Connecting the sects.

On cue every year, thousands of lesbians of all ages flock to Palm Springs for the Dinah Shore Golf Classic. As the green oasis sucks the nearby aquifers dry. the women celebrate amidst hundreds of thousands of chat-chomping college students in jeeps and humvees. armed for spring break with high-powered water rifles.

It could be a lethal clash of cultures. But the two sects hardly intersect, since the lesbians shut themselves inside huge, hermetically sealed hotels, gated and designated for fun and sun worship--all by the grace of Tanqueray. As the spring sun drifts toward the west, they turn their lounge chairs and prayer towels in sun-dialed, choreographed ritual.

The annual lesbian purification by chlorine and Coors commemorates the goddess Dinah Shore, patron saint of GMC. She was the first woman to break the tinted glass ceiling of car sales when her dulcet voice lured people into buying Chevrolets to see the U.S.A. Even though she left her vehicle a couple of earth years back, the rite continues.

Since Rancho Santa Fe everything seems like a cult. The Dinosaur Desert Classic, the Tennessee Lady Vols, Pat Summit and her blue eye shadow and Rajneeshy orange, AA, the Twelve Apostles, AOL.

Californians aren't taking it well. The newspapers are filled with whining whyme's: "Jim Jones and O.J. and Lyle and Eric and the riots and Bob Dornan--and now this?!" And psycho ceramics are all the rage. These crackpot theories claim, "It's the weather; it's the water; it's Jerry Brown." One guy, head of Way Out Productions, a missing-persons search firm, record label, long-distance phone company, and talent agency, said, "It's the flavor of the day, the X-files waiting to happen." He's already pitching America's Weirdest Home Videos.

Dan Rather, at least, was in heaven. He made more connections than an NRA lobbyist at the Republican convention. He tried so hard because he had to play catch-up, since his network was not the first to throw its MASS SUICIDE logo and creepy music up on the satellite feed.

As if connecting all those dots would make a picture, Dan drew lines between Jim Jones and alienation and Gnosticism and Easter and resurrection and ancient times and yellow marshmallow peeps and Bo and Peep and cloning and losing sheep and not knowing where to find them and then finding them wearing Nikes and the JUST DO IT mantra and the swoosh icon like some big checkoff on the road to the final four and computers and comets and Hale Boggs and Charles Manson and his parole denied which was fine with Chuck because he wanted to keep working on his web site, www.swastika.forehead, and the big web page in the sky and Dan went on and on until I began to think those poor Higher Source people were on to something and the least they could have done is take Dan with them.

The sub-plot I always dreaded broke soon enough. The leader of the cult had lost his college teaching position allegedly because he had sex with a young male student. The college denied it had let him go for moral reasons. But he did submit to a program for sexual reorientation. No one in the press pointed out that the program was a dismal failure.

Speaking of sects, Jerry Falwell's church has urged Johnson & Johnson, Chrysler, and GMC to pull their advertising from Ellen. Falwell called her "Ellen Degenerate," as if there were a second grader left who hadn't come up with that one already. And in more sectual news, the Presbyterian Church, after years of rancorous debate, voted to require all unmarried ministers, deacons, and elders to be sexually celibate. The Chastity [not Bono] Amendment is a cowardly back-door attempt to avoid outright banning of the ordination of homosexuals. Presbyterian conservatives are thrilled. Stop me before I connect again, but can a Sacrament of Castration be far behind?