UNPLUGED:Holy Apologies
Clinton, Kate
UNPLUGGED Kate Clinton Holy Apologies The other day in the mail with my very pretentious /. Peterman catalogue and my Publisher's Clearinghouse notice thanking me for sending Ed McMahon the map...
...She's like Jackie O in that way...
...Supposedly all of these apologies for past sins are necessary before the Vatican can send out party invites to the third millennium of Christianity...
...Go get out your Tracy Chapman album and crank up, "Sorry is all that you can say" to window-rattling decibels...
...He's got the book, the CD, lots of merch, and a very good road show...
...The U.N...
...Back yards...
...The Vatican must accept my low bid to produce the 2000th birthday bashes throughout the country...
...Dad...
...It's four-and-a-half years off, but I am planning now...
...I guess they are not sleeping well...
...But still...
...You thought the Tall Ships were big...
...New Jersey...
...I made that up, but having made a few insincere apologies in my own secular lifetime, I recognize transparency when I see through it...
...The Jesuits had earlier apologized for abetting centuries of male domination and had pledged their personal solidarity with women, frightening many coeds at Boston College...
...Things I still can't figure out— we're talking Cape Canaveral already, one giant putt for mankind, etc...
...She does not like big events...
...injustices against women in the name of the Roman Catholic Church...
...She likes small appearances...
...Recently 800 German Christians apologized to some baffled Danes for the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands...
...UNPLUGGED Kate Clinton Holy Apologies The other day in the mail with my very pretentious /. Peterman catalogue and my Publisher's Clearinghouse notice thanking me for sending Ed McMahon the map to my house so he will better be able to find me on that great prize-awarding day, I got a letter from the Pope...
...You helped me around the shop, you could get a square peg in a round hole...
...I'm thinking some kind of surprise party—sort of, This Is Your Life, Jesus Christ...
...The Southern Baptists must create jobs in city centers and work for the defeat of Jesse Helms...
...I proposed hooking Him up with the Lollapalooza tour last summer...
...According to one recent poll, 57 percent of people said they knew of his apology, while only 23 percent knew of the Pope's apology...
...It has been a pretty sorry summer...
...I like that about her...
...And I did appreciate the Nixon stamp—an inspired bit of whimsy...
...t's not just maxima organizational culpas that are being proffered...
...Eulah Banks, of Okra, North Carolina, whose husband fell into the moving trash compactor on the back of his self-owned garbage truck after she delayed her reply...
...But there is no "Why now...
...All that true-nature-of-women talk in his apology makes this lesbian suspect that a few hundred years from now, some Pope John Paul 86 is going to be apologizing for that unfortunate crusade against women in the late 1900s...
...Talk about your letter bombs...
...Lately it seems as if everybody is apologizing...
...Was it so hard to get a meeting room at the Vatican...
...In his letter of apology, entitled, "Ego Sum Okay, Vos est Excommunicatus," the Pope apologized for any...
...Why do it anyway...
...Then I found out he had sent a letter to every woman...
...I've been trying to talk Mary into coming back...
...I don't know if Hugh Grant has a millennial motive, but for his penance he must eat bugs for six days...
...Lots of religions are apologizing for things...
...Well, excuse me for being such a party pooper, but talk is cheap and whatever happened to good old penance...
...I don't know if Grant is using the same publicist as the one who got the kinder, gentler Timothy McVeigh on the cover of Newsweek, but the strategy of getting caught with a prostitute as a career move was, if not original, then at least timely...
...It wasn't one of those pray-or-else chain letters, one of those, "Don't be like Mrs...
...Push the miracle thing...
...They know me at the Vatican already for some of the bids I have put in to produce Papal visits...
...I was at first overwhelmed by His Thoughtfulness...
...There's Mr...
...It was a letter of apology...
...to this Papal apology...
...They'd been waiting...
...Nothing too showy...
...Kind of a Neil Young thing, get the younger crowd...
...Robert ("They drug tested him and found traces of formaldehyde") McNa-mara, author of Youra Culpa, his quasi-apology for the Vietnam War...
...er, Joseph, is that you...
...Even individuals are getting into their culps...
...This Papal letter reminds me of that Galileo moment a few years back...
...African Americans everywhere were relieved...
...The Papal guards tried to get Galileo to apologize under house arrest, but he went crazy instead...
...Conference on Women is about to convene in Beijing and His Extreme Cleverness is trying to carp the diem...
...Lawn chairs...
...Well, everybody but O.J...
...If the Vatican accepts my bid, I'll think about taping my picture of the Pope back together.* Kate Clinton is a comedian...
...In the United States, the Southern Baptist convention formally and finally apologized to African Americans for defending slavery in the antebellum South and for condoning contemporary racism...
...And then there's Hugh Grant's abject, convoluted stammerings, which actually sounded as if they'd been translated from the Latin...
...After seventeen years of debate, a special Papal commission announced that Galileo was right all those 353 years ago when he said that the Sun, not the Earth, not even the Pope, was the center of the universe...
Vol. 59 • September 1995 • No. 9
