Wearing her game-face smile and her Grace & Hope Mission blue blazer, Christine Shiflett forges into the Crystal Show Bar, your run-of-the-mill strip club on The Block. The 42-year-old missionary doesn't preach a peep. She just slips into groups of drinking customers with her donation basket and spiritual pamphlets.
She looks like a nun dropping in on a bachelors' party.
The bartender deftly stuffs a buck into Miss Shiflett's basket. Patrons stop dead in their drinks, then wave her off. Other stunned customers such as Freddy Kober (visiting from L.A.) fumble for their wallets.
"I think this is pretty cool," says Mr. Kober. "She's all right."
After spending about 20 minutes in three clubs on The Block, Miss Shiflett returns to the Grace & Hope Mission on South Gay Street. It's literally around the corner from Baltimore's two-block hot zone of mostly adult bookstores and strip clubs.
For the mission, it's another night, another $7.50 in donations -- compared to, say, the $20 it costs to buy a dancer a watery drink.
The mission and The Block have been living together in sin for about 80 years. In this novel coexistence, they have become downright neighborly and respectful of each other. The Crystal strip club and other clubs donate leftover food. The owner of an adult video store told the missionaries to call him if they ever need anything.
Here in the county seat of depravity, the Grace & Hope missionaries feel safe, respected and completely at home.
"We all have to live together. There's no sense condemning everyone," Miss Shiflett says. "They are all very friendly. There's a lady on the corner who runs a porno store.
"She keeps our UPS packages for us when we're not here."
Gunhild Carlson, who runs the Grace and Hope Mission, remembers when she and her sister, Ruth Carlson, were taking a friend to the airport. With suitcases in hand, they met their friend at the corner of Gay and Baltimore streets. Right outside the Big Top adult video and bookstore.
A couple approached them. Tourists, probably.
Ladies, are you all right? they asked. This is an awful neighborhood, they warned the missionaries. Gary Dostal, owner the Big Top, overheard the conversation and was grinning ear-to-ear, Miss Carlson says.
The 73-year-old missionary told the couple there was nothing to worry about. She and her sister would be just fine.
"We live around the corner," Miss Carlson told them.
The Grace & Hope Mission has been at 4 South Gay Street for about 80 years. The mission was started by Mamie Caskie and Jennie Goranflo, who with $4 in their pockets held their first service at the first Grace & Hope Mission at Camden Yards.
The mission's purpose, as Miss Caskie wrote, is to "open a door to the discouraged, to those who have lost hope and forgotten about grace."
The Baltimore mission moved to Gay Street in 1919 -- the site had been a nightclub in the old vaudeville days of The Block. This tickles Miss Carlson.
"I rather think this altar here was the bar," she says, sitting in the front pew on the ground-level church. It's conceivable that many years ago, dancers moved on this very spot.
"Could be," Miss Carlson says, smiling.
The building's basement had been a bowling alley in another life. The kitchen tables were made from the thick wood of bowling-alley floors.
Here, the missionaries prepare and bag the lunches for the men and families who come for the free food.
On cold nights, they might get 90 people in for the service and meals. Their spiritual treks into The Block's businesses are almost a side calling for the missionaries. What they mainly do is feed and clothe people and invite them to the 7:30 p.m. interdenominational service. Check out the singing, the missionaries say.
Miss Carlson has been with the mission 56 years, the last 16 here on Gay Street. Grace & Hope also has a mission on Greene Street in downtown Baltimore. Along with Miss Carlson and Miss Shiflett, Hilda Bichell also works and lives upstairs here, "where the men on the front steps serenade us all night."
And it's Miss, not Mrs. As missionaries, these women gave up having homes, husbands or children. It is their calling.
Miss Carlson is Scandinavian. Swedish, specifically. The point is she possesses certain unflinching Scandinavian qualities that can help a soul perform missionary work in these rough parts.
She has reserve, resolve and a willful orderliness about her. She's no laugh riot, either. Helping the poor can be humorless business. But after the last of their visitors have been fed here five nights a week, she can unwind. Maybe watch "Wheel of Fortune." Well, after she first turns off the light to the lanky cross outside that reads Grace & Hope Mission. And after she deadbolts the front door.
"A little rascal tried to take two sandwiches. I smacked his hand," says Miss Bichell, as the last of 70 people file out of the mission on a Thursday night. They take their hot dogs, chips and tall cups of coffee out into the street, where it seems colder than the official 50 degrees. "You ladies have a good night," say the
procession of men.
Miss Carlson and Miss Shiflett will now spread the good word on The Block. Usually, Marie McCubbin of the Greene Street mission passes out the spiritual tracts inside a couple of the strip clubs, where the doormen wave her in. But she's not working tonight.
So, Miss Carlson and Miss Shiflett do the deed. Miss Carlson walks by the Big Top bookstore at Baltimore and Gay streets. She is friendly with the owners, Linda and Gary Dostal. They are the ones who keep the UPS packages for her. And Miss Carlson has walked right into the Big Top to get her packages.
"When I come out, I hope people don't think I'm buying a porno movie," she says.
The business sells videos, but it's also stocked with what can only be described as sexual aids. But Miss Carlson doesn't flinch. It would take a lot more than this to make her squeamish or embarrassed. When one attempts to sprinkle spirituality on local fleshpots, one develops tough, unsentimental skin.
One reason the missionaries are welcome -- if not merely tolerated -- is because they leave the converting to others.
"They're not preachy or judgmental," says Mr. Dostal, whose Big Top business has been on The Block for 13 years. The mission has no spiritual influence on him or his business, but he says that's almost beside the point.
"We do kind of look out for them because they are good, decent people," Mr. Dostal says.
Miss Carlson walks up to a man resting his weary head on a parking meter along Baltimore Street. Somewhere in this crab grass of a beard, two human eyes dart then fix on the woman in the Grace & Hope uniform.
The man is handed a spiritual pamphlet. "Something to read while you're standing there?" Miss Carlson asks, with a glimmer of cheer.
The man nearly topples over.
Miss Carlson walks further up Baltimore Street, where it's just another Thursday night on The Block. "Oh, my goodness, look who the parole officer let out!" says a man staring at another man in a shaggy bed sheet criss-crossing Baltimore Street.
Sheet Man offers people drags from his brown-bagged bottle. Another someone invents a "Sheet Man" theme song, and it goes a little something like this: "Sheet Man, Sheet Man, Sheet Man, Sheet Man." (Repeat chorus.)
A woman, pencil-thin and almost-bald, approaches with a "1978 Beatles Magazine" of dubious value. She asks a stranger for a date, provided he's not a cop.
Doormen -- the barkers of The Block -- peel off singles when they see Miss Carlson coming. Three of them quiz her on Miss McCubbin's whereabouts to make sure she's OK. John Dobbins, 40, is a doorman for the Jewel Box club.
"I'm a church person myself. We give them money all the time," he says. "Nobody makes fun of them."
A doorman named Scooter (not his real name -- but you knew that) pulls one of the spiritual tracts from his pocket. The tract says, "Everything seems to end up on a dead-end street. Believe me, you have lots of company." The literature ends with "I now accept Christ as my Savior" and has a place for someone to sign.
Scooter is working in front of the Crystal Show Bar and works somewhere else during the day but skips further details. He defends these ladies. "If anybody ever messes with them, they're . . ." Scooter says, skipping more details.
It's hard to find testimonials about the mission's spiritual affect on The Block. People working here sometimes donate money and food, but the missionaries don't know of any Block denizens who ever changed their sinful ways because of them. Yes, they remember a few of the dancers dropping by the mission over the years to discuss guilt.
"To me what they do is wrong, but I wouldn't go up and tell them that. What good would that do?" Miss Carlson says. "We do hope they are affected by the tracts Miss McCubbin hands out. (( And we hope they see the cross outside the building."
Upstairs at the Crystal strip club, the crowd numbers four: the bartender, a 20-year Block veteran with a face like Quint from "Jaws," and the dancers -- Dominique, Tiffany and a woman who actually gives a last name: Marcia Haney of Baltimore. Everyone tells her this, but Ms. Haney does look like actress Helen Hunt in the face.
This is her first night dancing here, but she's worked on The Block before. She's dropped the Grace & Hope ladies a few dollars before, too.
"Just think about what they're trying to do," says Ms. Haney, 27. "They're never going to win. They're fighting a losing battle."
Ms. Haney chats about her son's recent kindergarten trip to a pumpkin farm. Then, she leaves to take her turn on stage.
At the jukebox, Tiffany picks out her dance songs -- something from Metallica. She's been dancing on The Block for four years. While dancing, Tiffany can see the arriving Miss McCubbin in the reflection from the stage mirrors. She'll come right up to dancers who are sitting on a guy's lap, Tiffany says.
"It does make me feel shameful," Tiffany says. "If I'm doing something really degrading on stage, I stop and kick into my model mode."
Because of the missionaries, Tiffany says she won't wear a crucifix while dancing, like some dancers do. It's like laughing in the face of God, Tiffany thinks.
The mission's presence on The Block also makes Tiffany think of her own religious background. "I guess I'm Catholic."
Tiffany says she gives the missionaries maybe $5 a pop just to chase away the guilt and fear. These ladies are a little scary, she says.
"They make me think maybe there's something better for me to be doing," Tiffany says, thinking this thing over in a deep moment of reflection.
E9 But the money is great, she says, snapping out of it.