“Get off the phone, right now!”, my mom would yell.
I would always hang up and wait. She stormed into my room and put her hand out, so I could give her my contraband. It became a weekly cycle, a match of wills. Initially, confiscation. Then, protestation. Finally, renewal. A hymn of rebelliousness. My supply never dried up. I had friends who wanted to talk to me, and they always found another phone for me to sneak into the house.
I looked at the new, bright, shiny butter yellow phone and decided to instead use it for another favorite forbidden activity: prank calling. Nothing had ever come of these calls, but it gave me a jolt of excitement to keep bugging strangers. It was like anonymous gambling that didn’t cost anything.
Rolling the dice, I pushed random numbers. The phone rang a few times, and an annoyed male voice answered.
“Yeah?”
“Is Johnny Rotten there?”, I asked.
“No, but Sid Vicious is.”
The story of one woman’s decade-long relationship with the Seventh-day Adventist sect.
Anne Alana Parr – Alana Piranha to her friends during her rebellious teenage years – was the last person anyone would have guessed to join a strict fundamentalist religion at 19. One night in 1989, after taking acid, with her boyfriend, her mind began to change in radical ways. Suddenly, Anne believed in God, Satan, and the Bible. All the religion she’d been taught growing up became unassailably real. When she discovered the Seventh-Day Adventist church her belief morphed into something much bigger.
From the church’s mainstream, devotion to a Pastor pushing multiple-personality disorder and Satanic covens, through multiple marriages, indoctrinated obedience, complex grief and betrayal, to how a murder-for-hire plot gone wrong destroyed an entire congregation and a teenage girl’s life, Time of Trouble is more than a tale of surviving trauma. It is a story that will resonate with that most human of all desires, the primal longing to find oneself, no matter where that self may be hiding.
Time of Trouble is Anne’s first memoir.
Coming in 2027.
“When I joined the Adventist church at 19, I was all in. I believed I had found all the answers to life’s mysteries. By the end of it all, another self was emerging, one that hungered for a world that lay beyond the heavy doors of a church. Earning an education opened my eyes to a life of curiosity and wonder; to look closer under the surface and find what hides in plain sight.”
With the Restore Team, Auburn Academy, 1992
Anne, after joining the Seventh day Adventist Church 1991
Wearing makeup and wanting to fit-in, 2001
Graduating Warner Pacific College, Portland, Oregon, 2008“Get off the phone, right now!”, my mom would yell.
I would always hang up and wait. She stormed into my room and put her hand out, so I could give her my contraband. It became a weekly cycle, a match of wills. Initially, confiscation. Then, protestation. Finally, renewal. A hymn of rebelliousness. My supply never dried up. I had friends who wanted to talk to me, and they always found another phone for me to sneak into the house.
I looked at the new, bright, shiny butter yellow phone and decided to instead use it for another favorite forbidden activity: prank calling. Nothing had ever come of these calls, but it gave me a jolt of excitement to keep bugging strangers. It was like anonymous gambling that didn’t cost anything.
Rolling the dice, I pushed random numbers. The phone rang a few times, and an annoyed male voice answered.
“Yeah?”
“Is Johnny Rotten there?”, I asked.
“No, but Sid Vicious is.”
The story of one woman’s decade-long relationship with the Seventh-day Adventist sect.
Anne Alana Parr – Alana Piranha to her friends during her rebellious teenage years – was the last person anyone would have guessed to join a strict fundamentalist religion at 19. One night in 1989, after taking acid, with her boyfriend, her mind began to change in radical ways. Suddenly, Anne believed in God, Satan, and the Bible. All the religion she’d been taught growing up became unassailably real. When she discovered the Seventh-Day Adventist church her belief morphed into something much bigger.
From the church’s mainstream, devotion to a Pastor pushing multiple-personality disorder and Satanic covens, through multiple marriages, indoctrinated obedience, complex grief and betrayal, to how a murder-for-hire plot gone wrong destroyed an entire congregation and a teenage girl’s life, Time of Trouble is more than a tale of surviving trauma. It is a story that will resonate with that most human of all desires, the primal longing to find oneself, no matter where that self may be hiding.
Time of Trouble is Anne’s first memoir.
Coming in 2027.
“When I joined the Adventist church at 19, I was all in. I believed I had found all the answers to life’s mysteries. By the end of it all, another self was emerging, one that hungered for a world that lay beyond the heavy doors of a church. Earning an education opened my eyes to a life of curiosity and wonder; to look closer under the surface and find what hides in plain sight.”
With the Restore Team, Auburn Academy, 1992Anne, after joining the Seventh day Adventist Church 1991Wearing makeup and wanting to fit-in, 2001Graduating Warner Pacific College, Portland, Oregon, 2008