What Happened to Catholic Nuns?

The Local Lens

Published Wed, Jan 30, 2013


As a suburban Catholic grade school student, I’d sometimes visit the parish church during recess time and stand, my arms extended sideways, before the high altar. In those few short minutes I did my best to look like a statue: Rosary draped from my right hand, perfect posture, unblinking eyes. To the right and left of me were the real statues, behind me the high gold tabernacle. Once or twice while lost like this I’d see the crouching figure of a full-robed nun in the distant organ loft. For an instant, I’d try to make out who she was, since I knew all the sisters at Drexel Hill’s Saint Bernadette’s parochial school, but the nun in the loft never revealed herself.


I imagined that the figure was the young nun with the beautiful eyebrows who I used to follow in the hallways and often go looking for during the longer recess at noon. One day, hot on her trail, I got my wish: she spotted me roaming the halls when I should have been in the schoolyard. With a triple click of her clicker, she announced, "Stay right there, young man!"


A little bit of heaven followed as I was able to observe her walking towards me, robe and veil flowing, a walking apparition. Expecting a scolding, I was dismayed when I saw the beginnings of a smile. When she suggested I should be out playing with the other children, I knew she recognized my affection for her.


Call it a little boy fixation, but the truth is, I grew up liking nuns. There was something in me that always wanted to please them, even the tough nuns with a penchant for twisting ear lobes (I had mine twisted on more than one occasion).


Transferred to another parish in the third grade, I repeated my high altar statue act in a heavily ornate Gothic church. The nuns at this parish were Saint Joseph nuns in high-top box veils and flowing habits. The St. Joe’s habit was so elaborate it resembled architecture; this seemed to go with the fact that you could always count on a Saint Joe’s nun being strict. When they weren’t talking about morality or the sinfulness of reading teen magazines and exposed female cleavage, they were telling students to "wipe that smirk off your face."


Can you imagine how far old-style St. Joe’s nuns would get in Philadelphia public schools today? In the old days, teachers could do anything to students, and parents mostly always deferred to teachers and nuns when it came to their kids. If you came home and complained about a nun-teacher, the first question parents asked was: "What did you do to deserve it?" Today the reaction would be quite the opposite, much like, "What did those teachers do to my sweet little Johnny?"


In those days I’d sometimes stay after school and help the St. Joe’s nuns carry their weighty book bags back to the convent after school. Being invited inside the convent was always a treat. It was there that I got to see the nuns pin back their veils and put on aprons while they cooked the evening meal. A nun’s secret life was endlessly fascinating—that is, until they got rid of their habits.


The new St. Joe’s nuns with their tiny cross lapel pins, stretch pants suits, and "hairdresser" hair just don’t have the same magic. I make no apologies: I want nuns to be nuns, not real estate CEO’s or women executives with dolled-up hair. About a year ago I had the privilege of talking to a modern St. Joe’s nun when I went to a friend’s Vesper memorial service at Rosemont College (the friend was Karen Lenz, a truly great woman who operated one of Philly’s two Catholic Worker houses).


At the reception I sat beside a neatly coiffed woman whom I assumed was a college administrator or bank executive. She wore an emerald brooch, amber earrings, and a silk scarf, as well as a perfume I’ve often smelled while walking through the women’s department in Macy’s. While slicing into a lamb chop, I asked the woman, "What do you do for a living?" When she told me that she was a St. Joe’s nun I thought of the old nuns in my parochial school with their towering headgear and veils. What a difference forty years makes.


"You’re really a nun?" I said. I looked in vain for a microscopic cross lapel pin that might indicate Sisterhood, but instead found the brooch that indicated Boscov’s.


Not long ago, when one walked the streets of Center City, the only women wearing flowing religious garb were Catholic nuns or maybe a few Anglican or Lutheran nuns. For years, I’d pass an Anglican nun in full traditional habit sitting in the concourse at Suburban Station asking for donations (this nun looked very much like Mother Katherine Drexel). While many Catholic women’s religious orders ditched the habit after Vatican II, many orders did not. It’s also true that some religious orders have returned to the traditional habit. It may seem odd, but surveys indicate that "secular dress" orders like the St. Joe’s nuns are experiencing a decline in membership, whereas convents where the traditional habit is worn are experiencing huge membership booms. The fact is, I’ve always believed that visual symbols are powerful because they relay a message.


Walk through Center City today and you’ll find that the only women wearing black flowing garb are Muslim women wearing burqas. These women do so proudly, unselfconsciously, unashamedly. Of course, if one wants to see traditionally garbed Catholic nuns one can always visit the Convent of the Pink Sisters at 17th and Spring Garden Streets, although you will never find these nuns on the street.

At my parish church, St. Michael Archangel Orthodox church in Northern Liberties, I had my first interaction with an Orthodox nun from the famous St. Martyr Princess Elisabeth Monastery founded in 1999 in the Minsk region of Russia. This particular sister was touring the States to give a lecture on the work of her convent and school, a boarding home for children and adults with special needs, and a homecare facility for mentally challenged children. The sister in question wore a full, traditional habit, standard operating procedure for nuns in the Eastern Church.


The same might be said of the Dali Lama, who travels the world dressed as a Buddhist monk, and who has never gone to Brooks Brothers, Macy’s, or Boscov’s in order to be outfitted in secular clothing or jewelry of any kind so that he can "fit in" and disappear.

 Russian Orthodox nuns, all Orthodox nuns, still retain the religious habit. 

ICON MAGAZINE City Beat Column, February 2013

May potato salad fall on your head if you were one of those who believed the Maya calendar “prophecy” about the world ending on December 21st.

We’re thinking of the gathering that took place at Stonehenge—that collection of 5,000 year old time clock rocks on Easter Island---on December 21st by assorted New Agers who believed that the end was near.

Some wore colorful Peruvian hats, while others dressed as white WICCA witches in capes and leotards. The leotard people danced like Shiva goddesses as the sun came up, a celebration tied to the end of the 13th Baktun Mayan cycle. Various men in the crowd donned Viking or Plains Indian costumes. Others wore nothing special but you could see them looking skyward in a worshipful way as the sun rose. Generally, there was a wide mix of reactions in the Stonehenge crowd to the world not ending. Many hugged one another as others looked tearfully into the sun.

One man bowed his head and then reverently placed the palms of his hands together in imitation of the Dali Lama. We had to wonder if he even knew to what or to whom he was praying. No doubt he was channeling the general mishmash: the sun, the good vibes, the big crowd around him, or even Stonehenge itself (all those cool rocks, etc.).


Speaking of rocks, we always get emails from the Union League of Philadelphia that Newt Gingrich is coming to town. Last year’s announcement concerned the former Speaker being awarded the organization’s prestigious Lincoln Award. Gingrich has always fascinated us. Liberal on some issues (like gay marriage), he can stun with sudden reversals into right wing territory. While we thought it odd that our request to cover last year’s award ceremony was turned down (Gingrich didn’t want any press present, we were told) we had high hopes in late 2012 when we got another email announcing another Gingrich visit. Once again, we were told: “Gingrich doesn’t want any press present.” While we’re not quite ready to throw in the towel, we do have to wonder why the venerable League keeps sending us (the press) emails when Gingrich doesn’t want the press present. This is pretty strange stuff and makes about as much sense as those Stonehenge people pretending to be the Dali Lama.


The 1970s great crossover film, Emmanuelle, took the world by storm. It featured Dutch beauty Sylvia Kristel. Emmanuelle followed the misadventures of a married couple in Thailand, and was a popular hit in Philadelphia’s old Center Theater at 16th and Market Streets. While the film at the Center brought in sailors, businessmen, and even family physicians from the Main Line, it did not have the crude following (or flavoring) of films in old Philly theaters like The Apollo and The Studio, both hardcore XXX Mafia-run cesspools where nothing was left to the imagination, and where patrons were sometimes beaten by management. Although the Center was demolished years ago to make way for Willard Rouse’s One Liberty Place, we’re sure there’s still “Kristel vibrations” in the ground there despite her death from cancer last year at age 60. For most Americans, Kristel was a soft porn queen but in the Netherlands she was the international star of more than 60 films. That’s why we were pleased when we saw Kristel in the Museum of Art’s Live Cinema screening of the films of Manon de Boer featured in the exhibition Live Cinema/Manon de Boer: Resonating Surfaces—A Trilogy, in which Sylvia appears in a 39 minute full face monologue-memoir talking about her life in Paris, Los Angeles, and New York. The Live Cinema Trilogy runs through February 10th.



Now that LGBT has gone mainstream, where do old lgbt activist go to die? We’d like to be able to say anywhere, from Roxborough’s Cathedral Village, Center City’s Watermark, to Ann’s Choice in the Northeast, all posh locations for people with money. The John C. Anderson low income apartments for seniors currently being built at 13th and Spruce Streets will be more than lgbt friendly. Life there will certainly not echo the homophobic refrain we heard in the 1970s when we tried to rent a room at the nearby Parker Hotel and a desk clerk screamed, “Two men, two beds!” While low income housing for senior citizens doesn’t inspire visions of life on the QT (don’t look for a photo spread of The Anderson in Philly Style) it will inspire a sense of security for residents, even if “old people” are stereotyped as being beyond sexual desire. When we last visited Cathedral Village (everybody has an old auntie) we noticed a randy crooner pacing the dining room ISO an opposite sex date. The staff, immune to the fellow’s carousing, got us wondering if they’d exhibit the same nonchalance with an lgbt resident. We’d certainly like to think so. Still, it’s good to see a building named in honor of John Anderson—a gay City Councilman during a time when there was no future for out politicians in Philly. Anderson, who died of complications from AIDS in 1983, was not out, so he could never tell then Mayor Frank Rizzo to cool it when the latter had the PPD round up gay men near the construction site. We call this ironic, because if anyone had told the arresting officers then that in the future there’d be a gay and lesbian senior home on this very spot, they probably would have had two handcuffs slapped on them instead of one.



The death of disco was one the saddest things ever to befall modern culture, if only because dancing in public since then has never been the same. (Ellen DeGeneres rap style dances to Kanye West tunes make us think of cartoons). The opening of the Ten Six Club (1709 Walnut Street), site of the old The Walnut Room, which closed its doors this New Year’s Eve, promises to bring back the instant dance party with what new owners Beckham and Daspasquale call 1960s British mod meets 80s and 90s dance club music complete with beaded drapery topped with a pink, gold and black color décor. Serendipitously timed with the release of David Bowie’s new album, The Next Day, The Ten Six Club proves that everything old is new again, even, perhaps, the return of ten inch platform shoes.



This brings us to the terrible melee at 2nd and Chestnut Streets in the wee hours of January 13th when a crowd of beer-fueled yahoos began kicking and punching a white car and a man lying in the street. Old City used to be a nice place, but today (at least on the weekends) it can turn into a magnet for crime, violence, and unsolved murders. We weren’t looking to get mugged or beaten, however, when we took Septa from Society Hill Towers to Alexey Kats’ Architect Salon & Gallery, former home of AxD Gallery, to see John Baccile’s new photography show. Baccile, only 24, works part time at UPS and does his artwork on the side. We noted him last year when he had his first solo exhibit, “Signs and Wonders,” at Café Twelve. At the Architect Salon we enjoyed watching Baccile walk around photographing the crowd as his mother, Barbara, told us: “John works very hard. In many ways, he is unique, and it is great to know that at age 24, he doesn’t have a single tattoo.” We like it when people, especially artists, go their own way.



What’s a Sunday in the city without joint art openings at the Sketch and Plastic Clubs? The big show was the Sketch Club’s Annual Domenic DiStefano Memorial Works on Paper Exhibition where Philly watercolor artist Noel Miles, former Art Director for the Philadelphia Daily News and Action News, won the 2013 John Geizel Watercolor Award. (Watch for an exhibition of Miles’ watercolors at Drexel University in 2014). We helped Miles celebrate his day with fluff omlette specials at Center City’s unpretentious Midtown restaurant, a place we love because the waitresses there call you ‘hon,” and because it is one of the favorite eateries of Philly actor Frank X.


Taking the down elevator into the murky world of city politics can be like doing the Tango with Dante, but here’s what we came up with: former City Law Department attorney Mark Zecca is running for the Office of City Controller in the May 13, 2013 Democratic Primary. With the scores of audit questions concerning City Controller Alan Butkovitz’s handling of the city’s finances, a Zecca candidacy feels good. We worked with Zecca years ago when Las Vegas Casino magnet Steve Wynn tried to buy the Maxfield Parrish Dream Garden mural in the Curtis Building in order to ship it to one of his Vegas casinos. Zecca impressed us then with his approachability. Unlike certain former PA governor’s, with Zecca there seems to be a real “there” there.



Other news: Head over to the Lantern Theater (10th and Ludlow Streets) if you want to see mother/daughter angst at its height. In The Beauty Queen of Leenane, a play by Martin McDonagh, Mary Martello, winner of five Barrymore Awards, plays Meg Folan, the seventy-year old mother of spinster-to-be, Maureen Folan, played by Abington Friends School teacher, Megan Bellwoar. In this story of a mother and daughter living together in the green fields of Ireland, there’s more twisted synergy than
broken Irish brogue.









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Young Toilet Trained Cat from the Provinces

The Local Lens


Published• Wed, Jan 16, 2013

By Thom Nickels



I’d like to give a New Year’s toast to my pet, Ziggy the Cat!


The toast in this case comes with good reason, because over the course of three months, Ziggy successfully completed a home potty training course. The course doesn’t come with a certificate or a blue ribbon, but it does come with a kitty-litter-free life. After years of buying and fussing with kitty litter—all that scooping and worrying about kitty litter smells when guests come knocking—I can finally ditch litter forever and watch Ziggy use the toilet like a human being. While things may not be perfect (Ziggy cannot flush), I can’t say that I miss carting huge bags of kitty litter into my house on shopping days.


When Ziggy feels a bathroom urge coming on, he meows, then jumps up on the toilet seat rim, positions himself like an ace sharp shooter, and wham!—no mess, no toilet paper, no clumping, no smells, just a clean bulls-eye after which he jumps off the rim and runs downstairs.


When I tell friends about Ziggy’s transformation they can’t believe it. Actually, they can’t quite conceive of it until they see it in person or watch the YouTube video a friend of mine made when Ziggy graduated from litter to the potty. That friend, incidentally, is the same guy who trained Ziggy to use the toilet.


I had a friend do it because he was willing to take the time. The enterprise took three months and a lot of patience. The first step was to order a special potty training toilet seat (price, $50) that comes in three parts. Stage One is basically kitty litter arranged inside a toilet bowl rim placed directly on the floor. This gets the cat used to the bowl shape and familiarizes the animal with navigating the rim. After two weeks of this, you can go to Stage Two, meaning that you take out the full litter base and replace it with another insert that allows for a small hole in the center with smaller amounts of litter along the circumference on a kind of rim or "shelf". This gets the cat used to the idea of pooping through a hole. This hole grows larger with progressive inserts (as the litter rim diminishes) until the hole is almost the size of a regular toilet bowl. Finally, the cat is able to use the toilet, and you can put the training inserts away, or save them for your next cat.


I should note that the hole at Stage One is very small, so most cats may ignore it for a while, choosing to "go" on the wide rim of litter. This seat-rim-litter contraption is placed on top of the regular toilet seat, and snaps on like a lid. For me this was the most important step because it means that the cat has to jump up on the toilet in order to go to the bathroom. This can be a slightly challenging stage for the pet owner because the training potty has to be unsnapped every time a human being goes to the bathroom.


This is what they mean when they say, "Nothing comes easy."


Ziggy was able to master each stage, so it was really fun to watch him navigate the last insert with the largest hole and a tiny circular track of litter as small as HO train tracks. The litter at this stage is purely symbolic and not even enough to paw or scoop out. My "cat whisperer" friend was very nervous about the final stage because this involved no litter at all. It was just the full human toilet seat. It was amazing to see Ziggy’s first full human poop, perched on the toilet rim in the comfortable style of a cat digging around in litter.


If you decide to do this, there are important things to keep in mind. You must remember to keep the toilet seat up, because when it’s down your cat will not be able to go. It’s also important to never close the bathroom door, something that I have trouble adjusting to (I think this comes from growing up with three sisters). Today, when Ziggy runs upstairs and races across my study and heads for the bathroom, sometimes I hear a loud complaint, a meow that says: "Open the bathroom door, now!"


Ziggy, by the way, likes a clean toilet. He’s not one of those creatures who likes to pile his stuff on top of somebody else’s, so flushing is important. Of course, changing centuries of natural instinct (digging into litter) can create odd behaviorisms. When you potty train your cat, you are almost going against Mother Nature. Ziggy will sometimes perch on the toilet rim and chant a series of meows, something I take to be the verbal replacement of digging in kitty litter. There’s nothing really wrong with him, because when I go in to see if he is okay, he’s just fine, but he needs a toilet ritual. We all need rituals.


When the first YouTube video of Ziggy using the toilet was placed online, people didn’t believe that it was my cat. They thought that I had found a video of a generic cat and just posted it because I found it fascinating. "That was your cat?" they said. "What?"


If you’re going to toilet train your cat, be prepared to be patient and never rush things. Let the cat proceed at his or her own pace, and of course always praise your cat when it successfully completes each stage. Lots of praise is always good. "Whisperer" Joe was really good at giving praise.


The rewards of having a fully toilet trained cat are tremendous. Kitty litter can stink and the smell can coat your house the way incense floods a church, only it’s not as nice as incense. Kitty litter aroma can be so powerful that people entering your house will know that you have cats. Ever hear anyone sniff the air and say, "Oh, em, I see you have a…cat"?


I have a bag of kitty litter in the basement for emergency purposes, but I don’t intend to use it anytime soon. Ziggy Stardust, you see, is just like a person. Here he comes now, running upstairs to the bathroom.


I tell you, this potty thing brings a whole new dimension to cat ownership.


Check out the Ziggy toilet video here: Good Ziggy at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gL6A4rkXs8.

January CITY BEAT column, ICON Magazine

January 2013 City Beat Column, ICON Magazine




They come into the neighborhood in the wee hours of the morning, well before the scheduled Streets Department trash pickup. If you happen to be inside your house and hear them outside sorting through your trash, you might think they are homeless people with shopping carts looking for scrap metal. But take a closer look and you’ll see a uniformed city employee in rubber gloves going through the mess.

Watch as they inspect old bags of pampers, bundles of stored doggie do, Kentucky Friend chicken bones, or last week’s discarded orange rinds. They are not looking for illicit drugs but for that one renegade plastic soda bottle you may have forgotten to place in your recycle bin.



When that happens--- regardless of the fact that a passerby may have thrown a plastic bottle into your trash---you are issued a $50 ticket for the infraction.

The City of Philadelphia employs about 47 trash picking officers whose job it is to inspect your trash on trash day for misplaced recyclable items. Ideally, these trash picking inspectors are supposed to grant some leeway when they inspect trash. The unofficial but rarely followed rule, as we understand it, is that residents are permitted a couple of misplaced recyclable items but when that number exceeds four or five, the inspector writes a ticket. But shouldn’t the trash police be looking for blatant violations, such as large bags of recyclable items posing as trash? Why this Orwellian overkill just to make a fast buck?

Is it really about saving the environment?

What about allowing the trash police to ticket people who litter?

Recently we spotted a young professional city woman ball up a large wrapper she’d been carrying and throw it down a sewer. The woman bent over and stuffed the enormous bag into the sewer in full view of passers-by, as if what she was doing was the most natural thing in the world. What was even more curious was that she was a well dressed and acted as if she’d been doing this sort of thing all her life.

“Who does she think cleans up the sewers?” we wondered. “Did it ever occur to her that if every Philadelphian did that the sewers of Philadelphia would backup and we’d have an urban version of Albert Camus’ The Plague?

After all, if Philadelphia wants to be known as the City of tickets, let’s at least do it right.


Killadelphia is a word that makes most Philadelphians flinch, however there’s no getting around the fact that years ago there were less city murders even if they were no less gruesome. In December 1959, a sixteen year old Manayunk schoolgirl by the name of Mary Ann Mitchell went with friends to the Roxy Theater in Roxborough to see the movie, “South Pacific.” Afterwards Mary Ann caught the “A” bus on Henry Avenue in order to return to her parents’ home on DuPont Street in Manayunk. The young schoolgirl was never seen alive again because the next day her badly bludgeoned body was discovered in a wooded area in Montgomery County. Mary Ann had been sexually assaulted and her body desecrated after death with a Coke bottle and a tree branch. A small time criminal, thirty-nine year old handyman Elmo Smith, was accused of the crime and sentenced to die by electrocution in 1962. Following the murder, the name Elmo Smith took on a Freddie Krueger like ring. For years bad jokes about there being an Elmo Smith behind every bush and alleyway made the rounds in Philly schools. Donna Persico, a Manayunk native, believes that Smith was charged with a crime he did not commit. In Murdered Innocence: The Maryann Mitchell Murder Revisited, Perisco explains why she feels that a local city bus driver was guilty of the murder. Among the more disturbing revelations in the book is the author’s admission that while researching Murdered Innocence her request to secure the case file on the murder from the Montgomery Country DA was denied not once, but twice.



There’s nothing like a large roasted pig with an apple in its mouth to get a party going, and to get Vegans to move to the other side of the room. At Voith & Mactavish Architects’ annual holiday party, the classic roasted pig (eyes wide open) was on display, somehow reminding us of the character Piggy in William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, and of course calling attention to the firm’s accomplishments (VMA rates as number 40 in the Top 100 women owned businesses in the Philadelphia region). Led by the statuesque Daniela Holt Voith, AIA and supported by talented lieutenants like John H. Cluver, AIA, a dead ringer for the young Abraham Lincoln sans beard, the firm is especially noted for its innovative designs within the context of tradition. Sadly, Cluver informed us that this year’s party will be the last at the firm’s 1616 Walnut Street address, which means a fond farewell to VMA’s conversation-stopper 24th Floor private outdoor balcony. Next year Voith & Mactavish will be in new digs although the roasted pig (eyes wide open) will still be scaring away Vegans.



We took the number 11 trolley from City Hall and headed to the West Philadelphia historic estate of William Hamilton overlooking Woodlands Cemetery. It was a cool, brisk night with the moon visible between tree tops when we started our solitary walk through this city of tombstones. “Dead people are our friends,” we mused, while strolling past the graves of Thomas Eakins, Anthony J. Drexel-Biddle and Samuel David Gross, M.D. of The Gross Clinic fame, and countless other luminaries. Inside the mansion, Woodlands Executive Director Jessica Baumert worked the crowd of mostly Penn students and West Philadelphians as volunteer Penn bartenders poured fortified Portuguese Madeira, favorite drink of French novelist George Sand and Frederic Chopin as well as the Founding Fathers--George Washington drank a pint a day—while a few teetotalers stuck to cranberry juice. When we looked around in vain for Center City people we were told by Ms. Baumert that The Woodlands is still too much of a secret in Philly but that she hopes to change that. We wondered how this could be, given the mansion’s spectacular setting and history. On hand to raise-high-the-roof beams was the sound of the Dill Pickle Old Time Orchestra (610-436-1000) featuring Charley Handy, Zach Say, Brenden Skire, Nikoli Fox, and Eliza Jones (of the award-winning group, Buried Bed). The band played a mixture of American old time string band music, Tin Pan Alley and 18th Century fiddle tunes, not quite causing the dead outside to awaken, but almost.



Cancer is no joking matter; ditto for chemo and radiation treatments which tend to weaken the body and turn people into the walking dead, a breath away from a Woodlands burial. When we heard that local author Sarto Schickel was going to speak about his book, Cancer Healing Odyssey (Paxdieta Books) at the First Unitarian Church in Center City, we headed over with a few friends to hear what he had to say. Schickel, who is tall with mesmerizing eyes, told us the story of his wife, Sun Hee, diagnosed with ovarian cancer and a collapsed lung but who has been possibly cured through a macrobiotic diet, a touch of chemo, along with a trip to the Gerson Clini in Mexico, where cancers tend to disappear after extensive juice therapy and coffee enemas. If this sounds to you like comic book Sci-Fi, we recommend Schnickel’s book as a sturdy case study. In fact, Schnickel’s presentation was so good we decided it was PBS-worthy and wondered why he wasn’t doing this on television. By the end of Schickel’s presentation, we weren’t even all that spooked by the coffee enema thing, even if we prefer Starbucks to “down there” injections.



We headed to the Radnor Hotel on the Main Line to help celebrate Bernie Robbins’ Jewelry 50th anniversary, but arrived late, just after the winner of the 1st annual Student Design Contest was announced: Raymond Hakimi, from New York’s FIT. Students from fashion schools and colleges were invited to submit three pieces back in September. Then a Facebook vote was held with the finalists going before BR’s executive team and a panel of celebrity judges, one of whom was Ivana Trump. While we didn’t see Ivana, we learned from Cashman and Associates’ Laura Krebs that the owners Harvey and Maddy Rovinsky do know a lot of high end celebrities. Yet Harvey and Maddy weren’t obsessing on star power that night but on Hakimi’s win and the presence of their infant granddaughter, their first, bundled up in a portable mini crib set atop a jewelry case, a juxtaposition proving that life’s real jewels are not the ones under glass. We spoke to winner Hakimi, whose design, a beautiful butterfly in , will be produced and sold in all seven BR stores. Also on hand was Ilaria Lanzoni, one of the celebrity judges, whose Hearts on Fire jewelry design company in Boston (www.heartsonfire.com) has taken that city by storm. “I met Ilaria at the Trevi Fountain in Rome, “ Harvey told me, his eyes lighting up like sapphire diamonds. The Trevi Fountain---can anything be more fortuitous?


Today’s twenty -something’s will never know the eclectic mix that was the 1960s and 1970s, when life, politics and art had a special kind of power. There was Andy Warhol riding his bicycle through the streets of Manhattan; Allen Ginsberg chewing on his harmonica; Yoko Ono in a box and Ed Sanders and the Fugs providing musical accompaniment as thousands shouted, “Hell no, we won’t go.” Posters, illustrations and other ephemera lined to the years around the counterculture can be found in the Collab Gallery in PMA’s Perelman Building. Titled DOUBLE PORTRAIT, famous husband and wife team Paula Scher and Seymour Chwast, fresh in from New York City to receive the annual Collab Design Excellent Award, led us around the gallery where we were hit with more images than we could process. On display: Chwast’s best political work of the 1960s, antiwar posters like End Bad Breath (1968), created to protest the US bombing of Hanoi and War is Good Business: Invest Your Son (1967). Paula, who describes herself as “a designer who illustrates,” met Seymour when she was an art student at Tyler School of Art—the days, she said, when Tyler was located in a really beautiful building. Who knows why Philly journalists didn’t show up for the DOUBLE PORTRAIT preview in droves--- any hints as to what motivates our kind? Chwast’s posters speak to a kind of genius in this age of mouse-controlled digital photo shop “art” which can only hope to ascend the heights of the work of real graphic designers. Then again, Paula would castigate us for this sentiment: “…You can’t be a designer and say, ‘Oh, this is timeless.’ Nothing is timeless,” she’s been quoted as saying. And she’s right.

Affliction, Morality, and Liberation: Edward Truth interview Thom Nickels

.Thom Nickels: Affliction, Morality, and Liberation (from LAMBDA LITERARY)


Posted on 28. Dec, 2012 by Edward Truth in Features, Interviews



“Like it or not, we live in Apocalyptic times. Most people today—if you ask them over coffee or a glass of wine—will agree that something “big” is going to happen to the world soon.”

How many of you are there? The answer used to be easy. Pre-web logic told us we had one identity, one life, and that all our actions had consequences that shaped the here, the now, and the destiny of that one identity. But life in the digital hinterland offers up brand new views of sequence, morality and mortality.

Take identity proliferation and sex. Managing web presence is a balancing act of expression and suppression—our personal and professional hats are on constant rotation. Hyperconnectivity allows us to explore desire like never before, and the ephemeral quality of online interaction lends itself to greater risk-taking and deep-rooted self-examination. We enact the sex to represent a particular identity, while at the same time the sex act constructs an identity for us. But all eyes are watching and sometimes the darker self becomes an aberration, as experienced by Dennis, the main character of SPORE (StarBooks Press), a novel by Thom Nickels [Nickels is also the spirituality editor of the Lambda Literary Review].



Intent on inhabiting all sexual worlds, Dennis unwittingly embarks on a journey through deep psychosis, forsaking his loved ones and leaving him vulnerable to the scourge that waits. The world of SPORE reflects a dystopian reality where violence and disease wage war against humanity. An insidious parasite is set loose, taking the form of a growth that disfigures the host. Those who suppress their latent sexuality are the prey. If you can afford to have it removed you live, but if you can’t you’re destined to lose your humanity forever—the ultimate punishment for skirting the status quo.



Implicit anxiety around sexuality, sacrifice, religion and reciprocity suggests an unresolved territorial dispute between the physical body and what lies within—an analysis perhaps best left for Foucault or Bataille, but one that begs the question: What makes us human and when are we more than human? Just as the spore is capable of giving rise to a new individual, the judgments, superstition and insecurities of the primitive mind invariably shape our destiny.



Thom Nickels is currently working on a book called Legendary Philadelphia and his double feature, Walking on Water & After All This, will be available in paperback early 2013. Recently Nickels and I took a short walk through the magic realism of SPORE, the apocalypse, and the changing identity of religion.



Introduce us to the main character of SPORE.



In my twenties, I used to waste a lot of time cruising the streets of Philly in the pre-dawn hours. One night I [came across] this guy. With such persistence he asked me, “What are you—a missionary for homosexuality?” His question hit a chord. We agreed to meet later for a kind of date, but when the time came he showed up with a Bible so that he could preach to me. As it turned out, he was part of an ex-gay ministry. Dennis, the main character of SPORE, assumes an evangelical manner, only he’s a real missionary for homosexuality. He becomes an “ordained” 700 Club-style street corner preacher and warns of dire consequences if those with repressed gay tendencies don’t learn to embrace same-sex experiences. The consequences of self denial and repression in this case are growths of a broccoli-like tumor, which can appear all over the body—even as protrusions from the buttocks. In a worst case scenario, victims can turn into trees. Dennis discovers his “powers” on the island of Oahu near the (Buddhist) Valley of the Temples. Since prophets are rarely listened to, Dennis’ life becomes a comedy of errors in Philadelphia, where his street mission begins.



What inspired the “magic realism” of SPORE?



The magic realism of SPORE was inspired by my early childhood love of miracle stories, the lives of the saints, mystics, hermits, Carlos Castaneda, the novels of Roland Firbank, and the non-fiction works of Jane Roberts (Seth Speaks). I like to call my novels Epics; it’s a carry-over from high school when I used to entertain classmates with monthly Epics or encyclicals that told stories about my friends and people in school, only in fantastical type situations. In addition, I’m fascinated with books written by religious figures that go on to change the world, where the text or story goes beyond epic into the scriptural. Had Joseph Smith of Mormon fame written a novel instead of a faux New Testament epic [The Book of Mormon] about early American civilizations, that novel would have been forgotten long ago.



Let’s talk spirit. We’re digging deeper than ever into the space between visible objects, grasping at faith and philosophy to answer questions about the life before and the hereafter, as well as the life right here in front of us that we can’t see. What does anything matter if we keep disconnected from the metaphysical?



Like it or not, we live in Apocalyptic times. Most people today—if you ask them over coffee or a glass of wine—will agree that something “big” is going to happen to the world soon. We don’t know what this something is, but it is coming. George Orwell was certainly a prophet; we see much of the reality he predicted coming true today, especially in the United States with the slow erosion of civil liberties. Whether it’s the new passport regulations (a friend of mine was turned away by two TSA agents when he was about to board a plane to Spain because his passport had two water stains on it, just another example of the emerging and all-encompassing National Security State), or the recent passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), where the military can arrest or detain any US citizen it deems a terrorist threat, America is slowing slipping into fascism. This is apocalyptic.



In my novella, After All This (from Two Novellas: Walking on Water & After All This) the post-Apocalyptic world comes alive and survivors have to reconstruct a new civilization. How do they do this? They invent a new religious text, a new Joseph Campbell-style myth, to give body and vision to their struggle.



Regarding metaphysics, on some level I think all of us have a sense at times that we are much more than our bodies. There are different degrees of realization here, of course. For some this interest in “spirituality” manifests itself in safe areas like generic meditation centers (where one meditates for relaxation and to “center”), yoga or other techniques that point to a mind body connection—things that, by the way, orthodox empirical science might question. Many people inhabit this first sphere of spirituality but go no further, because to go further reaches into more narrowly defined spaces where the spirituality becomes defined and thus open to criticism from those who tell us that to narrow definitions this way is to limit intelligence. (Narrowing = a possible descent or ascent into the world of religious dogma, etc.) Whether it’s tarot, rune stones, amitara yoga, a belief in crystals, all of these things suggest that we are more than what we “are” on the outside; that we have a consciousness or soul and are far from human bodies randomly created and thrown into existence for no particular reason. The old existentialist belief that life has no reason or meaning, and that we come and go and then disappear only to make room for new generations of futile sufferers can, in the worst instances, lead to madness (Nietzsche).



Of course, this isn’t to say that “believers” don’t go mad—because they do—but generally being tied into the other reality helps. We may opt to only believe in ourselves or in some noble ideals concerning the perfection of humanity, but in the end strict beliefs like this almost always disappoint.



Most of my fiction has contained something of the metaphysical, although that has not always been the case. My short stories in The Gay Alternative, a national literary magazine published in the 1970s, were each autobiographical. I am currently writing a book about my experiences in Harvard Square during the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector, so I’m leaving the metaphysical behind on this one, although who knows how this story may develop.



What have we done wrong with organized religion? What’s your solution?



Very complex question—it almost depends on which religion you are talking about.



The ‘we’ I take to mean the whole of humanity. The problem is in interpretation. Most religions begin with a prophet or seer who comes with a message. That message gets recorded, translated, passed down. Inferences get lost, passages get added to. What something meant 2,000 years ago very often has a different context today. Islam is a younger religion than Christianity so you could almost say that it is going through what Christianity went through during the Inquisition. Islam then might be said to be in its spiritual adolescence.



Religion stands to lose its influence when it becomes bogged down in too many sub-rules. The Ten Commandments are straightforward and general; ditto for the Sermon on the Mount. Dietary restrictions, laws around circumcision, sexual practices—this is lawful but this is foul—tend to trivialize religion in the mind of intelligent folk, so the tendency is to walk away from the larger truth of it, dismissing that larger truth because of the bylaws. You see this all the time with Catholic-born LGBT people. They wind up throwing everything out—their belief in the divinity of Jesus, the sacraments—because of the negativity surrounding these bylaws. Saying that you left a religion and became an atheist because the religion is homophobic has nothing to do questions like “Does God exist?” That is a deeper question and cannot be answered via the social/cultural “issues” route.



It is healthy to question organized religion. It is good to think, “Am I believing these things just because my parents put them in my head as a child?” It can be a good thing to walk out and believe nothing for a while, gather experience, read, and then re-examine the issue later. I happen to believe in Christianity, and am a member—a convert—to the Orthodox Church, because of certain problems I had with Catholicism, especially the Conciliar Church after Vatican II. I saw the Catholic Church destroying its beautiful liturgy and replacing it with an abbreviated Reader’s Digest version. But that’s another story. The point is, if, as a Christian, I believe that Jesus was who he said he was, then to a certain extent I am going to put that first—ahead of anything secular or political. When I draw my last breath, I am not going to call out to the LGBT community, but to the God who was there before and who will be there after I am gone.



But organized religion loses people and creates bad press when it attempts to change or nullify advances made in the secular realm—what Jesus would call Caesar’s domain. The legalization of same sex marriage in California or New York should not be an issue for any Church or religious organization. Let the secular world do what it wants to do. That should not affect any Church, but unfortunately it does. To a large extent, the religions and Churches that thunder the loudest when it comes to these issues are often acting out frustration at their own emptiness and ineptitude. They’re mad because their pews are empty so they are going “shake” the society they think helped drain those pews, by attacking gay marriage.



We see this with the Catholic Church, especially as the clergy sex abuse crises widened. The attacks by the Vatican on almost anything gay have increased tenfold. This sort of deflection just makes the Church look mean and ideological, much like a political party rather an organization that is supposed to attend to human souls. By the same token, the Catholic Church is under no obligation to adopt the social/cultural advances made in that “other world.” You know, just because feminism has gone mainstream does not mean that the Pope has to allow women’s ordination.



Just as the Church has no business in Caesar’s domain, Caesar’s domain has no business telling the Church what it must do. But these things are overlapping, and it is causing a lot of hate and confusion.



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Related posts:



1.‘Liberation: Diaries, Volume Three: 1970-1983′ by Christopher Isherwood

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3.‘Spore’ by Thom Nickels

4.‘Breakfast With Thom Gunn’ by Randall Mann

5.New LGBT Books in July



About Edward Truth

Edward Truth is a New York City-based journalist and critical theorist. Follow him on Twitter@dadrt.

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Christmas, 2012

The Local Lens


Published• Wed, Dec 19, 2012

By Thom Nickels



Christmas is always a time to think about friends and loved ones who are no longer with us. I’m thinking especially about relatives long gone, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and maybe even siblings. No matter how old we get I think that most of us remember the faces of relatives we knew as children. As I think back to my own deceased relatives my only regret is that I never got to know them well as people because I was either too young or too involved in my own growing pains to get a sense of who they really were.



Most of my Christmases growing up had the flavor of an old Saturday Evening Post cover. There was the traditional lap talk with Santa Claus, the decoration of the house, going out to a tree farm to select a tree and then cutting it down before tying it to the roof of the car and going home for hot chocolate. There was the experience of putting up the Manger on the living room mantle, always my mother’s favorite task because she’d surround it with boughs and ferns that filled the house with the scent of pine and holly. Then, of course, there was the planning of the mammoth Christmas dinner, which usually started in our house at 4 o’clock with cocktails, shrimp cocktail, and various cheeses, followed by a formal dinner: table centerpiece, lots of candles, white tablecloth and matching napkins, the best silverware, and name cards with fancy designs.



Growing up, on Christmas Eve we’d head out to the traditional Midnight Mass when it was a High Solemn affair, filled with chants, processions, Latin and incense. Christmas was a time of ceremony and beauty and the idea was to do everything in a big way.



Before Christmas dinner, there was usually fresh fruit cocktail as an appetizer, a variety of breads, red and white wine, and then a full course spread. Dinner began with grace and invocation by Grandfather Nickels, a retired architect who loved dressing to the nines while puffing on Cuban cigars. He’d speak in a slow and melodious voice so that his words sounded like an official address. He’d usually tell a story after saying grace, like the time he told us how as a boy he used to watch the iceman cart big blocks of ice into the kitchen icebox in his parents’ home in Manayunk.



I always felt a unique tie to Grandfather because his wife—my grandmother—and another aunt were both killed when the car they were riding in stalled on trolley tracks near Lansdowne, Pennsylvania. Tragically, a trolley then hit the car, but the accident spared Grandfather, who was also a passenger. I’ve always felt a connection to this tragedy because they were coming to my parents’ house to celebrate my sixth birthday. Waiting at home for their arrival, I remember answering the incoming call from an aunt, another survivor, and hearing: "Tommy, Tommy, get your mother!"



In those days, people thought nothing of smoking indoors, so by dessert time the dining room would be filled with the aroma of cigar, pipe and cigarette smoke. Sometimes the dining room was so smoky it looked like a great cloud had descended over the table. My aunts had elaborate cigarette cases to match their small jeweled pill boxes. I used to love to watch them take their medication out after dinner, opening and shutting the boxes with a snap and then ingesting the tiny pills quickly, as if they felt a measure of guilt. It seemed to me then that all old people took pills for aliments that were rarely visible. But I never saw my grandfather take a pill. More often than not, he’d just ask for a glass of BB and light up another cigar.



By dinner’s end, the formality that marked the beginning of the meal was gone. It was a time when the family could relax in the living room, as the male French poodle owned by my father’s brother would make his leg-humping rounds. This was usually the funniest time of the evening. Christmas also meant after-dinner chocolates, fancy liqueurs and endless cups of coffee. It was really the happiest of times, when even the kids were allowed to take a wee sip of Christmas wine.



But one Christmas dinner was not so happy.



It was the Christmas my mother told Grandfather to take a hike. Needless to say, we were all shocked, but what could we do? We were children and had no say in the matter.



What upset my mother was the way Grandfather pushed my youngest brother David away from him when David ran and jumped onto his lap. David was developmentally disabled or what they used to call mentally retarded. When he died at age 31 he had the mentality of a three year old, although physically he looked like a normal guy.



David had a habit of rushing towards family members and then collapsing in their laps, a gymnastic style maneuver that tended to mess up neatly pressed clothing. Grandfather, unfortunately, had a habit of keeping my brother at arm’s length, and it took this one incident to cause my mother to lose her Tyrone County Irish temper in one Hiroshima blast that resulted in her telling Pop-Pop to take his things and go back home.



I felt bad because I liked Grandfather’s second wife, a woman we just called Nana, who was gracious to a fault although being Grandfather’s wife, what could she do?



Soon after Christmas, my mother forgave Grandfather and invited him and Nana over for a makeup meal on a Sunday. They ironed out the issue and came to a new understanding. I don’t know whether both sides took a share of the blame, but whatever was said managed to heal the hurt forever.



The lesson I took away from this is that no personal family schism has to be permanent. There is always a chance for forgiveness and a chance to start anew if both parties care enough to sit down and talk things out. In other words, holding on to a grudge and being unwilling to forgive can be a deadly thing.



Christmas the following year went on without a hitch, although I think David managed to spill Nana’s coffee towards the end of dinner. By then we had more of a sense of humor about such mishaps, and just laughed it off.

U.S. AIRWAYS Tuna Can Shuttles

The Local Lens


Published• Wed, Dec 12, 2012

By Thom Nickels



It’s good to be back home in the Riverwards after a quick trip to San Francisco and Palo Alto, California to cover an HIV-AIDS conference for another publication. I say it’s good to be home because, while I love visiting other states and countries, I don’t like what it entails to get there: flying.



Flying is not what it used to be, but then again what is? In the old days (the 1970s and early ‘80s) taking a plane was an exotic thing. Flight attendants then were a premier group with stylish uniforms; airplane seats were wider; there were free meals and booze.



Today these "freebies" have been relegated to international flights, while most domestic airlines in North America have been rated the worst in the world (the best airlines in the world are located in Asia). Airline travel in the United States began to go downhill when President Reagan deregulated the industry. With the present economic collapse, most American airlines, with the notable exception of Jet Blue, have become nothing more than aerial subway systems.



Consider U.S. Airways, called by many "the airline from hell," and rated fifth worst in the world by Zagat’s. This is the airline I used for my non-stop Philly to ‘Frisco trip. U.S. Airways has been criticized for its poor check-in service, cramped seating, bad food, rude flight attendants and its greedy insistence on charging passengers $25 for every piece of luggage checked at the front counter (it’s also practically the only airline that charges for checked luggage on international flights).



Unfortunately, things have gotten worse at U.S. Airways since the economic collapse. For one thing, the numbers of domestic flights, especially cross country, have been reduced so that the flights available are astonishingly overcrowded. These tuna-can shuttles offer nothing in the way of body comfort. If you are flying cross country, you can count on the "glued-in" experience of being joined hip-to-hip with fellow passengers in seats that are arranged so close you can hear the heartbeats of your seatmates. If you are unlucky enough to be placed in the middle seat, resolve not to be comfortable but to offer up the experience, perhaps as a "sacrifice" for the sins of the world or even your own sins. I was in the middle seat traveling both in and out of Philly and was so crammed in I could hardly move.



The U.S. Airways tuna-can shuttle has a major baggage problem, thanks to the airline’s $25 baggage check policy. As a result of the baggage fee, U.S. Airways has created a private hell for passengers and flight attendants in that most travelers, in a fever to save money, attempt to bring on larger and larger carry-on bags (still free, but watch out for a money-grubbing policy change in the future) that can be stored in the overhead bins above the aisles.



What an incredible sight it is to see passengers trying to stuff huge turkey suitcases and backpacks into these small compartments. The elaborate stuffing process often holds up the boarding line while passengers arrange and re-arrange their baggage.



Sometimes other passengers will help to get the puzzle pieces to fit. Of course, in a worst-case scenario, say a crash, one can only imagine the weight of all that baggage coming down on passengers’ heads.



The baggage-stuffing pandemonium was especially evident while waiting for takeoff at Philly International. Overly optimistic passengers with king-sized bags were forced to face reality when flight attendants told them their pieces were too big and had to be taken out and checked. Because the attendants had to send all oversized bags back into the terminal, the line of passengers on my plane looking for their seats didn’t move for a long time. An astonishing number of passengers had miscalculated the size of their suitcases and knapsacks just to save $25.



The situation was so bad an announcement was made that even passengers who had already stored their correct-sized baggage might be asked to remove them and go through the check-in process. Conversely, in the ‘Frisco airport while waiting to go home, a U.S. Airways spokesperson called for volunteers to check their baggage because overhead bin space was limited. "We have a completely full flight," the spokesperson said, "so you may be asked to check your luggage."



Contrary to the Zagat’s rating, I found the U.S. Airways flight attendants to be extremely polite and accommodating. This was especially evident while boarding my flight in Philly when the attendants had to deal with an obnoxious group of twenty-something students, about seven in all, who insisted that because they were friends, they had to sit together. Apparently they had arranged their tickets through a travel agency and were promised by a travel agent that they’d be able to sit together despite the seat designation numbers on their tickets. The commotion this incident caused held up the boarding line for a good 35 minutes as the students bickered with the attendants on their right to sit with friends. "This is my first time flying," one girl bemoaned, her spoiled brat wail causing seasoned travelers, some of them elderly, to look on in disbelief as the still-congested boarding line snaked back out of the airplane.



"You’re going to have to sit in your designated seats," one attendant repeated for the fifth time. By now, many of the passengers were becoming annoyed. Complaints issued forth like steam heat in a restaurant kitchen until finally one of students went to his designated seat, which happened to be in front of me. He looked as unhappy as a boy who found coal in his Christmas stocking, and relieved his frustration by putting in earplugs and disconnecting from reality, and of course not talking—ever—to the two passengers seated beside him during the almost seven-hour flight.



So, yes, while I loved my trip, I was glad to get off U.S. Airways and head to the Market-Frankford El, which happened to just as crowded as the tuna-can air shuttle. But while the El may have been hip-to-hip standing room only (when is the El ever not crowded?), at least there were no whiners clamoring and fighting for seats so they could be with their friends.