An Unpleasant Coffee with Sister Vassa

I've decided to title this entry, 'My Unpleasant Coffee with Sister Vassa.' Why such a title? I'll get to that in a minute. First let me say that I've always felt admiration for Sister Vassa, mostly because of her earlier Coffee with Sister Vassa YouTube shows, which are usually taped in Vienna, Austria, where I visited once several years ago (and loved). As an Orthodox Christian (from Roman Catholic) I jumped at the chance to hear a lecture by Sister Vassa at a local Orthodox Philadelphia parish. But shortly after the lecture began I felt a growing sense of disappointment. I found Sister Vassa a little too sassy and snarky and too much 'in love' with her own celebrity.

 I even detected more than a flair of arrogance in her, especially when I asked a question during the post lecture Q and A. My question that had to do with the growth of Islam in western Europe. I wanted her unique perspective as an Orthodox nun but what I got was a cryptic wink and a nod. Then she told a joke which seemed to suggest that I had committed a small offense by asking such a question. I approached Sister Vassa at the reception after her talk and asked why she had answered my question in such a strange, hostile manner. Fortunately, she was slightly more agreeable (reception food and drink work wonders), or at least her snarkiness was gone. Then she mentioned something about having to "be careful about saying certain things" in public and at that moment I thought, "Oh, it's all about perceived Islamophobia, EU rules and so called 'hate' crimes." She lives in Vienna, after all.

In late November 2017, I spotted a Facebook post of hers in which she appeared without her religious habit. Apparently she was in Boston for a liturgical/theological conference of some sort (in conjunction with the respected Eastern Catholic Jesuit priest, Fr, Robert Taft). The Facebook photo showed Sister Vassa in long flowing locks looking very much like a sexy coed holding a purple umbrella in the rain. The photo's caption read something like this:, "Here I am in my civies." What's this, I thought, a Novus Ordo Russian Orthodox nun? I know that many Catholic nuns have gone the way of all flesh and now dress in skirts, hoop earrings and makeup, and I said as much on Sister's Facebook page and even took it a step further when I said, "What's next for you, dating?" I was just returning snarky for snarky, after all. Then I suggested that perhaps she was walking around in public in her "civies" because she was hanging out with a Jesuit. Later, to my dismay (but not complete surprise), Sister Vassa 'unfriended' me on Facebook. I am now no longer on her coffee train and will have to take my brew with priests who don't take 'selfies' under purple umbrellas.
 
  I came upon a wonderful paragraph about Sister Vassa in the Saint Euphrosynos Cafe Discussion Forum:

 "Whereas, despite Sister Vassa's attempt to post uncontroversial themes, her emphasis is entirely upon herself ! This should tipoff everyone that she is not a fit leader for a 'ministry'. There are too many sociopaths and narcissists already in various Protestant, evangelical and other 'ministries' who are using the adulation of the congregation to do much harm to the souls of their flocks. It has almost become commonplace to find out that so and so preacher or popular local minister has actually been living an undercover life of darkness all the while the pastor was loudly proclaiming his belief with thundering preaching."

 Oh my! Perhaps that quote is a bit extreme, but it's my prediction that Sister Vassa's journey into the mesh of Novus Ordo is far from over. 

My new book, publication date March 19, 2018. 

guest blogger

          

George E. Thomas’s Book First Modern Extols PAFA’s Architectural Importance:  A Review  

  (By) Marita Krivda Poxon

George E. Thomas has taught at the University of Pennsylvania for over thirty years in the Historic Preservation Program. Since 2002 he commutes from Philadelphia to Harvard University where he also lectures in architecture. His title at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design is Co-Director of Critical Conservation Program.  He refuses to move to Cambridge since he has not been a fan of the derivative colonial housing stock nearby Harvard’s campus. Since he was a young historian he has loved Philadelphia and has been the number one champion of Frank Furness. He even lives in a Frank Furness carriage house in Chestnut Hill. 

The buildings of Frank Furness are his passion ever since he rolled up his sleeves to spearhead the amazing restoration of PAFA during the Bicentennial.   He advised architects on every inch of the building’s restoration to make whole again the glories of its basic bones.  Years of work were spent in the study of surviving original architectural drawings and historic photographs of the building. 

                  PAFA Exterior 

                                                                                 (F. Gutekunst’s photo of PAFA in 1876)

Thomas is also a prolific, fine writer whose books include: William L. Price: From Arts and Crafts to Modern Design (2000) and Building America’s First University:  An Architectural and Historical Guides to the University of Pennsylvania (2000) and many others.  In 1990 Thomas along with Bryn Mawr College’s Jeffrey A. Cohen wrote Frank Furness: The Complete Works. This book documents over 640 buildings that Furness designed that continue to inspire what today is called the Philadelphia School of Architecture.

George E. Thomas’s new book is: First Modern: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA Distributed by University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). No other architectural historian could have written the book just published with such obvious love of and appreciation for Frank Furness as Thomas. In the book’s Foreword, David Brigham, PAFA’s President and CEO praises the author since his book will enable its readers “to understand the innovative nature of the building and appreciate its value today at the heart of PAFA’s mission.” Also its publication serves as a lynchpin in the current Capital Campaign for the 21^st Century preservation of the Furness masterpiece. 

  What makes the PAFA building the first modern is the way Furness connected his design to the machine culture that took over Philadelphia during its 19^th Century industrial expansion.   Mechanics, industrialists and inventors thrived in Philadelphia. It was the leader in global innovation with businesses like the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Baldwin Locomotive Works.   The impact of the city’s industrial growth extended into all areas as engineers and inventors served on the boards of cultural centers like PAFA. Many members of the 1870 PAFA Board came from this industrial culture.  They selected Furness and his partner Hewitt to construct a new museum which would use iron and steel as they themselves had used in building their own commercial enterprises.  The Board wanted to create an industrial caliber “capacious fire-proof” art museum and school. The chapters on the intrigue and battle among these board members to select Furness & Hewitt as competition winner are riveting.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was important to Frank Furness.  At an early age, he learned about Emerson’s forward thinking, American-centered philosophy from his father, the Reverend William Henry Furness who was the head of the city’s First Unitarian Church.  Emerson called for Americans “to represent in their culture the opportunities of their own time.” This Emersonian emphasis on the future not the past dominated Furness throughout his life.

              PAFA Trusses

The new technologies that make PAFA modern include: the use of iron beams to span smaller interior rooms as well as wider interior galleries. The use of steel trusses on the Cherry Street exterior façade and above the long gallery was revolutionary.  Building materials of the industrial age were exposed and visible including iron columns that carried wrought-iron beams.  Massive steel girders with exposed rivets span the auditorium. Modern industrial machinery created the floral and linear ornament on the stone work of the main entrance hallway.  Industrial iron beams and steel columns - truly modern!

Thomas includes stunning old and new photographs.  Those from PAFA’s archives are amazing since they bring the reader back to another century. The modern photographs highlight the continued integrity of Furness’s structure.  The book itself is a treasure through its visually stunning pictorial representations and its splendid organization.  Kudos to the author for writing a book whose meticulous scholarship proves, celebrates and christens PAFA as “the first modern” building in the world.

  My Tonsure as a Reader in the Russian Orthodox Church at Saint Michael the Archangel Church in Philadelphia. With Bishop John before the start of the Hierarchial Divine Liturgy. The full occasion was the celebration of Fr. Vincent 41 years as pastor of the parish. Sunday, November 12, 2017.

ICON Magazine Theater Reviews

ICON Theater Sept. 2017

 

 

Tommy and Me. This football sports play by former Philadelphia Daily News columnist Ray Didinger played to packed audiences at the Fringe Arts Building on Columbus Blvd. Theatre Exile’s production about Philadelphia Eagles legend Tommy McDonald and Didinger’s long struggle to get McDonald into the NFL Football Hall of Fame brightened up a ‘theater-zero’ August. Tommy and Me audiences applauded wildly as if the Fringe Arts stage had been transformed into Franklin Field. Directed by Joe Canuso with script input by playwright Bruce Graham (Minor Demons, Coyote on a Fence, Desperate Affections), Didinger’s play captured McDonald’s (Tom Teti) elfin quirks. Ned Pryce as Young Tommy (in football gear) had the right macho ambience, and Matt Pfeiffer was believable as the ‘always sensible, eternally patient Didinger who never lost faith in his childhood sports hero. Seventh grader Simon Kiley as the young Didinger—children don’t always come across well on stage—had a maturity that made you forget that he was a child except when he leapt into the air to give or return a ‘high five.’ The post-play panel discussion erupted into howls of laughter when the moderator told an inordinate number of politically incorrect jokes. One was a monologue on midgets and how their small hands and feet evokes images of Philly sports legend, Howard Eskin, who stands at 5’4”.  

 

 

Fishtown – A Hipster Noir.  Do hipsters consume ‘cool,’ rather than create it, as one writer quipped. Here we have obscure music, a blinding blast of social media, stuffed ‘turkey’ backpacks, detached discontent and pumpkin spice lattes. Tribe of Fools presents this virtual reality conspiracy when “a new app allows you to live out your wildest fantasies.” The play’s pop up question is: What really constitutes reality?  Director Peter Smith says, "We wanted to tell a story about social media and how statuses, tweets and photos make the internet a stage for the world to see us; but you can't tell the story of tech and social media without grappling with Sexism.” You be the judge. Caitlin Weigel’s play is a Fringe Festival offering at the Louis Bluver Theater at the Drake, Sept. 8-23.

 

Leaps of Faith and Other Mistakes. Diner en le blanc meets Cirque du Soleil at the Painted Bride Arts Center when weirdo acrobats dressed all in white sit on a sofa and attempt to be “exceptional in every moment.” Sometimes the forced comedy of slapstick and barb trading can loose the most attentive observer. I hope that’s not the case with these zany couch potatoes when they sit and fantasize about sailing on the high seas. Don’t forget to bring Dramamine. Presented by the Almanac Dance Circus Theater and directed by Annie Wilson, Sept. 6-23.  

 

The Bald Soprano.  Called an anti-play, this Eugene Ionesco work was first produced in 1950. Unlike Ionesco’s Exit the King, this absurdist work does not call for humans to put off lusts and desires in order to be free. What it does do is begin all over again as soon as it ends, making one think of the endless circles of Ravel’s Bolero. It’s a conversation between two couples, a maid and the maid’s fire chief lover. Ionesco wrote the play when he was leaning English. In the best tradition of the French Avant-garde, it’s full of non-sequiturs and mutilated aphorisms. Ionesco hated strict realism in theatre (he had a special contempt for Berdolt Brecht). The production stars Tina Brock, co-founder/Producing Artistic Director of The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium. Sept. 5-25, Bethany Mission Gallery, 1527 Brandywine Street, 215-285-0472) 

 

Cabaret. The stage of the Arden Theater will be transformed into Berlin’s notorious Kit Kat Club that novelist Christopher Isherwood wrote about in his 1945 book, Goodbye to Berlin. The 1972 film, described as “gay and gender bending,” starred Michael York as the bisexual Brian Roberts who has an affair with Sally Bowles while dating men on the side.  How will the Arden ever duplicate Joel Grey’s majestic performance while wearing a corset, fishnets and stiletto heels? Directed by Matthew Decker and written by Joe Masteroff, Cabaret will usher in the Arden’s 30^thanniversary season.  Sept. 21-Oct. 22.    

 

Icon Theater August 2017

                                      ICON THEATER AUGUST 2017

Saturday Night Fever.  When this musical drama hit the big screen in 1977 audiences were mesmerized by John Travolta’s dance moves. The Bee Gees soundtrack went on to become the best selling soundtrack of all time. This Walnut Street Theater production starring Jacob Tischler as Tony Manero, a Brooklyn teen in a dead end job with a talent for disco dancing, has packed the house since May.

 The dancing is as good as anything you might see at BalletX.  Tischler, like Travolta, glides across the stage like an undulating rubber man on crack, spinning out moves with Annette (Nicole Colon) while simultaneously holding her romantic overtures at bay. Enter sultry Stephanie Mangano (Alexandra Matteo), hard to get and even harder to please but with Tony’s persistence (and wiggles), who can resist? Annette’s whinny clamor for Tony’s attention is the blueprint for the death of one of Tony’s friends on the Brooklyn Bridge even if the tragedy is blithely danced away. Richard Stafford is responsible for the engaging and beautiful choreography. It’s no wonder that SNF was designated “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress.

The Humans. The Walnut’s 2017-18 season will include Stephen Karam’s Tony Award winning play about family tensions over the Thanksgiving holiday. Originally an off Broadway production, The Humans went on to win six Tonys. Walnut President and Producing Artistic Director Bernard Havard announced that the Walnut is the first theater to acquire the rights to produce this play.

 BalletX, Summer Series.  In the first dance piece, choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s, Castrati, presents elongated human forms reminiscent of the alien beings in Whitely Strieber’s Communion. The dancers portray the last seven living castrati in the 16^th-18^th centuries.

Ochoa has the dancers move in such a way that we can actually feel the castrati’s pain of being locked in a genderless world despite their beautiful voices.   Castrati was easily the best segment of the production. In the second set, Matthew Neenan’s Let Mortal Tongues Awake, explores the relationship of individuals to authority through militarized movements of ‘The Citizen’ as dancer. The Kraftwork- style soundtrack evolves into patriotic songs as the dancers, in ironic opposition to the lyrics, appear with tape over their mouths, a not so subtle reference to imprisoned or silenced citizens in a fascist state.  The subliminal reference to Trump’s America is obvious although this reviewer saw it more as the face of fascism in the academic world where the silencing of Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter has become common. BalletX is now off to the Breckenridge Music Festival in Breckenridge, Colorado and then the International Dance Festival in Vail, Colorado.       

Tommy and Me. The world premier of sportswriter Ray Didinger’s autobiographical account of his push to have his football player boyhood hero, Tommy McDonald, inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.  Certain to be the chief draw of Fringe Arts 2017. The play was read to a sold out audience at Plays and Players in 2015. Didinger, the author of 11 books, excavated the myth of “the dumb football player” on NPR’s Fresh Air in 2014.

 Playpenn, new play development 2017. Here’s where true theater lovers gather. Free and open to the public the scripts of six new plays were read in July: Terence Anthony’s The House of the Negro Insane; Brent Askari’s Hard Cell; Christine Evans’, Galilee; C.A. Johnson’s Thirst; Carter W. Lewis’ With and Jonathan Norton’s Penny Candy. The Conference included an online workshop with playwright Jacqueline Goldfinger and a class called Writing the Issue-Based Play (IBP). Playpenn’s Artistic Director, Paul Meshejian, wrote: “PlayPenn was founded because of what I considered a paucity of new play production in Philadelphia. The impulse was a local one. Since our founding, and by no means only because of PlayPenn, Philadelphia has experienced an explosion in the production of new work. That PlayPenn has supported work that has gone on to have a more prolific national presence is a welcome added benefit. “  

ICON Theater July 2017

ICON CITY THEATER JULY 2017

  The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens & Count Leo Tolstoy. Theology in five easy

pieces is the subject of this comedy by Scott Carter, which means a lot of back and forth about religion and

 Jesus Christ. These three willful men from history, stuck in a room in the after life

 (like the characters in Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit), have all written their own version of the New Testament minus

the “superstitious parts” they’ve rejected. 

They argue with one another but nobody emerges as winner of the debate.

 Carter’s script has the snappy, irreverence of his work as writer for

 Real Time with Bill Maher. Andrew Criss as Tolstoy is powerful and peasant-like while Gregory Issac lends

 the right ‘aristocratic touch’ to his portrayal of Jefferson. Brian McCann as Charles Dickens has

 the zany wild writer thing down pat so that Dickens comes across as the most contemporary-seeming

 man on stage. Unfortunately the play ends with a

preachy condemnation of Jefferson’s having owned slaves while “hypocritically” writing so eloquently

 about human rights and equality. Carter’s script obsesses on Jefferson’s sins despite the fact that in the

 18^th Century the notion of equality did not apply to slaves. The tiresome practice of judging famous

people of the past based on contemporary standards and values should die a quick death.

  (The Lantern Theater, until July 2)  

Red Velvet. Not the cake, mind you, but Lolita Chakrabarti’s drama of intrigue and riots on the streets of London

 protesting the Slavery

 Abolition Act as the first black man to portray Othello takes to the stage. This September 7- October 8, 2017

 Lantern production will set the tone for the fall season which will include two additional politically oriented

dramas, the WW II Nazi-German play, The Craftsman by Bruce Graham and Copenhagen

 by Michael Frayn. Lantern’s spring 2018 program brings some fresh air into the house with its production

 of the delightful French comedy, Don’t Dress for Dinner.

Souvenir, A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins.  Don’t believe it when they say that

 money can’t buy everything or that persistence can’t win out over talent. A big Cash Cow certainly

 opened doors for the highly untalented but charismatic socialite, Florence Jenkins, who achieved international

 fame as a coloratura soprano.  The productions at Walnut Street Theater’s Independence Studio on 3 just keep

 getting better and better. (September 12-October 15, 2017). 

American Canvas. Whatever happened to this potentially marvelous play about Philadelphia painter

Thomas Eakins? Philadelphia Theater Company had it all planned out but then substituted

 The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey

 at the last minute. Will there even be a Thomas Eakins play on a Center City stage?

HIR. This disturbing play, directed by Jarrod Markman, shows what can happen when an abused wife, Paige

(Marcia Saunders) becomes an abuser herself after her husband’s debilitating stroke. She feeds husband

 Arnold (John Morrison) mind altering tranquilizers, spanks him, dresses him in a woman’s nightgown

 and then hoses him down like an animal when it’s time to give him his shower.  Her life of domestic

 revenge borders on the diabolical as she systematically destroys the lives of her two children, Max (Eppchez!),

 a transgender male and her normal, ex-Marine son Issac (Kevin Meehan), just home from a war zone. Playwright 

Taylor Mac, who describes himself

as “genderqueer, or a little bit of everything,” casts a satirically hard look at the ‘revolutionary’ world

 of gender identity with its 52 genders and ‘anything goes’ philosophy. He does this with as much harshness

 as he critiques the rabid All in the Family roots that once defined Paige’s family life. Eppchez! is charming

 as Max and Saunders is so convincingly horrible as Paige that this reviewer had to fight fantasies about dousing her

 with eggs or containers of potato salad. Mac, in commenting about HIR, wrote that “there’s this whole

 generation of older, white men who are filled with rage right now, because

 they watch Fox News all day long and they feel like they’re not part of the culture…” But in HIR it is the men,

albeit their faults, who are the sane ones.