I started watching HBO's Big Love in secret during the day with the office door shut or late at night when I couldn't sleep. Eventually Bob found out and against his better judgment joined me. We came out of the closet a few years ago and now watch without shame. The writers are excellent, keep the plot moving along at a rapid pace, and develop the characters allowing them to grow with the twists and turns of the story. Even though the subject matter can make a viewer uneasy, production details (i.e., wardrobe, hair/make-up, set design) create a believable environment and a realistic story line. One detail I  enjoy is the music chosen to play behind the introduction, during the episode, and especially at the end when the closing credits roll.

This year the show has become a real pot boiler. A recent episode involved the characters in murder, dismembering, incest, kidnapping, and, of course, polygamy. Big Love has no commercials, so there isn't time to take a breath, look around, and get your bearings. After the pulp fiction-like action in the "Under One Roof" episode, the music played during the closing credits was startling: a sweet Gospel song—something about something on a hilltop sung by a voice unmistakably Elvis. First thing the next morning I opened ITunes, searched for Elvis and sure enough there it was, Mansion Over the Hilltop. As one web thread leads to another, I soon was reading about Elvis's beginnings in Gospel music, and the start of his career.

I was fourteen in 1956 when Elvis played at the Sioux City Auditorium. The whole notion of being a "teenager" was still new: there was being a kid, waiting to be an adult, and being an adult. No age definition or marketing segment separated us as a pack. There were no self-help books or columnists to advise parents about the "teenage years". There were, however, the first glimmers of something different, something special, and something apart.  "Elvis Presley , more than anyone else, gave the young a belief in themselves as a distinct and somehow unified generation—the first in America ever to feel the power of an integrated youth culture. " The Memphis, pre-Las Vegas, pre-sequined Elvis looked dangerous, dressed in black, and wore a greaser's DA, combed back with a forehead lock that refused to stay in place. In 1952, Midwestern jukeboxes played Patti Page, Eddie Fisher, Frank Sinatra, Frankie Laine, and Rosemary Clooney. Only four years later, those icons were being nudged out by Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and Elvis.

My parents were born, educated, and married in South Dakota but didn't seem locked within the limitations defined by their Midwestern upbringing. Muth read books, smoked cigarettes, and played her records loud. Daddy was a Mason, smoked a pipe, and played Donkey Baseball in the summer. Those faint traces of being out of place came to my aid when Elvis surfaced in Iowa. Most of my girlfriends were forbidden to go see him, but my Dad dropped me off in front of the auditorium and said, "Have fun!".

And fun we had—there was screaming, there was moaning, there was bawling. When Elvis began to play A Whole Lot of Shakin', the roof blew right off. My friend and I had cheap seats—top row in the balcony miles away from the stage but the power of his personality brought us right down into the action. Two hours later, or it may have been two minutes or two days, he was gone. He came back for three encores but wouldn't come out again. I'm not kidding—the next thing we heard was, "Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building."