Heather King's Blog, page 46

STAINED GLASS FROM GOTHIC TO STREET STYLE

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Everyone knows that Forest Lawn is a giant cemetery off the 134 in Glendale.

But do we all know of the Forest Lawn Museum?

Says Forest Lawn Museum Director and exhibition curator James Fishburne, PhD.:

“We’re a hidden gem and I want to make us a visible, widely-known gem. Forest Lawn is a whole institution. Art is part of our DNA.”

“There’s the outdoor statuary, of course. And the buildings themselves are works of art: stained glass, mosaics, paintings.”

The Hall of Crucifixion-Resurrection, for example, houses the largest religious painting in the Western Hemisphere: Jan Styka’s “The Crucifixion” from the 1890s. Robert Clark’s “The Resurrection” (1965), also massive, literally slides on a track.

“The building itself is really incredible,a loose recreation on the outside of the Cathedral in Orvieto, Italy, a kind of Gothic Renaissance. Then you step inside and it’s French Gothic, and you step in farther and the style becomes reminiscent of a mid-century movie palace. It’s a neat mashup, sort of an ‘only in LA’ type of thing.”

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

NEXT DOOR

If you ever want to unload some of your belongings, the nextdoor app is the way to go.

Yesterday I posted this:

MOVING GIVE-AWAY!!

I have a bunch of stuff I am gifting to the world.

Large overstuffed green velvet armchair: 38” wide, 36” deep, 32” high.

Four beautiful oak dining room chairs, two of them captain chairs with arms, with green leather padded seats

Two Ikea bookcases: one is 47” long, 8” wide, and 26” tall, the other is 74” tall, 15” deep and 14” wide.

Large white Crate and Barrel platter with leaves and grape clusters

Some terra cotta garden pots and ornament type stuff.

Outdoor bamboo blinds.

Vintage glass curtain rod.

Large Cyclone fan.

Metal garden table and green metal chair.

And a bag of misc.

Everything but the glass curtain rod, which I’ve decided to keep, was gone within hours. My downstairs neighbor Erik took the chair and various other people showed up and hoovered that stuff up in no time. I find people are very motivated in such situations. They pull up, wheel in, load, and careen off before you can change your mind.

Almost all of the aforementioned items I have had for at least 15 years and many for longer.

Strange to be leaving behind a garden that I cleared, planted, lovingly tended and that is now established. My way was to save the water from my shower every morning and laboriously haul it out in a pail–partly a gesture, obviously, but an important one, I felt, and for the rest to hand-water, sparingly, from a hose, making no noise and little waste. While I was gone for the month, someone installed two tall, plastic, unsightly overhead sprinkler heads that, to my mind anyway, will water unnecessarily: most California native plants, once established, need little water, and if they do need water, need it once a week or so, and deeply. This will rain water on everything, probably daily and shallowly, and definitely remotely.

I know, I know: not my garden–and never has been–not my business. So be it. Plus, I’m hardly a horticulturalist. Plus I’ve probably actually been doing a hundred things “wrong.”

But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that a garden is a labor of love. The more labor you put into it, the better it responds. The more labor, the more serendipitously charming it will look, the more intelligence it will radiate somehow. Mine was a garden with river rocks dug out from the ground by hand and thoughtfully placed, seeds sown with hope, plants pondered, prayed over and praised…I picked out every one of those plants, drove them home, knew their names…A relationship was formed.

How incredibly grateful I am that I was given the space and the opportunity.

And may the people who come over form their own relationship with the garden.

Last night I heard a prayer someone recommended for use with people who we feel have hurt or wounded us: I’m sorry, forgive me, thank you, I love you.

I’m sorry. Yes.

As I pack up more and more stuff, it’s also interesting to see what’s left; what’s essential as I more or less camp out for a few days. Six 12-ounce packages of Starbucks French roast (I buy them expired on ebay). A giant container of pure cane sugar. A glass of roses from the garden. My portable prayer box (breviary, Magnificat, candle, incense, matches). A small old wooden crucifix. Three rosaries.

THAT IS ICED TEA, NOT JACK DANIELS ON MY BEDSIDE TABLE.
FYI.

CRUNCH TIME

Today I drive back to Pasadena, spend four days packing the rest of my stuff, giving stuff away, and preparing to load the truck to move my stuff for the actual move to Tucson.

How did the decision to move even come about? I’m wondering. I’d been pondering the idea for a while but I can’t remember an actual moment.

I do remember this. One day in December, my friends Tom, Michael and Paolo came over and we were sitting in the garden, and we were talking about Tucson and the possibility of my moving there and I said I had kind of decided not to go. I said something like: “I hardly know anyone there and what if something happened to me? ” And Paolo, just very offhandedly, but with intention, replied, “I vote for Tucson” or “I think you should go,” or something like that. And it kind of stayed with me. Partly because Paolo has led an adventurous life of his own, packed with creativity, community, art and love, and I admire him, and his partner Lisa, tremendously.

Also I had seen a vermilion flycatcher on my most recent visit.

I seriously think those two “chance” moments conspired, as much as anything else, to bring me here. 

Crunch time means devoting an inordinate amount of mental space and physical exertion to “stuff” for a while. One function of the Incarnation, I’ve been thinking, is that we are constantly constantly carrying stuff from one place to another. Take a look around next time you’re out. Guys with plastic bags dangling from their handlebars, kids with backpacks, mothers with strollers, pickup trucks laded with rakes, shovels, trash barrels, all of us hauling bags of groceries into the kitchen after a Trader Joe’s run.

Along with the stuff, my mind has turned, perhaps in an effort to stave off anxiety, to what kind of clothing might be suitable for summer in the desert. I have basically worn the same outfit every day for the last ten years, which consists of a pair of jeans of some kind, a tank top and a James Perse shirt that buttons up the front (except I get mine used off ebay for 30 bucks or so). And some kind of wrap tied around my waist and in winter, a scarf and jacket.

But last year the temperature reached 100 degrees or more for over 100 days of the year, or something like that, in Tucson. So gosh, I started wondering recently, what do people wear here in July? Like…skirts? Or even, dresses?

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against dresses. I like them. I own some. It’s just that when push comes to shove, every single morning of my life I wake up, take a shower, and don clothing that will allow me to clean the house, cook, garden, go to Mass, run errands, and take a walk. Which as I said, are pants of some type, et cetera.

Nonetheless, last week I started googling things like “sundress” and “what do people wear in the desert” and after a while other, increasingly lame phrases like “summery skirts” and “linen harem pants” and “freepeople.”

At some point I thought of the brand Black Crane, which specializes in giant tent-like shapeless women’s garments that cost 3- or 400 bucks a throw.

I BELIEVE YOU FORGOT TO CLEAN UP AFTER YOUR DOG…

This, for example, which I found used on ebay for 126.

It looks kind of great on her: on me, the effect would be like a potato sack on a pea. But more to the point, WOULD I be likely to wake up and think, “I’ll be darned, it’s 120 outside, why I think I will don my white shroud and gather brush, hack off dead cactus limbs, sweep the patio, scrub the floor and scour the tub in that”?

Or “My God, you could fry an egg on the sidewalk, why not cut a hole in a the middle of a tablecloth, slip it over my head like a poncho, and walk to Mass like that, perhaps evangelizing en route? Lifting one robe-draped arm, pointing skyward, murmuring sagely, ‘By his stripes you were healed’ “…

Also the problem for me with white is that, I am not exaggerating, literally within three minutes I will have spilled coffee on myself, fallen asleep while marking up a book so that the Pilot G2 leaks a coal-black blot over the front of my shirt, brushed up against a coat of fire-engine-red wet paint with my hip, or simply spontaneously have gathered to my person and my garments any number of smudges, smears, blotches and bedaubments.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I am so profoundly grateful, and in such an incoherent state of wonder, that I can barely think straight. Life is life, and the problems, challenges, and suffering will continue.

But this is a huge move for me, on many levels, and I can’t believe the Tucson house into which I’ll be moving, upon which more later.

CACTUS ABLOOM BESIDE THE DOOR OF MY AIRBNB

IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING

Let’s start off the week with a laugh, and a tear…

“He entered my room and said: ‘Poor creature, you who understand nothing. Come with me and I will teach you things which you do not suspect.’ I followed him.

He took me into a church. It was new and ugly. He led me up to the altar and said: ‘Kneel down.’ I said: ‘I have not been baptized.’ He said: ‘Fall on your knees before this place, in love, as before the place where lies the truth.’ I obeyed.

He brought me out and made me climb into a garret (an attic). Through the open window one could see the whole city spread out, some wooden scaffoldings, and the river on which boats were being unloaded. He bade me be seated.

We were alone. He spoke. From time to time someone would enter, mingle in the conversation, then leave again.

Winter had gone; spring had not yet come. The branches of the trees lay bare, without buds, in the cold air full of sunshine.

The light of day would arise, shine forth in splendor, and fade away; then the moon and the stars would enter through the window. And then once more the dawn would come up.

At times he would fall silent, take some bread from a cupboard, and we would share it. The bread really had the taste of bread. I have never found that taste again.

He would pour out some wine for me, and some for himself–wine which tasted of the sun and of the soil upon which this city was built.

At other times we would stretch ourselves out on the floor of the garret and sweet sleep would enfold me. Then I would wake and drink in the light of the sun.

He had promised to teach me, but he did not teach me anything. We talked about all kinds of things, in a desultory way, as do old friends.

One day he said to me: “Now go.” I fell down before him, I clasped his knees, I implored him not to drive me away. But he threw me out on the stairs. I went down unconscious of anything, my heart as it were in shreds. I wandered along the streets. Then I realized that I had no idea where his house lay.

I have never tried to find it again. I understood that he had come to me by mistake. My place is not in that garret. It can be anywhere–in a prison cell, in one of those middle-class drawing-rooms full of knick-knacks and red plush, in the waiting room of a station–anywhere, except in that garret.

Sometimes, I cannot help trying, fearfully and remorsefully, to repeat to myself a part of what he said to me. How am I to know if I remember rightly? He is not there to tell me.

I know well that he does not love me. How could he love me? And yet deep down within me something, a particle of myself, cannot help thinking, with fear and trembling, that perhaps, in spite of everything, he loves me.”

–Simone Weil

BEHIND THE SCENES WITH AN ART INSTALLER

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

I’m often aware of the many invisible hands and hearts behind any given Mass: the people who launder and iron the altar cloths, who replace the flowers and candles, who polish the vessels.

With theaters and museums opening, I thought of my friend Tom Duffy. As a Senior Art Preparator at LACMA, he’s one heart and pair of hands behind the exhibits we museum-goers will soon, once again, be allowed to drink in.

Tom has been making his way in the art world since 1996. He started in LA, first at the Skirball, then MOCA, moved on to the Toledo Museum of Art and the Everson Museum in Syracuse. Then he spent “a very informative, enjoyable three years of my journey” at at LA Packing, and was then at the Broad, the Getty, and since 2018, LACMA.

Depending on the institution, he might be called a preparator or an installer or a carpenter or a light designer. At LACMA, he and others similarly situated are responsible for just one aspect of the installation.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

TOM AT THE BROAD
credit: Jennifer Gutowski

DESERT SOLITAIRE

Well folks, a bit of an update on my recent peregrinations…

I have found a house to rent in Tucson, a feat I recognize absolutely as the work of the Holy Spirit as, to a person, every one to whom I’ve spoken here has described the “seller’s market” real estate situation as “insane,” “exploding,” “we’ve never seen anything like this in 50 years.”

Somehow, I managed to find a ’30s walled adobe with hardwood floors, a garage, washer-dryer, built-in bookcases, French doors, and a garden front and back in one of the city’s most charming historic neighborhoods, Sam Hughes. “You don’t need to drive anywhere if you live in this historic midtown neighborhood” reads one article, which is perfect as during the past few weeks, I have become even more of a daily wanderer than usual.

So far I have found a dentist, someone to cut my hair, and a nail joint. I have a library card. I have scoped out the Trader Joe’s situation, the best place to buy bread, the Little Free Libraries, the Tucson Museum of Art for greeting cards.

Devastating discovery: Tucson does not have 99 Cents Only Stores, which have been a mainstay of my marketing life for many years. Cleaning supplies, toiletries, produce, oat milk, coconut water, flax seed…Aspirin, cough drops, hydrogen peroxide, Sour Patch Watermelon…I’m sure I have saved hundreds if not thousands of dollars at the 99.

Well, Tucson does not have 99 Cents Only Stores. They have Dollar Trees, which are a sad, poor facsimile. First of all, most of the stuff is more like three or four or five dollars, not 99 cents, and some of it is MORE expensive than if you just went to Target or Walgreen’s like a normal person. So–this is one of the many ways I am “letting go.”

Everyone has been incredibly helpful and friendly. One day I ventured up to the downtown Tucson Post Office to rent a box (never dreaming I would find a place with an actual address and its own mailbox before the end of the month). In LA, I bring a bottle of water, snacks, and a book to the PO. It’s nothing to have to wait in line 20 minutes just to mail a package, and that’s at a small branch office.

So I figured whoa, the main downtown Tucson PO–it must be crammed! Especially during what is essentially still COVID! So I geared up, paced myself, girded my loins, ventured forth with full supplies–and there were two other people inside. And two helpful, efficient clerks.

The whole city is like that. 7, 8, 9 in the morning–rush hour in other words–not a car in sight as I cross a major north-south avenue half a mile south of downtown. St. Augustine Cathedral has a 7 am and a noon Mass which if I book it, I can make on foot from my airbnb in 15 minutes.

Rows of palo verde trees, in full, glorious bloom, line the sidewalks.

The prickly pear and cholla cacti are also in bloom, many shades of deep red, magenta, cantaloupe. Also mallow: apricot, deep pink, seashell pink.

Yesterday I went online to set a shut-off date for SoCal Gas, and almost cried: a utility I’ve been paying monthly (and so reasonable!) for over 30 years. I thought of all the dinners cooked, tea kettles boiled, ancient gas heater pilot lights lit (every single place I’ve lived has had an ancient gas heater). My new people are called Southwest Gas and in signing up I learned they wanted an $80 deposit and that you can ask your old utility people for a Letter of Credit to have the deposit waived! How cool is that?

I’ll go back to Pasadena near the end of the month, pack up the rest of my stuff, give some things away, and then it will be moving day, which my friends are basically doing for/with me. I am not driving a UHaul, of any size, trust me.

Beneath the surface: excitement, sadness, fear. So many people I love, in so many different places–and so little time we have in our short habitation, even under the best of circumstances, on this earth!

So much gratitude. Every day I receive a note of encouragement–someone has discovered my work and IDENTIFIES COMPLETELY (my favorite). Someone wants to be in my next Writing Workshop. Someone has pored over a Psalm or a Gospel passage, written a killer reflection, and sent it out to 15 or 20 of their friends, among whom I’m honored to be counted.

Someone sends along a YouTube of a guy who lives in a cave and prays for the world. Someone (actually lately a whole bunch of people) has been diagnosed with cancer, and is asking for prayers. Someone vaguely remembers some saint I may or may not have written about who may or may not have been a drug addict, or French, or a convert: can I help?

Yesterday I went up to my PO box and found a letter from a priest in St. Paul, MN, enclosing a prayer card of a couple of whom I write in this month’s Magnificat. Cyprien and Daphrose Rugamba, a husband and wife active in a Catholic association called the Emmanuel Community, were assassinated in their home, along with six of their ten children, during the Rwandan genocide.

Brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, betrayal by the people closest to us: it’s the oldest story in the book, and it crosses all lines of era, geography, gender and race. Cyprien had repeatedly strayed from the marriage but Daphrose had held steady, as we women at our best tend to do. And Cyprien, as men at their best tend to do, had straightened up and flown right. The two had supported the arts and native craftspeople. They had tried to spread light, hope and love to the community and to their children.

That was the second letter I’ve received at my new address. The first was an envelope from a friend with tiny medallions of St. Joseph, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and St. Peregrine, patron saint of cancer. The saints with whose blood the Church continues to be watered. Lord, I am not worthy, and may I keep them close.

The Bishop even welcomed me to town the other day!

Which is a long-winded way of saying: All is well. As always, I’m in the best possible hands.

LIFT UP YOUR HEADS: YOUR REDEMPTION IS AT HAND!

WANTED: DISTURBING HOMILIES!

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Recently I heard a homily in which the priest shared that he and his brethren are generally instructed by their superiors not to say anything that will disturb people. I almost wept. If we’re not here to be disturbed, to be challenged, to be called higher, what are we here for?

Madeline L’Engle, beloved writer of such children’s classics as A Wrinkle in Time, once observed: “We do not draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.”

So invite us to consider whether we are showing the world a “lovely light,” or in fact any light at all.

Disturb us!

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

THE PILGRIMAGE CONTINUES

From a friend, last week, at Madonna House in Combermere, Ontario:

“The Loons and the Great Blue Heron have returned from the south. The maple sap has quit running and the maple trees are budding. Yesterday there was a work bee to take the leaves off the flower beds because the crocuses have just started to bloom. All of this swells up to one burst of song…Christ is Risen!”

From Pittsburgh, PA, a note from another friend about the derelict garden she, her husband and her daughter have been resurrecting in their back yard: “All that is left of what had been are random Daffodils and some struggling peony shoots.   Anyway, we are done with the most back-breaking part of digging up bajillions of weeds and hoeing and mixing in topsoil!!!!!! I can’t wait to plant.”

A third friend who teaches at a university in Queens shared some thoughts on hoarding/accumulating, a subject on which she’d once taught a course. She wrote:

“The hoarding compulsion also has an order to it, and invested meaning. When you watch these stories [from the reality show, Hoarders], people are brilliant and they see meaning and beauty in everything”…

My friend mentioned two examples: a woman kept a tinfoil gum wrapper because it was so beautiful, and another who kept a single pen cap because, when playing board games, it might make a handy replacement.

The pen cap, the foil wrapper–I so get the attachment to them, and the investing of things with supernatural significance. I’m contemplating all of this deeply as I prepare to move to Tucson. I’m here now, at an airbnb, and will return to Pasadena near the end of the month to pack up the rest of my stuff for transport.

I have boxes of what I call tchotchkes: tiny pottery bowls, little metal birds, prayer cards, retablos. When packed up, they really don’t take up that much room and mean far more to me than my furniture–the latter of which I am seriously thinking of almost all giving away, along with my plants and garden stuff, which is a real stretch…there’ll be more stuff in Tucson…

But these little things, many of which have a religious dimension–crucifixes, milagros, statues of St. Dymphna, patron saint of the mentally ill, and my very favorite Sacred Heart of Jesus statue from the mass-produced ’50s that sits on my desk–do make for a little “portable kingdom.” Many of them were gifts, or little things I’ve picked up on my travels…Anyway, God bless us all in our spiritual crises…hoarders, ascetics, and everything in between.

I came here thinking I might already have found a place: namely, this house in the mountains way above Tucson on 8 acres of land. Me and the coyotes, bobcats, cacti, ocotillo and birds! Room for a real piano!

Then I discovered that Oro Valley is the Orange County of Tucson. This particular house is totally cool, but it’s surrounded by development and I’m not sure there is anything more depressing than prisitine desert on which sit giant clusters of huge, air-conditioned houses with pools, concrete, and lawns. No-one walks (I’m not talking about hiking; I mean walking, a leisurely, observant stroll about your immediate neighborhood): I imagine people more or less going from air-conditioned house to air-conditioned car or more likely, fleeing in the summer for one of their other homes.

Also the javelinas eat all the plants, your compost and your garbage. One friend said the javelinas in her father’s back yard had learned the weekly trash day and bore down to wreak mayhem in the few hours the barrels were unlocked. Also, I would have had to switch from T-Mobile to Verizon and probably pay 200 bucks a month for crappy wifi and a mobile hotspot Jetpack as the place was off by itself and not connected to any established grid or whatever they call it.

So then I started looking down here in the city, which has tons of wonderful, charming, funky, diverse, historic neighborhoods. I found one place, a large adobe studio that an artist had tricked out with cool inlaid-mosaic iron gates, et cetera. and had 10-foot ceilings, a shaded patio and a yard. This turned out to be directly across the street from a large elementary school. Everything else I’ve liked has been directly across the street from an industrial park, a bank of office buildings, a skate park, or an abandoned lot with a Municipal Variance sign on the fence, meaning someone’s about to begin a two- or three-year construction project.

Also, turns out the entire world is migrating here and other similar smallish cities in the wake of COVID, so there’s not much available in the way of rentals and as a bonus everyone hates and despises Californians (not that that’s anything new).

I must say I feel fairly peaceful in the midst of it all. I’m in a beautiful little casita till the end of the month, the front yard filled with mallows of various colors, native flowers, cacti, and aloes. I’ve decided it’s enough of a spiritual-physical-psychic stretch to be living out of a suitcase once again (I’ve done this so many times in my life, it feels strangely familiar and even cozy), to be mentally sorting my stuff (most of which, back in LA, is packed), to be contemplating a move to a new city after thirty years, to be dealing with the logistics of renting a UHaul, movers, saying farewell to my apartment of the last six years, not to mention my garden (leaving a garden is worthy of its own post, if not more than one).

So I’ve decided to pare down, get my stuff here and put it in storage (distasteful as that may be), rent another airbnb for May, let my mind and heart settle, and start looking for a more permanent space in earnest then.

Take it slow, in other words.

Because in the meantime, I still have my weekly column, my monthly Magnficat column, many other work/spiritual/recovery obligations, and dental work to tend to. Where to have the mail forwarded to!? Must rent PO box today. Plus it’s about to be about 150 degrees in Tucson every day for four months.

Right now, though, the temperature is splendid: my favorite, 80s to low 90s. I take a long walk every day, up and down the residential streets. Can walk to the art museums, the PO, and best of all, to the Cathedral of St. Augustine, which has Masses at both at 7 and noon, and is open all day for prayer.

Many many people to hold in prayer these days, as always. Dying fathers, troubled teens, people with dire diagneses, people who are depressed, enraged, bewildered, bereft, alone.

So it’s a rich, rich time for me. Maybe I will find that house with room for a real piano, and maybe I’ll find a studio where I can at least set up my keyboard and have a few plants on the patio. I think I had some idea of moving to Tucson and here, at last, I would get the dream space for which I have longed all my life. But as with romantic love, which has also somehow eluded me in this vale of tears…I’ve kind of lived my life in places that have always been in one way great and in another have always been wrong in some major way, uncomfortable to the point of being penitential.

But does any of it really matter? In the midst of suffering and exile, the contemplative heart is formed, nurtures, and grows. I have never had the knack for making myself comfortable: I will live in a place for years without ever getting a really good reading lamp, will walk every single day for decades without ever quite getting the right shoes, will bemoan that my hair is too short but every time it starts to get long, decide I look like a scarecrow and hack it off with a pair of kitchen scissors without even looking in a mirror.

What I never forget is to have really good tcotchkes, a few plants to love, friends to shore me up, to inspire me, challenge me, make me laugh, share the journey. (And from whose emails to quote, you know who you are and thank you!)

Four such friends, in particular, have volunteered, if you can believe such goodness and generosity exist, to help me make the move. Not just help, but really pretty much do it, as in load and drive the truck…More on the hideous vulnerability/fear of receiving later…

And what I have never ever forgotten, truly neglected, or “gotten wrong”–because you CAN’T get him wrong if your basic motive is love–is Christ.

PASOLINI AND ME PODCAST!

More podcast fun.

This one is from Catholic Culture, with Thomas Mirus and James T. Majewski, good Catholic boys from NYC.

Here’s the YouTube blurb:

“In 1962, inspired by Pope St. John XXIII’s outreach to non-Christian artists, a gay communist picked up the Gospels and ended up making a film about Jesus. Nervous yet? But one thing with which you can’t charge Pier Paolo Pasolini is taking liberties with his source material – the dialogue in The Gospel According to Matthew is drawn entirely from that book of the Bible.

The Vatican’s newspaper once called this the best film ever made about Jesus. It certainly is one of the most unique adaptations, in the austerity of its approach (almost willful in its refusal to elaborate on Scripture), in its counterintuitive casting, in its portrayal of Our Lord’s fierce urgency in delivering His message. There are many interesting moments to discuss, but the core question for Thomas and James is: Does the minimalism of the Gospel account translate well to the screen without embellishment, or does what leaves room for imagination on the page become barren in a visual medium?

Memoirist and columnist Heather King (you may have read her work in Magnificat or Angelus) joins the show to discuss this, one of her favorite films.

GIVE IT A LOOK/LISTEN!

THE RELEVANCE OF THE STARS

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete (1941-2014), was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, majored in physics and aerospace science at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and was engaged to be married when “the call” came.

He was ordained in 1973 at the age of 32, became an assistant to the archbishop of Washington, and over time became close friends with both Pope John Paul II Pope Benedict XVI.

Notoriously rumpled, perpetually late, a negligent returner of phone calls and emails, Monsignor chain-smoked, loved food, drink, and good conversation, and had a wicked sense of humor.

Author Michael Sean Winters tells the story of how Albacete, Albacete’s beloved brother Manuel, and a third guest once came to a Washington DC restaurant at which Winters was a server during the Triduum. “When all three of them ordered lamb chops, I interjected. ‘You can’t have lamb chops – it’s Good Friday.’ Without missing a beat, Lorenzo said, ‘Oh, Mike, [he was the only person who ever called me ‘Mike’], we had an ancestor who died fighting in the Crusades and have a dispensation in perpetuity.’ ” 

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.