ABSTRACT
It is a sultry August evening at the Climax Club in Gary, Indiana. I am here at a wedding reception, watching a fat woman in a red dress with a wide smile dancing with somebody's baby. The baby's hair has been plaited into cornrows. The fat woman and the baby don't seem to mind that the air-conditioning doesn't work. Neither do most of the 200 or so other people who have come here to "fellowship." That's what the minister bade us do, earlier today, after he pronounced that a couple named Bobby and Bobbie were man and wife. And so we do: we fellowship.
