries. The two believed they had discovered the secrets to physical immortality, but of course they died like everyone else.
As bad-taste as it all may appear to us, we can thank the outsider art community for helping us realize that Miss Velma was endlessly creative in numerous genres, constantly, endlessly, tirelessly. Frank Zappa, the 70s avant garde musician and anarchist, was a big fan. Ron Athey, the queer S&M performance artist, wrote an article for LA Weekly in which he stated that he had been introduced to Miss Velma through his grandmother, and together they’d visited the church again and again. Of Miss Velma he wrote, “She was a healer and an entertainer — saving your soul by capturing your imagination.” Through the eyes of these artists we can see that Miss Velma belongs to a unique group of religious art eccentrics along with Leonard Knight of Salvation Mountain (see page xxx) and Antone Martin of Desert Christ Park (see page xxx).
Visit the Miss Velma Fan Page on Facebook, and check her out on YouTube.
The former site of the Universal World Church
123 N. Lake St.
Los Angeles 90026
This is an excerpt from Catherine Auman’s book Guide to Spiritual L.A.: The Irreverent, the Awake, and the True
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