According to the red-faced man's medical ID bracelet, he was deathly allergic to shellfish. So, maybe an unlabeled buffet at a dimly lit club with a "B" rating from the Board of Public Health was not the best choice on his part. But that was just the tip of the iceberg of his bad decision making. See, the red-faced man, who turned out to have been wearing a fake moustache and fake glasses, was a celebrity of sorts.

The man, whose name—whose actual, given name—was Christian Priestly, starred in one of those shows on the high-numbered channels where the preacher emotes about sin and salvation while a fund drive phone number flashes on screen. (It was never quite clear what the fund drive was for. To keep the show on the air? So the show could keep asking for funding to keep the show on the air? Well, that seemed a little circular, logic-wise.) The Reverend Priestly's style could best be described as Elvis-esque. He was known for his marshmallow-white suit and his perfect pompadour, as well as his tendency to burst into song mid-preach. His coif, by the way, was so spectacular that anchormen would call the fund drive number begging for hair advice. Reverend Priestly wasn't wearing his marshmallow-white suit at the club that fateful night, and his hair was product-free and depompadoured, so you'd think the glasses-and-moustache disguise would be overkill. As it turns out, it was underkill. Lots of people took pictures after the dramatic rescue because that's what people do, and blurry footage of the mysterious red-faced man lying on the floor with a pen sticking out of his neck became a big tabloid story. (The mysterious pink-haired dancer/medic/ninja became an even bigger story.) And despite the man's disguise, it didn't take long for tabloid reporters to figure out his identity, maybe because the Reverend's show went on hiatus for weeks, and when he came back he had a big scar on his throat as if he'd taken a part-time gig as a Pez dispenser.

So the Reverend confessed to his congregation on one of his shows, sobbing and singing (very hoarsely) even more than usual. Reverend Priestly gave his mysterious "pink-haired angel" partial credit for saving him. But mostly, he said, he was alive thanks to the Grace of God. I guess the Reverend thought himself a pretty important guy, because at about the same time as he'd taken his first gurgling neck-breaths through a Bic jumbo pen, a bus full of orphans got wiped out by a tractor-trailer on their way to Disneyland. Apparently since God's Grace was busy helping the Reverend, the orphans were met with God's Will, who you really do not want to mess with. (Don't ask me who these Will and Grace characters are. I gather they're sort of the opposing comedy/tragedy masks of religious theater.)

"The Confession" was the Reverend's most highly-rated episode, although the next one was his lowest thus far, and the one after that was even lower, and so on, until the only people still watching were hospital patients in comas, and cats left home alone with the TV on for "company."

See, the Reverend's fans could have forgiven the exotic dance club thing. But what they couldn't forgive was the gluttony. Two years earlier, an obese Reverend Priestly had had a health scare in the form of a mild heart attack. Afterward he'd wept into the cameras and apologized to his viewers for having "let himself go," sobbing about one's body being a temple and how, clearly, his temple needed a renovation. He begged his followers to please pray for him to lose weight. Well, do you know what? The praying really worked. In just a few months, Reverend Priestly was miraculously able to lose over one hundred pounds. He became quite popular as the preacher who could tell you how to "Pray Away the Pounds™" (as it said on all his merchandise). His viewership had swelled, clear proof that rebuilding his "temple" had indeed pleased God.

Well. After the Reverend almost died at the firehouse club's all-you-can-eat buffet, an investigative tabloid reporter got hold of the Reverend's medical records and learned that he had used thousands of dollars of donations from his viewers for lap-band surgery, lipo, and a tummy tuck—to sort of, you know, help the praying along. The tabloid christened him "Preacher Pay-Away-the-Pounds." His viewers were mad. They thought their contributions had been going to good causes of some sort, like famine victims or something. Why had the Reverend wasted it on a bunch of Big Medicine procedures? And worst of all, they were procedures he hadn't even needed, since everyone knew it was prayer that had done the trick anyway.

The Reverend had to turn in his marshmallow-white suit. And of course he lost his congregation too. He was defrocked, and deflocked.

But it all turned out okay. The Reverend got fired from his church, but he was able to use his years of experience telethonning for God to become a successful infomercial pitchman. You could often find him on some show where a paid audience oohed and ahhed over strange products presented like biblical miracles. The products were always supposed to be time-saving devices which would enable people to spend less time ladling their soup or tying their shoelaces and other modern burdens, and more time doing whatever it was they'd rather be doing. (What they'd rather be doing, usually, was shopping for labor-saving devices, so you could see where that might result in a paradoxical loop that could eventually tear at the fabric of reality. But Christian Priestly did not believe in the "fabric of reality" and other confounding notions of science, so he wasn't going to lose any sleep over that.)

As for Gladys, doctors were amazed that she had managed not to kill the Reverend or render him mute, which were apparently the usual results when an amateur performed an emergency crikey-whatchamacallit-otomy, despite all we've learned from otherwise reputable Hollywood action movies and medical dramas. So maybe Grace had a hand in it after all.

For months, Gladys got flooded with offers to appear on talk shows. They wanted to know: would she be willing to talk about how TV inspired her life-saving actions that day? And could she re-enact the event live if they supplied a mannequin? And could she maybe pretend to do an extreme appendectomy too? And an emergency brain surgery? Just for laughs, of course. And would she be willing to wear a sexy nurse costume on the show? Because the audience would really get a kick out of that. And if there were a pole on set, could she maybe show the audience a few easy routines, very tasteful of course, and explain how even real women could use exotic dancing moves to keep their men interested?

Gladys declined all the requests. It seemed she didn't really want to be famous, after all.

And, you know? For once, Mama was fine with that.