Unmentionable No Longer

"Okay, 34, then."

"All cotton?"

"Yes, ma'am."

His total comes to $51.32. They talk about the weather, then he takes his bag of underpants and leaves.

This is as exciting as it gets buying the garment -- no secret ceremony, no prayers, no covert delivery system.

The underwear is part of a covenant with God that Mormons consider private, but the information is plainly out there: Just as the Jewish yarmulke and the Christian "WWJD?" bracelet are reminders to their wearers of their faith, the Mormon garment is an unseen reminder to "saints" (as LDS church members refer to themselves) of who they are. In young adulthood, when and if a Mormon man or woman goes through the "endowment" ceremony at the temple, they are given the garment and told to wear one every day thereafter. Nothing comes between a saint and his underwear.

It looks like long underwear, or mid-thigh length -- think of bloomers, or old-fashioned swim trunks. It comes in one piece or two. The women's version can be frillier, with a scoop neck and cap sleeves. The underwear is supposed to keep its wearer modest, and by design it discourages women in particular from wearing provocative clothes. Spaghetti straps, tube tops, bare midriffs, micro-minis, Daisy Duke shorts -- not in the garment, you don't.

Some Mormon lore also invests the garments with a power to protect -- there are stories about people who got through car wrecks, floods and other calamities unscathed, and thanked the godly power of the underwear. (Steve Young, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback and devout Mormon, told "60 Minutes" in 1996 that he didn't wear the garment during games, but did elsewhere.)

The garment usually has a symbol over each breast: a carpenter's square and a V-like compass, and a small buttonhole slit above the right knee. When a garment is worn out, according to "Mormon America: The Power and the Promise" by Richard and Joan Ostling, the sacred symbols are snipped off and the rest can be discarded or used as rags.

Interestingly, much of the information about the garment comes from anti-Mormons, who view it as just another freaky reason to rail against LDS -- a way the church represses itself and its people. The symbols stitched onto it set off the Freemasonry alarms of conspiracy theorists. In the wide-open "boxers or briefs?" culture of America, it's seen as a very odd thing indeed to be quiet and reverent about your unmentionables.

For a minute, let's not talk about underwear and examine the past few weeks in what some people believe is a theocratic, Mormon-run state.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the Olympic Winter Games was how little interaction there was between the saints and the world at large. Bars stayed open later than state law allows; revelers walked around city streets with open containers of beer. Rules were broken, and Mormons looked the other way.