North Catholic High School and the Cristo Rey Conversion

I’m sitting with two North Catholic grads in my (Philadelphia) Fishtown kitchen. One’s downing a Pepsi while the other guy is pouring over last week’s Star article entitled, “Alum push on for N. Catholic’s salvation.” Both these guys love North Catholic and they’ve taken to reading the article out loud. I’m sitting with them thinking of my own high school way out in the Chester County boondocks. I don’t have the same kind of loyalty to my old high school that these guys have for North Catholic, so their absorption in the school’s plight fascinates me.
“Woo, what’s this?” the one drinking Pepsi says while folding the Star into the shape of a Chinese menu. “They wanna rename North Cristo Rey. Cristo Rey was founded by the Society of Jesus-- what’s the Society of Jesus?” (Not so long ago, all Catholic school students knew that the Society of Jesus was the Jesuits, but not anymore.) “…And it says here that Cardinal Justin Rigali has given the Alumni Association and business leaders permission to conduct a feasibility study.”
“Wow,” the other guy offers, “they’ll be a work study program where the students will work one day a week in about 40 businesses.”
“Not good,” the Pepsi drinker chimes in, “that means I won’t find a job if they give these jobs to students. That sucks.”
The second guy almost bounces off his chair. “Listen to this—it says the new school would be Catholic, but open to people of all faiths.’”
“Man, I guess that means they’ll be taking the crucifixes off the wall so they won’t be offensive to non Catholic. But North is gonna remain all-male, at least in the beginning, though they’ll look into female enrollment, which really means it’ll go co-ed six months after it reopens. You know, it seems like North isn’t even going to be North anymore. And that’s not right. They should just close the school and keep their dignity. You know, go out with a little bit of dignity…”.
After hearing these guys talk, I looked into the history of Cristo Rey schools, and came across a National Catholic Reporter 2009 article that asked, “What happens when your old Catholic alma mater is no longer the same place it used to be?” The article was about a Catholic high school in the Watts section of south Los Angeles. Controversial Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles approached the Jesuits to take over the school. The Cristo Yet model, according to the NCR, are “schools for the poor where students help meet tuition by taking work/study jobs with major corporations and other sponsors.” But the school’s alumni from the old days are not happy with the Cristo Rey model. Now comfortably middle class, the alumni cannot send their kids to the school because under the Cristo Rey model, only poor and disadvantaged students can apply. With economic guidelines like these, a family would have to remain poor for generations in order to keep sending their kids to the parents’ alma mater.
This is not to say that the Cristo Rey model has not worked elsewhere in the country. Indeed, as brand new schools, rather than a reformulated system built on the foundations of traditional Catholic high schools, the Cristo Rey model might hold some promise for disadvantaged youth. So call them public schools, but why masquerade them as Catholic?
In the past, the spirit of Catholicism has always permeated the Catholic school system, but no longer. Catholic schools-turned-publicly funded charter schools are a case in point.
In the Archdiocese of Washington, where many Catholic schools were converted to publicly funded charter schools, non-Catholics make up more than 71% of the student population. They still mimic as Catholic schools “of a sort,” but why bother? “The charter schools teach value-based education but cannot use religion as its base. The Catholic schools-turned-charter have lost a big piece of themselves,” wrote author Susan Gibbs in US Catholic.
In “Losing Our Religion: The Crises in Catholic Education,” Joan Desmond describes how one charter school in Beeville, Tennessee, had to “take the crucifixes off the walls and put them in our pockets and drawers.”
Now, when a so called Catholic school does that, it’s really time to fold up the tent and call a spade a spade: Call yourself a public school.
As for the two guys in my kitchen, I can tell you that they are not religious fanatics. In fact, they hardly go to Mass outside of Christmas, Easter and funerals, but they know one thing: they want their alma mater, which claims to be Catholic, to remain Catholic.
“Anything less, is not really North,” they said.

Thom Nickels

UPS Madness = Lost Package

A large green car covered in snow slush proceeds down East Thompson Street from the Port Richmond Shopping Center, staying a good hundred feet behind a large UPS truck. The car is careful not to get too close to the truck or to attract any undue attention. To avoid detection (and give the UPS truck a little space) the driver will periodically pull over and park or take a random detour down a side street, wait a while, then back around again to find the truck.
The UPS driver is oblivious that he’s being followed and tracked. He doesn’t even notice that the green car stops at every house where he’s delivered a package. He doesn’t see the occupants, a man and a woman, cleverly working together as a duo—he going out and grabbing the just delivered package and throwing it in the backseat of the old Chevy, while the woman pulls away before neighbors can catch onto what’s happening.
They proceed like this until, at the end of an hour, the man and woman have grabbed virtually every package left by the UPS man.
The specific green car noted above is a fiction, but incidents of people tracking UPS trucks to steal packages is not. On Monday, December 11th, a package sent to me by a family member was stolen from my doorstep while I was at work. To make matters worse, a replacement package sent out 3 days after that was also stolen, or disintegrated into dry ice or eaten by the seagulls that hover near the shopping plaza—this despite the fact that I alerted my neighbors Carol and Jay to stand guard, A KA rifles aimed and ready to fire (a fiction) when the UPS man came knocking. But in the two minute span that it takes most people to use the water closet, somebody swooped down on the second delivered package, perhaps that green car again, or a grubby passer-by with a stolen shopping cart.
At the news of a second stolen package I entertained thoughts of forming a posse of friends and allies to search the alleys and byways of the hood for discarded package wrappings and UPS sigh off sheets. Armed with flashlights and Trappist jam detection devices, we’d hunt down the villains and make them pay.
“I hope the food in that package was bad, and that whoever stole it is choking by the river,” Carol said. Jay, Carol’s sister, had an even worse scenario, reminding me of those grim opening scenes in ‘Law and Order.’ While I’m not going to go Clint Eastwood to retrieve Trappist jam and gourmet cheeses, I do hope that the Christmas snatchers get their comeuppance—is that the right word?
UPS package snatching is happening all over the country. In Merrimack, New Hampshire last week a person or persons targeted a traveling UPSA truck, essentially following the truck while it made deliveries and then snatching the packages once the truck left. Merrimack police reported that hundreds of dollars in random items were stolen during the course of a week. Police eventually found the empty UPS boxes and packing slips in nearby woods, so the case is still hot.
In Brentwood, Tennessee, there’s also been a rash of door-to-door stealing of UPS packages. The culprits in this case did not use a car but walked from door to door, taking as many packages as they could carry.
In Cape Coral, Florida, a former UPS driver and his wife was charged with stealing over $250,000 worth of UPS packages and selling them on eBay.
In an ideal world, UPS would insist that every package be signed for, as well as ask for ID whenever they drop off a package. UPS would also not cram packages halfway inside storm doors so that the ends of packages are sticking out, tempting those on the street or in cars to come and sample the goods.

Thom Nickels

Those Northern Liberties Hipsters

TOO HIP FOR LITURGICAL GOLD

An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about the Eastern Orthodox churches in the Northern Liberties section of the city got me thinking about hipsters and religion, among other things. In that piece, writer David O’Reilly quotes some Northern Liberties residents who say they have no interest in going to (or visiting) any of these unique churches because organized religion isn’t necessary for spirituality anymore. That stuff, the feeling went, belongs to an older time and to an older generation.

Reading O’Reilly’s piece, I couldn’t help but envision 2,000 years of Christianity being made irrelevant by the invention of the Blackberry, Liberty Lands, or Sunday brunch in a chic new neighborhood restaurant.

What the hipsters seemed to be saying in this Inquirer piece is that the new religion of Northern Liberties is the environment, and that “living” that religion amounts to sprucing up Liberties Land, planting new trees, or discovering new doggie day care centers. The hipsters seem to agree that this is not an age for pie in the sky, for priests in gold vestments who wear funny hats and kiss icons, or for following somebody else’s rules. The New Age is all about finding the truth within as long as it does not hurt anybody.

Ah yes, the truth within: My truth is not your truth, but hey, that’s okay. We are all the same, all religions are the same, everything’s on an equal footing, and one truth is as good as another. But is that really true? If all truths are the same, you mean to say that there’s not one truth that stands out as The Truth?

One thing’s certain, and it’s this: the hipsters didn’t invent “doing your own thing” when it comes to spirituality. That was my generation, the baby boomers. When I was 20 I walked out of a Catholic Ash Wednesday service. My exodus was meant as a slap in the face to my mother, who was with me at the time. In my mind I was demonstrating my new found independence. “I believe in the Church of Man,” I told her later in the car, “a higher spirituality. Heaven is here on Earth.”

But if heaven is here on earth, why can’t we fix the economy, leave the doors of our houses open when we go to work, or pick dollar bills off money trees? The concept of heaven on earth is a fantasy that never seems to make the transition to real life. Put all your faith in Man, or humankind, and chances are eventually you will be sorely disappointed.

I did feel sorry for these Orthodox and Eastern Catholic priests who told Inquirer writer David O’Reilly that their Northern Liberties churches are not attracting any of the local residents. These are the same residents, after all, who claim to have an interest in everything arty and esoteric, from casino politics to micro breweries to trolling the streets on First Friday’s for a monthly infusion of art and crafts. They’ll talk about Tibetan monks, take up Hindu or Transcendental meditation, go Vegan, tattoo their body, but still nothing compels them to sample an ancient liturgy that once caused ambassadors from the court of Kiev who visited the Aghia Sophia in Byzantium in 987 to exclaim, “We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth.”
The Orthodox churches must take part of the blame for this. Visitors to these churches can sometimes be made to feel unwelcome. When I visited Saint George’s Greek Orthodox Church in Center City some years ago, an old woman approached me in the vestibule and stated rather emphatically, that “This is NOT a Catholic church!” It didn’t help that she then asked if I was Greek, as if an Irishman had no business soiling the province of Orthodoxy.
For a Church to be vibrant and successful, wouldn’t it be wise to purge itself of too strong an ethnic identity? The keyword here, I think, is universal. If these NL churches want to attract the local population, they should opt to be more than just ethnic enclaves. But they should not, as one hipster commented on Philly.com, make themselves “more relevant” and “attractive” by staging environmental sermons or trying to compete with local activist organizations.
After all, have these hipsters ever heard the quotation from Scripture, “Render unto Caesar….?”
Reading the Inquirer article, it was easy to feel the priests’ resentment of NL residents. I got the feeling that a couple of the priests came very close to suggesting, albeit in a joking manner, that the hipsters should go out and create their own church, a Northern Liberties Church of the Dog, or a Northern Liberties Church of the Environment, or a CasinoNo chapel of the Delaware River Rite. In the Church of the Dog, for instance, hip congregants could show off their dogs, sing dog mantras, and sip Starbucks coffee while periodically playing with their Blackberries. Then they could all head out for a communal brunch. I’m stereotyping, of course, and for that I apologize, but I am hitting on a few general truths. (By the way, I’ve got nothing against dogs, or the concept of relative truth— a hot Johnny Brenda’s band as one’s temporary personal messiah-- I just don’t like stepping in dog poop while making my way in the neighborhoods).
While I don’t pretend to have even half the answers, I do know that should that awful Mayan prophecy come true in 2012, people won’t be running to the Church of the Dog, or to the Church of the Environment for advice and solace, but more likely than not they’ll be knocking on the door of that priest in the funny hat around the corner.

Thom Nickels

My Christmas Tree, 2009

This is the story of my Christmas tree, a tall artificial tree with white lights.
I don’t put the tree up every year. Last year, for instance, I kept it in the basement beside the snow shovels and some old buckets, but this year something happened to make me want to give it a central place in my living room.
The tree was given me by my sister some years just before she moved to Florida with her husband. I won’t go into the ‘politics’ of that move other than to say that no one in the family wanted her to move south. She’s the sister—I have three—closest to me in age, so growing up we were almost always thought of as twins. The reason for this is that in the fifth grade I had a case of double pneumonia and this forced the nuns to hold me back a year.
Before my sister and her husband left Pennsylvania, they visited me on Mercer Street and presented me with the tree. Somehow the idea of a Christmas tree in Florida, with all its wintry connotations, didn’t sit well with them. Who needs artificial evergreens when you have real palm trees growing in your backyard? So, yes, I was happy to take this tall slender alpine specimen with its generous array of white lights and call it my own.
That first year I positioned it in front of my living room window, admiring the way it glowed out onto the street. Others commented that it was a subtle yet striking decoration
My sister has been in Florida for almost 8 years now, and during that time I’ve developed a rather ambiguous relationship with the tree. You see, there’s a part of me that is very 1960s bohemian or what they used to call anti-bourgeois. In my twenties I tried my best to eschew holidays, thinking they were anti intellectual or somehow beneath me. I’d criticize Thanksgiving as a trumped up Hallmark card fest in which turkeys were slaughtered. Traditional Columbus Day, my actual birthday, I’d categorize as Columbus’ unjust conquest (and slaughter) of the Indians. In my agnostic twenties, Christmas was more a winter solstice, a time for family and friends, but nothing more.
Most of these Scrooge-like feelings are history now that I’ve gotten older, though once in a while they “attack” me like an old virus. Perhaps this is the reason that lately I haven’t been taking care of the Christmas tree. Last year, for instance, I let it sit in a corner in my basement near a pipe with a small leak. For the longest time I’d see that water was damaging the tree’s base, but rather than move the tree I’d sweep around it as the base slowly withered away. When I noticed that half its lights had gone out, I resisted walking to the Dollar Store for new ones. The sad truth is, I allowed the Christmas tree to rot until a few weeks ago when the sister who gave it to me called to say that she had stage II cancer of the lymph nodes.
My sister is a “no BS” straightforward type, and announced the news as if she were reading something from the newspaper. She didn’t cry or preface the news with drama. She told me straight out that she would have to undergo chemotherapy and possibly radiation and that she had already gone shopping for a number of wigs in preparation for when she lost her hair. She told me she had great faith in her doctor, whom she quoted as saying, “We are going to lick this thing and put it behind you.” She seemed cheery and upbeat. Of course being her “twin” I heard the suppressed emotion underneath her words. I heard the occasional “crack,” the weak link that once activated would explode in a rush of tears.
After our conversation a stunned feeling came over me. There was, of course, a rush of childhood memories in which she, the vivacious beautiful sister with the blonde hair and magnetic personality, in short the family beauty, was suddenly vulnerable to the scary part of life.
I didn’t know what to do, but then I thought of the Christmas tree I’d neglected for so long, leaning in a “crash” position against the old oil tank.
I brought it up from the basement, cleaned off the dirty base, straightened out the crooked branches and placed ii in its rightful place on a table in front of the living room window. Then I brought up the dusty box of ornaments and placed them beside the tree. While doing these things remnants of that old anti-holiday feeling came over me, as if voicing one last pathetic protest—“Don’t celebrate! Don’t celebrate!”-- but in the end those cries didn’t stand a chance.
My sister, and her Christmas tree, won hands down.

Thom Nickels

Port Richmond: Off Duty Cop's Preferential treatment an outrage

On this bright, crisp Sunday morning in Port Richmond the sidewalks are empty, rolled up like old patio furniture. Here and there neighbors poke their faces out front doors to see what the weather’s like. Traffic on the street is slow; the few drivers who are out have that ‘just getting awake’ looks on their faces. It’s the sort of day you imagine people sleeping in late.

But just when you think the quiet will go on forever, you hear people chanting slogans. The cries have the sound of protest, like people marching in unison for a common cause. They come from a playground near Indiana and Elkhart Streets, where a little boy about 10 years old happens to be walking along a deserted sidewalk playing with his cell phone. The boy looks around as if determining the source of the protest then walks in the direction of the noise, his gait accelerating a bit. It’s obvious he wants to find out what all the commotion is about. He skips down the street like he’s going to a country fair but then he slows considerably once he realizes there’s something serious about the noise he hears.

Eleven years ago, little Billy Panas was probably just like this kid, walking around the neighborhood, thinking of his mom and dad, his brothers and sisters, maybe a bicycle or a broken skateboard, his whole life stretched out before him like the infinite stretch of ocean one sees from the beach at Wildwood. Little boys, of course, cannot fully grasp the concept of death, so while this particular kid may have heard about the shooting of Billy Panas by off-duty Philadelphia police officer Sgt. Frank Tepper, his youth protects him from the horror of a life snuffed out so early in the game.

The boy disappears down a side street, unaware that life can bring on all kinds of experiences, including meeting a bully with a gun. Certainly Billy Panas, who was once 10 year old, didn’t expect to die on the evening of Saturday, November 21st, when he was allegedly shot in the chest by Tepper, a man whom neighbors describe as a bully who often took to waving his gun in the air in various confrontations with neighborhood teens. While there are different versions regarding how young Panas was shot, the fact remains that somebody, in this case Tepper, drew a gun to settle a dispute or an argument.

When Tepper allegedly fired that gun he crossed the line. And this is why the protestors—men and women as well as a mix of teens and children—are carrying signs and wearing red t-shirts asking for justice for the dead 21 year old boy.

The protestors march through the streets as neighbors offer their support. The police civil affairs unit follows the march in squad cars. Where are they marching to? They are headed to Tepper’s house, where Billy’s dad will speak through a megaphone, and where people will sign a petition to have Tepper put behind bars as quickly as possible rather than have him sit behind a plush desk answering police phones to the tune of $58,610 a year while DA Lynne Abraham (washing her hands like Pontius Pilate) hands the case over to a grand jury, a process that may take months, stretching on into spring, summer or fall of 2010.

The marchers hold a rally in front of Tepper’s house, where two uniformed police officers stand guard. The officers look a little tense as the crowd, numbering about 200, busy themselves with signing the petition, or going over to the pretzel, coffee and do-nut table for a little refreshment.
It looks like nobody’s home in Tepper’s house. Violence like this has horrible aftershocks: what must Tepper’s wife and children think, if indeed they are looking out from behind closed shades?
Billy Panas’ dad—he is a big guy with a full head of hair and a dog tag with a picture of his son on it—tells the crowd, “My wife Karen and I want to thank you. Remember one thing—there’s only one bad seed, all the other police are respectable and they’re doing their job. We have only vengeance in our hearts against the murderer of Billy Panas.” People applaud, and the two officers who had looked tense seem to relax. They even begin to smile a little bit but it’s not long before they go back to looking tense. The truth is never an easy potion to swallow. “If Tepper wasn’t a police officer he would be in jail right now. Why isn’t he in jail? This is the whole question,” Mr. Panas says. “What if he murdered somebody else’s child? It was obviously going to happen sooner or later, Tepper’s a loose cannon.”

A cannon so loose, as other news outlets have reported, he once sprayed mace at a group of children; a cannon so loose that he went for his gun when he thought his 8 year old kid was being harassed. A cannon so loose that fellow police officers refused to work with him. A cannon so loose he bypassed police procedure and didn’t call 911 the night he shot Panas.
So why wasn’t this man kicked off the force a long time ago?

“Tepper should not be on the street,” Mr. Panas told me. “We should not be paying for his food right now. That’s the whole thing in a nutshell. Do I think this process is being dragged out? Yes I do. It’s because he’s a cop. That’s all there is to it. Because he wears a badge, he’s protected. It’s not fair!”

And that’s true. The bottom line is that the Philadelphia Police Department is not inclined to think that one of their own can do anything wrong. In some ways the department is reluctant to call a spade a spade. This can make getting justice for Billy Panas a little bit like climbing the Matterhorn.

Mr. Panas, brave man that he is, knows how to hide his pain. It was evident when he started to joke with the crowd. One can only guess what some of his private moments must be like, when he lets his guard down, when memories of his son flood his mind.
Still, as protests go, the rally was remarkable in its civility. Here we have the family, friends and neighbors of a boy killed by a police officer, and yet here was a Philadelphia police car being used as a desk top for the scores of petition signers seeking justice for the shooter, a Philadelphia police officer. This “merging” together brought to light the bad seed concept: there are bad seeds everywhere, in every profession, from pope to president to lifeguard to wine steward to corner cop.

But it’s time to stop the preferential treatment. It’s time for Sgt. Tepper to experience a little discomfort and inconvenience: it’s time for the law to remove him from his plush desk job and give him the treatment they’d give you or me had we been accused of shooting someone in the street.

Ugly as Sin: Catholic Church architecture since Vatican II

While on a tour of some Roman Catholic churches in Vienna recently, I was struck by the haphazard clash of styles: magnificent Romanesque- Gothic high altars, richly appointed with frescoes and images, with an oddly shaped table plunked down in front like something dropped from The Planet of the Apes: the oh-so-simple Vatican II altar table (aka Julia Child’s table). In such historic environments, the table, however expertly made, looks fairly comical. While the elaborate iconography in these splendid old churches makes Julia Child’s table seem less intrusive, that’s not the case in many new Catholic churches built since the close of Vatican II—a Council called by then Pope John XXIII to renew and invigorate the Church.

Vatican II unleashed a virtual windstorm that not only affected how Catholics worship, but the buildings they worshipped in. The root cause, according to Michael Rose, author of ‘Ugly as Sin: Why They Changed Our Churches from Sacred Places to Meeting Spaces—and How We Can Change Them Back Again,” was a duplicitous 1978 draft statement by the U.S. Bishop’s Committee on Liturgy, entitled ‘Environment and Art in Catholic Worship.’ Rose asserts that the document was “cunningly published in the name of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, implying approval from Rome.” The Vatican II document falsely used as the catalyst for such a “reformation,” Sacrosanctum Concilium, did not, however call for the wholesale slaughter of traditional Catholic Church architecture. The U.S. Bishops apparently had another agenda: the reshaping of Catholic churches into (so called) more relevant, people-oriented worship spaces.
This meant plain wooden altar tables rather than marble high altars; carpeted rooms; plain glass stained windows; potted plants in place of traditional Catholic artwork; small and nondescript Stations of the Cross that disappear into the walls; churches in the round that resemble MTV soundstages; the elimination of altar rails and sanctuary lamps. Crucifixes replaced by Baptist-style wooden crosses or geometric plus signs; traditional baptismal transformed into hot tubs. Older churches, including many cathedrals, were renovated: high altars were removed and dismantled; historic frescoes and icons painted over.

In the end, many of the new churches and the “renovated” cathedrals had the look of conference halls or inter denominational chapels. Hundreds, maybe thousands of churches worldwide were destroyed by the architectural iconoclasts.

Many Catholic churches in my Philadelphia neighborhood were altered after Vatican II. Fortunately, the three big churches on Allegheny Avenue—St. Adalbert’s, Nativity B.V.M., and Our Lady Help of Christians-- were not changed significantly. One church in Fishtown was particularly affected: Holy Name of Jesus Parish at 701 E. Gaul Street, officially founded in February 1905 in a three-story building on Frankford Avenue. Ground was broken for the present day church in the fall of 1921.

Holy Name of Jesus had an architectural makeover in 1973, when the then Dominican pastor (Father Edward L. Martin, O.P.) felt that many of the traditional trappings had to go. Like so many other pastors around the country, the good priest was a victim of the “simplifying” frenzy that followed the Council.

“They cut off the principal altar, the high altar. They put in a butcher block in the center of the church and a crucifix hanging from the ceiling. The Dominicans also took the whole altar rail out. The sanctuary was carpeted. This kind of carpeting buckles over time, so it was pretty much a mess in 1998 when a new pastor took over,” Holy Name pastor Father Francis P. Groarke told me by telephone.

The Dominicans, thankfully, did not remove the church’s side altars, and left the old wooden statues in place, a generous move considering the fate of other churches, where side altars wound up in piles on various city trash heaps. Also left untouched were devotional shrines to the Infant of Prague and Saint Jude.

“When the Dominicans left in 1998, they took everything, even the silverware,” Father Groake joked.

“The pastor who took over tried to restore the church to the way it was. He got rid of the butcher block. He had a platform built and he got an altar from a church that closed in Philadelphia in 1999. The high altar is once again visible,” Father Groake said, adding, “This pastor also had the tabernacle redone. The church was painted, and he got rid of that big hanging crucifix. Ceramic tile was added to the sanctuary, so it is pretty much a warm welcoming place now. The pastor was complimented an awful lot for what he did, although the church was not returned to the pre-1972 experience, when there was an altar rail. There’s no altar rail at Holy Name.”

Vatican II did not issue any edicts calling for the removal of church altar rails. What happened is that in many American churches this was done more or less by design consensus when communion-in-hand became a popular from of receiving the sacrament. The altar rail, traditionally, is the western version of the Eastern iconostasis (a screen of icons that frames the altar).

Holy Name was lucky that it did not go the way of Saint Leo’s parish in Tacony, where the high altar was replaced with something that Father Robert Seeney, pastor of the church, called a “wooden stand, not even a table, something that people compared to an ironing board.” The 1960s makeover also ripped out the side altars and nearly all the statues in the church. Parishioners were furious, but what could they do?

Fr. Seeney, who was made pastor of the parish in June 2009, began his own counter revolution: restoring the altars and the statues, and making the church “Catholic” again.

“The church went from being a meeting hall to a cathedral in a couple of months,” he told me.

But Father Seeney says he will never forget the sadness he felt when he was first assigned to the parish. “When you looked at the church on the outside, it’s such an old church, and then went you went inside, it was stripped of all its beauty.”

But not any more, Father.

The Snappy 20-Something Neighborhood Girl Bartender

What’s happened to the classic, neighborhood corner bar? Not so very long ago you could walk into any corner bar and find an older male bartender tending the space with the dignity of an old priest. Usually there’d be a lot of conversation in these bars: Customers talking to other customers or “consulting” with the bartender on any number of issues. The old style ‘priest’ bartender was everything: friend, mentor, father, therapist, but always a good listener. The ‘priest’ bartender was always a dispenser of sound advice. Once more, he never tried to steal the show. By that I mean he had a knack for making himself invisible until you needed him. He did not, unlike his replacement—the snappy twenty-something bartender girl in a ponytail—reduce his customer base to a hypnotic fan club that salivates over his every move.

Ah, yes, the snappy, twenty something female bartender! She’s quick, she’s saucy, she may even perform bottle tricks, but as for advice, counseling or commentary about world events, forget it, she’s too young and inexperienced to delve into these matters. Anyone, even a monkey, can be trained to mix drinks, but only someone with a lot of life experience can be a bartender with excellent people skills.

This is not to put down female bartenders. To the contrary, I think older women bartenders, when they have that motherly thing going for them, can be superb. Older women are not so lost in body self consciousness as their younger sisters, and they are not so set on prancing about being “sexy.” More importantly, they have more of ability to converse or act as barstool therapists. They have enough life experience to relate to customers on many different levels.

When I first moved to the neighborhood in 2002, one of the first things I did was familiarize myself with the local bars. At that time I found a number of bartender “priests” in little corner bars that had not yet been gentrified into beer palaces with wide plasma TV screens. The bars had old pool tables, as well as racks of cheap bar snacks—chips anyone?—lining the walls. Some bars even had complimentary bowls of nuts or popcorn, and the music was low enough so that you could actually have a conversation. Today, most of these same corner bars have gone the way of Delilah’s Den. The old ‘priest’ has been replaced by a snappy girl with a ponytail who would no more have a conversation about world events than she’d read to you pages from her diary. Gone are the small bags of chips; and forget the complimentary bowls of nuts or popcorn. If you want something to eat, you have to order something “important” from the kitchen. Nine times out ten, customers in these new bars are not talking to one another but seem lost in a hypnotic trance that has more to do with greased pole imaginings than anything else.

Sadly, the unassuming little neighborhood bar, once a great place for conversation, has been transformed into a cheesecake palace.

This is a change that’s been happening nationwide, not just in the neighborhood. It’s also a change that’s being noticed by unemployed male bartenders who suddenly cannot find work.
Recently, I stumbled onto an Internet out of work bartender message board and noted some of the comments.

“The female bartender is perhaps the most jaded, cold, walled off and unapproachable member of the female species,” says Maggie Savarino Dutton, herself a bartender, in the Seattle Weekly.

Dutton is referring to the fact that if male customers think they’re going to get a date from female-bartender, they’re mistaken. A young attractive female is not going to play therapist or devote too much time to any male customer because there could be “consequences.” She’s always “threatened” with sexual harassment. It’s precisely because she works in a bar that she knows all the male pickup lines.

What to do? “Bring back the neighborhood hangouts and send the metrosexuals and Girl Gone Wild back to the clubs and strip joints,” one male bartender wrote. “All trends fade away. Right now the trend is dumb, fake and plastic,” another man offered.

The economy and new tobacco laws are blamed for the decline in the neighborhood bar business, hence bar owners have latched onto young female bartenders as a possible solution. Female youth now trumps experience, knowledge and people skill—as a way to make money.
One solution is to find a neighborhood bar that hasn’t gone plastic, that’s still gritty in some respects. Better yet, why don’t these bars team the females up with male bartenders? The females can take of business while the male bartenders—all over 30, of course—could converse with the customers and do the counselor/therapist thing.

This, as one bartender wrote, would attract both a wide female and male customer base.

Thom Nickels can be rached at ThomNickels1@aol.com