I believe a Nik Sonntag played for BYU.

I had to translate into Russian for Elder Didier in front of a congregation with 600 people (district conference). He purposely put me in the worst situation ever.

I had already heard Elder Didier give a virtually identical talk 5 times as he traveled through my mission, and prior to this instance there had been native Russian speaker translators.

Elder Didier was basically repeating a memorized talk perfectly word-for-word, except the first 5-7 minutes of his talk he would tell a little "parable" with some sort of funny story with an animal that got into trouble. He had 3 different animal stories and he had repeated two of them already.

Because the animal stories (about things like monkeys drilling holes in coconuts) were much more complicated to translate, I was a little nervous. So I went up to him before the talk and I asked him which animal story he was planning on sharing, so that I would have an easier time translating.

Elder Didier said something to the effect of the spirit dictating what he would say, and he acted irritated. (Who is this upstart missionary punk asking me what God is going to tell me to say to the congregation?)

So, instead of giving the same talk I had already heard word-for-word 5 times in various cities of our mission, he gave a completely different talk. It sucked. I'm convinced he did this just because I asked him which animal story he was going to tell.

Nice. Unless he could understand Russian, you could have just translated what he was saying to the speech you had heard the previous times. You could have had the last laugh.

sonntag played for oregon state than dixie than the U. before injuries cut his career short

I was called to Indonesia in the summer of 1980. They called 14 of us, believing that David Kennedy, ambassador at large for the church and former bigwig in international banking, could make arrangements to get us in on "tourist" visas (the 6 week ones microlex refers to). We spent almost 3 months in the MTC waiting for visas. This coincided with the Iranian hostage crisis, and TV had taken to carrying captions indicating "Crisis Day xxx". So us missionaries followed suit after a while, putting posters over our windows indicating how long we had been in "captivity" in the MTC. They made us take them down, so we took the ceiling tiles down and wrote our "journal" of the crisis on the back of the ceiling tiles. They've probably been replaced by now, but who knows, maybe our legacy still exists...

They eventually decided to send us to California to do something useful while waiting for visas. By early spring, Salt Lake decided we weren't ever going to get visas, so they sent us to the Philippines, I guess because the missionaries taught in English in the Philippines at that time, and the Philippines is about as hot, poor, and dirty as Indonesia, so we'd be fooled into thinking our prayers and fasting had been answered...

Shortly after arriving in the Philippines, Salt Lake announced the 18 month mission thing, and gave current missionaries who arrived in the MTC by the end of July the choice of whether to serve 18 or 24 months. Those who arrived later had no choice - 18 months was their lot. We arrived August 6th. So I spent 3 months in the MTC, 4 months in California, and 11 months in the Philippines.

Thats right he was the kid that traveled around with Danny Southwick.

Steel you served in Belgium?

Me and the wife spent time in Beligum, spent two days in Brugge, spent a day in Brussells. Bought $300 of Dumont Chocolate. Ate fries with 'special sauce' which turned out to be mayonaise. Ate the best Pizza Hut pizza in my life.