(Today's essay was first posted to my blog back on 2/1/11; since the story below is a true one, I thought running it again would be good for my reputation. Enjoy.)
I got to thinking about being born after I wrote that last post about Rachel Urchitel, the, well, I'm not sure what exactly she is; I started to write "reality star" but I'm not sure she's even that, she's just another one of those Hollywood anomalies that exist because of unusual circumstances, like those puffed-up, weird-looking fish that live 78 gazillion feet beneath the sea, that never see sunlight or TMZ and will implode if you ever brought them close to the surface. I'm not sure if Ms. Urchitel would implode by coming too close to the surface or not, but it does make an interesting mental image.
Like Rachel, and I'm assuming here on both our parts, I was born naked, and unlike Rachel, who was told by Janice Dickinson, another household name in the world of celebrity rehab, that "you were born with a silver spoon up your ass", to the best of my knowledge I wasn't born with any cutlery of any kind up my wazoo. I'm sure my mother would have mentioned it at some point. Personally, I don't remember much about my birth, being quite young at the time. (Great story about the day my parents brought me home from the hospital; the way my Dad, who passed on in 2003, used to tell the tale, when he and my Mom arrived home with me in tow, the phone was ringing and my Dad answered it, and the lady at the other end identified herself as the head of the hospital where I was born (remember, this was a LOT of years ago and under no circumstances is this likely to happen today), and said that she was sorry, but that he and Mom had brought home the wrong baby. My mother gets on the phone and says, oh no, I have my baby. And the nice lady at the hospital says, wrongo, Mrs. Popemother, your squalling brat is still here with us. So my parents, being quick-thinkers, said, shit, maybe there was something to this wrong baby stuff (the other kid was MUCH better looking, and that was a dead giveaway) and headed back to the hospital, with what was, apparently, someone else's kid. They arrived back at the scene of the crime and quickly ascertained that, yep, wrong kid went home with the Popefolks. Some nurse's aide had apparently read the chart wrong and brought them the wrong baby when they were leaving. Absolutely true story. And although they never said it, they always gave me the impression that there were times they wished they had kept the other kid. He didn't have a third eye in the middle of his forehead.)
I began my training to become the Pope of the All John All The Time World Church by being born into a Roman Catholic (you know, that's church with the OTHER Pope) family in the 1950's, and the brain-washi...excuse me, the teaching began immediately. I attended a Catholic grade school (Our Lady Of Perpetual Motion), became an altar boy in the 5th grade (fell down three steps off the altar "serving Mass" at my older brother's wedding), and then advanced to the position of "lector" (which has nothing to do with the deranged, cannibalistic killer in the movie "The Silence Of The Lambs"; it's a lay-person, or at least it was back in those days, who gets up at the pulpit on the altar during Mass and reads the various texts from Scripture for that day's ceremony, you know, like passages from Elysians 7, Verse 10, or something from the II Evasions, Chapter 5, Paragraph 15(b)(401k) or whatever), when I was 13 or so, and then continued my indoctrination by attending an all-boys Catholic high school, run by the Vegemite Brothers Of The Holy Sandwich, who, in an effort to instill SOMEthing in my adolescent brain, proceeded to pound the crap out of me, along with most of my fellow brain-dead Catholic teenagers, at every opportunity. Ooh, those were fun times.
Coming from a background this rich in the fundamentals of moralistic thinking and intellectual enquiry has given me the diverse yet well-grounded foundation that I required to be the Pope of a world-class spiritual community. I'm pretty sure it didn't leave me suited to do much else; with that beginning, I could maybe have been a Mattress Tag Policeman (you know, the guys that go around checking to see if the "Do Not Remove This Tag" tag has been removed from your mattress and/or box spring), or a United States Congressman. So when the opening for Pope of the AJATTWC became available, I leapt at the chance. (Well, to be honest, at my age, I just hopped vigorously.)
And the competition for the position was stiff; Rachel Urchitel applied just before I did. But there was that thing with the silver spoon in her background (pardon the pun), so they passed on her.
And the rest, as they say, is geography.
Love and diapers,
PJTT
copyright 2011 Krissongs, Inc.
