Everything I need to know, I learned from Tammy Faye

Everything she needed to know, she learned from Dolly Parton, says Melissa Maerz, at Double XX.

Me? Just about everything I need to know, I learned from Tammy Faye Bakker Messner. When she died in 2007, I wrote this (it’s long so don’t feel obligated):

    She peered at the world through raccoon-circles of mascara that it was sometimes hard to see past.
    The same went for the pancake makeup, the helmet-wigs, and that perky, baby-doll voice.
    From the looks of things, Tammy Faye Bakker Messner was hard to swallow, but she went to glory last Friday after an 11-year battle with cancer, and the world’s a little less for her leave-taking.
    I admired Tammy Faye, but not for the kitsch she brought to pop culture. She came from my tribe, where for war-painted, Jesus-loving women, the phrase, “the higher the hair, the closer to God” is canon. Looking one’s best — or one’s version of one’s best — is a form of worship. She once told an interviewer that she wore makeup even to bed because she was joining the man she loved more than anyone, and “I’m not going to look like crap for him.” She was drawn like a crow to shiny things, big ol’ shoulder pads in her suits, nosebleed heels, and earrings the size of chandeliers.
    Still, if you grow up cold and hungry, you earn the right to define your own aesthetic.
    She came to Jesus as a pre-adolescent, and as a girl prayed to God that her life not be boring. On a deeper level, I admired Tammy Faye because she came out of a faith tradition that could be exclusionary to the extreme, where people outside of your tribe are condemned to hell where their flesh will melt from their bones. You stand in a city park and you know: That one’s a sinner, and that one, and that one, as well. But Tammy Faye cheerfully brought the message — what she and others call “good news” — to a wider audience including homosexuals, drag queens, disaffected youth, and (yes!) porn stars. In short, she embraced the kind of people that Jesus did, the ones much of the rest of society finds uncomfortable.
    I think Tammy Faye embraced them all because she knew better than most what it is to be an outsider. Her career as one of the country’s first successful televangelists exploded in flames when her then-husband slept with the church secretary, and then went to jail for stealing millions from followers. From all indications, her next husband remained faithful, but then he, too, went to jail for financial improprieties. And through it all, she sold wigs. She sold books and records that were unfailingly optimistic, if not saccharine.
    A campy 2000 documentary presented her life story in a mostly sympathetic light, and then a whole new generation of Americans was introduced to Tammy Faye in the television show, “The Surreal Life,” in 2004, where she showed herself to be, well, Christian.
    Writing in his autobiography, another of the show’s faded stars, porn star Ron Jeremy, said that he’d inexplicably made the best connection with Tammy Faye, and they remained in contact after the show. In multiple scenes, Tammy Faye would leave — sometimes in tears — when confronted with a nudist resort, a strip club, a seance.
    She did not make a big deal of it, she didn’t preach. She just left, and remained consistently cheerful and non-judgmental among a cast of prickly also-rans.
    It seemed almost cruel to watch her last week on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” There she was, war paint and all, as she fought for breath. But she wanted to tell her listeners — plugged in to the television machine to the last — that she was in God’s hands. In the end, she still loved Jesus.