Idiosycratic Life

Arg. Just wrote a somewhat longish entry and then deleted it before I posted it. Boo! I was telling you all a really cute story about Stephen's friend Jenn from school who performed in the show Stephen and I went to see on Friday night and now it's gone forever, and I can't be bothered to repeat it. Sucks, sucks, sucks.

I photographed a woman being ordained as a Lutheran bishop tonight. No little old ladies harangued me for photographing in the church, which is good. I definitely worked through some of my "shooting in church" phobia, which is also very good. I photographed the bishop about two weeks ago, when we did a special profile on her. (She's the first female bishop in PA, and only the fifth in the country) Tonight's assignment was like a follow-up thing. She was so nice to work with two weeks ago that I was really happy for her tonight, which made sitting through the two-hour service and waiting thirty-five minutes to get close enough to her to take a close-up celebratory hug shot seem a lot less tiresome.

The Lutheran ceremony was exactly like a Catholic service, (I mean, EXACTLY, the music, prayers, responsorials, everything) with the exception of the presence of female clergy. It was really interesting. I kept thinking about this button HEF has on her backpack that says, "Ordain women or stop baptizing them." If the Catholic church did start ordaining women, would they be called "priests" or "priestesses," do you think? Oh well. It won't happen during this particular papacy.

Now I have this song by Meryn Cadell going through my head. The chorus of the song has a repeating line that goes, "The pope, pope, pope." (I would really have to sing this for you to get the full effect, but it's a very funny, albeit irreverant song.)

The pope, pope, pope.

Remind me sometime to tell you the story about seeing the Pope in Vienna where I started hallucinating and nearly passed out from heat exhaustion. At one point, I thought I saw angels descending from the Hapsburg Palace. It made me happy because I figured that if I died, I would stop being thirsty. Then this really nice Austrian family gave me some Pepsi and the hallucinations stopped shortly thereafter.

The pope, pope, pope.