Pages 6 & 7: Aside from the Courtroom dramas at home, I can’t decide whether the Fifth Grade obsession with rape or the First Grade daily tutorial on the Passion of Christ was more traumatic. The Crucifixion detail that had Sister Venarda most transfixed was her apparent remote viewing of the Past where the Roman soldiers waited until the blood from the Scourging at the Pillar had scabbed over before they RIPPED the cloak from Jesus’s back, ensuring that it hurt even more as the scabs were torn off. Pacing the floor at the front of the classroom, Sister Venarda, another Improv devotee, acted out the scene, not shutting up until all we six year olds were in tears. There was usually one hold-out; a boy whose name I’ve forgotten just as I’ve forgotten why we knew we couldn’t get a break from the narrative until we were all crying. Amazingly none of us said a word to our parents. We didn’t even mention that the Fourth Grade Teacher/Mystic, Sister Saint Margaret, was constantly complaining to us ten year olds that the psychiatrists were torturing her. This intervention had occurred after the Principal, Mother Ferdinand, discovered Sister leading the goodie goodies among us to the chapel to pray, instead of to the movie being shown in the gym. Though what was being shown was either along the lines of a duck and cover instruction about the atom bomb, Jennifer Jones as Saint Bernadette , or The Bells of Saint Mary’s, since we hardly ever got to see one, movies were a really big deal. But she’d persuaded us before every one of them that making this “sacrifice” for the souls in Purgatory would liberate them a lot faster. And as if to compensate , though unknowingly, that was the year Dad bought a16mm. camera and projector. We’d go downtown to the one very small camera store and pick out something from an extremely limited collection , the only rental reel I remember featuring a Snake, a lion and an African baby sitting on the sand with the mother frantically rushing in to save it before the inevitable. The movie camera however proved to be a boon in the law business. Jeannie, Marybeth and I were enlisted in the new technology at the sites of several car crashes, our three pairs of skinny legs, white socks and maryjanes, lined up against the curbs to show how abnormally and possibly illegally tall they were. When not engaged in proving malfeasance, the camera was used for home movies, Dad usually issuing the command to “Move, Move, this is a movie camera!” After observing him for a year or so, I volunteered to splice and edit , not only to watch images appear on the screen and to feel really important as I slammed down on the blade, sliced through the frames, and scraped off the outer layer but because I liked the smell of the chemicals and glue I think I was fired as the projectionist after I let several feet of celluloid pile up and tangle on the floor, having neglected to fasten on a take-up reel. Or it may have been because I edited out hundreds of what seemed to me pointless and endless images of the side of a road from the moving car. Not so different from 24 hours of the Empire State Building although I hadn’t seen a single Warhol film when I volunteered to “act” in one. copyright Viva, 2017