As I've written previously, my better half is a former Mormon, growing up in a large Mormon family that was intricately involved with the Mormon church.

As you probably know, Mormons are forbidden from doing a lot of fun things, including drinking alcoholic or even caffeinated beverages, watching unwholesome films (anything above PG, essentially), and engaging in premarital sex. As you can imagine, this leaves Mormons with a ton of time to fill with wholesome activities, like family game nights and six-hour church services and weird social rituals I'd never heard of until Jake told me about them.

For instance: Pudding Pictionary, which is like regular Pictionary except it's played with chocolate pudding, spread on a tabletop, with players drawing pictures in the pudding with their noses. (How engaging in faux scat is more wholesome than watching a PG-13 movie is beyond me, but that's Mormons for you.)

Then there's the "foot of your father" game, wherein a large group of Mormon fathers and daughters gather in an auditorium, where the dads take off their shoes, roll up their pants cuffs, and place themselves behind the stage curtain, which is raised only far enough to expose their bare feet. Then, daughters must attempt to identify their fathers by their feet. Actually, this sounds kind of hilarious and fun, but as with Pudding Pictionary, the line between the wholesome and the fetishistic is thin.

Finally, there are candy-bar letters, wherein high-schoolers communicate—to ask each other to prom, for instance—via a "letter" composed in part of candy bars, the names of which function as words in the text. Candy-bar letters do double Mormon duty, protracting the "wholesome" aspects of dating (the inviting and accepting, both of which are done via time-consuming candy-bar letter) and allowing Mormons to indulge in the one earthly drug they allow themselves: sugar.

For the past two weeks, Jake's been working in San Francisco, and in a fit of missing him, I wrote him a goddamn candy-bar letter. (See subject line.)

Here's page one.

Here's page two. (This is Diane.)

Page three is lightly pornographic and private. (But I can report that it featured a Mr. Goodbar, a brownie, and three dark-chocolate Hershey's kisses.)

Thank you, Mormons.