PeaceBang

Did You See "300?"

Maybe it’s just because there’s been a lot of suffering in my church this week, but I laffed and laffed at this PG version of the “300″ trailer, the original of which I found startlingly violent:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNqiSkd1M6k&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ewtfsrsly%2Ecom%2F

Who knew that Sparta could be so hot? It’s been the #1 flick for weeks, I think. Which means that I have a pretty good excuse to see it.

Best line: “FROSTING!”

I Look Like Betty Butterfield!!

…someone wrote it to say, “I’m sorry, but you look like Betty Butterfield,”

and having investigated the matter, I have to say that I DO!

(PB and BB= Separated at Birth)

I can totally be Betty Butterfield for Halloween, so thank you to whoever it was that wrote in anonymously to tell me about my rat-haired red-headed doppelganger out in cyberspace… I had never heard of “her” ’til today:

http://www.archive.org/details/Betty_Butterfield_exorcism

I just need to smear my lipstick all over my mouth a little more.

I Heart Betty Butterfield! Let’s go on the road together!

NIGHTLINE Segment, Just For You!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4Ek8JCRAxA

Church Search: Wilton,CT

Yo!
Christian peeps in the Fairfield County area, this is for you.

An old college buddy with a lovely wife and two kids and a great sense of humor, loads of creative talent and a liberal sensibility is looking for a church home.

I don’t think they’re sect-specific so much as ISO a loving and vital congregation.

Write in if you can hook my boo up.

Love,
PeaceBang, all lamely hip-hop for some reason

"Grey Gardens"

MotherBang and SisterBang and I saw “Grey Gardens” on Broadway last week and loved it, but now I can’t stop talking like Edie Beale.

Here’s the legendary Christine Ebersole doing a number at the Drama Desk Awards,
http://www.entertainment-link.com/broadway/musicals/grey-gardens.asp?gclid=CM38-_WHgosCFQhDUAodiWtAHg

We saw her marvelous understudy, Maureen Moore, and were all freely weeping at the end. I know it’s Broadway heresy to say it, but honestly, we all preferred Ms. Moore, whose voice is better, sounds more like the actual Edie, and who was more nuanced in her performance than I’ve seen in Ms. Ebersole’s several clips of the performance.

Haven’t you ever seen the documentary Grey Gardens?? Oh, for heaven’s sake, get it from Netflix right away.

SisterBang has adored it for “years and years and years.” She’s so staunch.

Taking A Sabbath Day

This morning I decided to take a whole day of Sabbath, where I would actually do no work at all.

It’s 5:40 pm now and I am doing pretty well at it.

I did do some dishes but I have refrained from putting away the laundry or cleaning up my desk or answering any church e-mail.

I have been reading, and lazing, and sleeping. I have been staring out the window and thinking. I have been petting the cat. And reading some more.

I have been breathing deeply and not having any adrenalin rushes, except for seeing one e-mail subject line that referenced “gossip” which made me think that someone was gossiping about me and that I’d have to go into upset/defense mode. But that wasn’t it, so I was able to relax.

I am reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Eat, Pray, Love and although I enjoyed the section on Italy and really enjoy her very much as a writer, I am not sure that I like her as a person. The book seems to assume that I will, in fact, fall in love with the narrator, but so far I’m not there. This may impede my ability to read the rest of the book.

I am also reading something called How To Write a Book Proposal but it made my heart race with a sense that I should Get Right On It, so I put it away.

I am also reading Praying For Sheetrock, and the latest issue of Food & Wine magazine, which to tell you the truth, is the best sort of thing to read on a sabbath day.

It’s very cold outside so I’m not going out there. I am not washing my hair or putting on make-up or arranging my face into anything but an expression of quiet and repose. I don’t need to have anything to say, or anything to suggest. Just for 15 hours or so.

I am not even going to put a new ink cartridge into the printer. That would be work.

When I Heard From The Bride

It had to have been seven or eight years ago, when I was the minister of a UU church in Maryland. I did a lot of weddings back then: our congregation didn’t have a building of its own, so I got a lot of cold calls out of the book from people wanting to get married at home, or at country clubs, or at mansions-for-rent, or at beautiful little inns. I have all their names in my book of records, and sometimes I look over those names and wonder how all those lovely couples are doing.

One couple, I never forgot, because the groom died very shortly after the wedding. Just a freak thing. Went in for a nap after work and never woke up. I remember how flabbergasted I was by the news– I had phoned them for some extraneous reason and his bride told me, in that kind of brittle voice that reveals too many nights up crying. She didn’t live very close to my church and never attended, so we only had that tenuous connection of their wedding.

So now — all these years later and about probably twenty or thirty more weddings in my book — the bride and I are reconnected. As it turns out, she is now an active Episcopalian and was hanging out the other day at Mad Priest’s blog with that group of rowdy, rude, PeaceBang-bashers I wrote about two posts ago. She sees the conversation going on and thinks, wait, I know her! And she drops me a line.
Of course I remember her right away and am thrilled. I am delighted that her spiritual search has led her to a place of serious engagement with a church and a tradition, and deeply gratified to know that she has remarried. Happy ending to a story that had long occupied a tiny, sad corner of my heart.

And then there’s this: Again, evidence that the blogging community is a community. Which is why those insulting goofs at MadPriest so disappointed me, writing about me like the gossip columnist at The Superficial.com writes about Paris Hilton or Jennifer Lopez — treating a clergy sister like so much fodder for trashtalk, forgetting that Christians are supposed to model interwovenness, not revealing — and apparently reveling in — the kind of jejeune dynamics that keeps so many people out of our churches. Yikes. If there has to be conflict, let there be conflict, but let it be about something real and worth caring about, not just doofusy insults for the sake of camaraderie and jackassed guffaws.

My note from Janis was the best thing that happened today, and it was a wonderful day already so hey, say amen somebody!

A Year Of Banjo

The annual banjo festival is here again and I can’t believe that I can really actually play the BANJO. Last year when I went, I could only watch in stupidly grinning admiration as these guys, the coolest ever, strummed away:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jdm9u9Nc0tk

They sound a million times better in person. The video sound is all wangly.

This year I will bring my own BANJO to the festival and maybe will even JAM with some other musicians like a real BANJO player. Today someone at my music store where I take lessons off-handedly referred to me as a “musician”and I almost dropped my BANJO case.

But really, I am playing now. I am playing real songs and singing along. I can even switch up an octave and then another and get a tiny bit fancy.

If I could someday have my own red shirt and play with the Strutters I would die of happiness.

On "Nightline" And Achieving Extremely Minor Celebrity

I got to see my “Nightline” segment again last night with the Search Committee who brought me to my congregation in 2002. We have a reunion dinner every year and this was our fifth anniversary, which none of us can quite believe.
One of them brought over a DVD produced by her husband, who took all the promo spots and edited them together with the 3-minute segment. We watched it over appetizers and wine. Fun to have them there to hoot and holler about it with me.

My review is that is was Okay.
I definitely clenched my teeth when Martin Bashir started in with his typically handsome-ominous tone about my “secret identity” — we all groaned with laughter — and introduced the story in a cheezy and misleading manner, insinuating that I give fashion advice in the parish to my congregation!! Right, Marty. That’s why it’s called BEAUTY TIPS FOR MINISTERS. Augh!

The actual segment was done with what I thought was a nice blend of fun and seriousness, and although my main talking point did not make the cut (”The contemporary church is an exciting, relevant place to be, and American clergy are often not projecting a public image that communicates that fact.”), I got in a couple of quotes that were fine, and on point.

What was it like seeing myself on camera?
It was… Okay. I hated the angle they shot me at for the close-up interview because it showed a very flat part of my hair (which drooped badly under the hot lights). I watched my own talking face with critical fascination : “Wow, my lips are really lopsided, wow, I have three chins, wow, look at how weird my blinking is, wow, I have really aged, wow, I wonder how much it would cost to get liposuction on my chin(s) and jowls? hey, my make-up looks good, hey, that outfit works pretty well…” and so on, and thusly. Overall, I decided that the image and the message went together fairly effectively, and that’s the most important thing.

I was glad that producer and interviewer Nancy Cordes featured shots of us laughing together, and that she included my remark to Tim Jensen that he was weary holey clothes “and not holy in a good way!” I was sorry that you didn’t get to see seminarian Donna Collins speak eloquently of how she’s a student of all things ministerial, including how to dress like one, and that they were unable to show her preaching from the pulpit and my giving her feedback about how well her face “reads” from the back pew. That’s the kind of work I am most interested in doing with ministers.

One of my parishioners pointed out something that I hadn’t noticed on the first viewing — that they intercut an image of a cross with the story — which irritated us all because there are no crosses anywhere on or in our building, and we’re not a specifically Christian congregation in this generation. Where did they get that cross? We’re guessing at the cemetery across the street. :::cue rolling of eyes::::

Another groaner of a moment was when the story closed with a shot of a mall and a voice-over saying that in her spare time, Rev. Weinstein “cruises the mall” for ideas… and looks at fashion magazines.
That latter point is fair to make– since I started BeautyTipsForMinisters I do spend time seriously perusing Allure, Glamour, Lucky, In Style, Out and various clothing catalogues. This is new for me. But cruising the mall? Listen, honey, in my “spare time” I’m working on a doctoral degree!

I’m looking forward to being on the Sunday With Liz Walker Show at 11:00 AM next Sunday on WBZ. We’re shooting the segment on Wednesday and I expect that it will have much more substance to it than the “Nightline” offering.

Now. On achieving very minor fame in the clergy community.

Mostly it has been a total delight, a grand opening of my sense of clergy as a worldwide community of friends, sisters and brothers, mutually supportive, funny, wise, affectionate and deeply connected at the level of the soul beyond denominational differences. Since I started Beauty Tips, I have had hundreds of lovely, loving, often -hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking e-mails from ministers all over the country introducing themselves, thanking me for blogging on the subject, asking me for support or advice which I promptly give to the best of my ability, and expressing appreciation for the outrageous persona of PeaceBang, “stage mother to the clergy” who wants “all her babies to be stars.”

As I have discussed before on this original blog, it became clear to me very soon after starting the Beauty Tips blog that I wanted to make PeaceBang’s voice more flamboyantly dramatic than the one I adopted for this first blog, feeling that the topic warranted it. I wanted the blog to feel like a fabulous salon where, when you entered it, you would feel enveloped and almost overwhelmed by this grand diva who would pull you over to a full-length mirror and say, “DARLING! HOW CAN WE MAKE YOU SHINE, SHINE, SHINE!!??” I pictured myself in a pair of satin pajamas with maribou-covered mules and a huge feather boa, kind of a Rev. Auntie Mame.

It has been received well. The vast majority of readers “get it.”

While I had a vague idea that I would really like to help ministers find a more appropriate, confidence-promoting image for themselves, I figured most of that would happen on-line. It never occurred to me that I would get media attention that would give me the opportunity to blend my PeaceBang persona with my real ministry as Vicki Weinstein. Interesting! How to do it? My conclusion: continue to write as the outrageous PeaceBang on the blog and be myself on camera, or anywhere else. Not that there’s a universe of difference between the two, of course — just several degrees of flamboyance and insistence!

This has all been a really interesting exercise in identity and public image, much like the journey from laywoman to minister but with far more personal detachment and neutral curiosity, whereas my journey to ministry was rife with (clergy, do you remember?) drama, a sense of thrill and vague crisis, projection and worry. Since my blogging happens as a pleasant hobby within the context of a profoundly fulfilling and totally happy life in parish ministry with a congregation I adore (but made a decision right away not to discuss in detail on any of my blogs), it has just been FUN.

There has been heartache in this work, too: I’ve received a number of letters from incredibly insecure ministers who pour out their hearts to me confessing their fears and hurts about how bad they think they look and/or how helpless they feel in choosing what to wear. I never realized how much of 8th grade stays with us, and I’m surprised and saddened by it. I never wanted the blog to invoke rampant insecurity among any of my readers; frankly, I would have imagined we were beyond that level of fragility. I was wrong, and apparently naive. But what some folks need isn’t fashion advice but support in working through some serious emotional issues. I hope they get that support. At best, maybe my blog can make them aware of their low self-esteem and encourage them to investigate it with courage and care.

The blog has generated some controversy, and I think that’s great.
After Michael Paulson’s article ran in the Boston Globe and was subsequently syndicated around the country, many clergypeople addressed it in newsletters and sermons. I have read about a dozen of these reflections and appreciate all of them, even when the writer vehemently disagrees with me. They have many excellent points.

There is a group of women ministers who blog together and who are still tsking about me based on an ugly cat fight we had last summer. That’s okay, too.
I stand by my argument, however harshly made, that there is no reason whatsoever to preside over a religious ceremony looking disheveled and sloppy. What began as a conversation in July became a shrieking accusation that I don’t understand because I’m not a Mom. And when that happens, I know enough to leave the room. No one needs to engage in a Fight Of the Screaming Archetypes, and especially not me, because I’m a single woman with no one at home to love and support me emotionally or financially and you have the comfort of children and partners not to mention the approval of a society that still sees motherhood as the apotheosis of feminine identity and…see what I mean? Non-productive.
I deleted the exchange because I think that female clergy need to present a unified front to a world that is still not accustomed to our existence.

Just today, I read a blog exchange about me that was the only outright disturbing thing I have ever read, because it sounded like dialogue out of some teen drama like the “OC” rather than a conversation happening between mature adults, let alone self-professed spiritual leaders. In reaction to my article in the Boston Globe, a retired Lutheran minister (!) in England, snidely wrote that I looked like I was wearing a wig hat. (What’s a wig hat? Where can I get one?) Others on the same blog chimed in insulting my hair, and yet another wrote that he was slightly disappointed to find that I am a woman (I suppose he thought I was a gay man — and he wouldn’t be the first). The group cheered their own clergy image maven and boo’d me with all the maturity reserved for a bitter prom queen fight at Saxe Junior High. I can’t tell you how depressing I find this. Religious leaders actually stooping to the level of schoolbus bullies, picking on the popular girl and teasing her about her hair. Hey kids, this is a relationship. If you can read me, I can read you. And I do, in the hopes that you’ll have something substantive to offer, not to hear you make snotty little remarks about my hair, which by the way, is great hair (and is that color in honor of Agnes Moorehead’s character Endora on “Bewitched” –which shows just how hard I’m trying for your idea of a “class act”).

I started BeautyTipsForMinisters because my sister kept noodging me to. The response has been amazing. I keep writing Beauty Tips because hundreds of clergy and others appreciate it. Everything I said, do, write and suggest is for them. If they hadn’t anointed me in this unique role of Minister to Ministers, I wouldn’t be in the newspaper or on television. I’ve never been a fashion plate and never said I was. I have said nothing but the truth: that I’m a very chubby, short female minister who tries to look her very best to communicate the vibrancy of contemporary religious life every time she appears in public. I’m not a model. I’m a pastor and a writer.
[This just in: it appears that the blogger, Mad Priest, is actually charming and funny — but his commenters –who apparently think of themselves as a merry, irreverent and hilarious little band of Anglican rebels — just aren’t funny, and they really want to be. That doesn’t bother me so much as the fact that they haven’t got the sense God gave a schnauzer, because they keep writing about me as though I can’t see them. Hey kids: Boo! I’m here!– PB]

Finally, for the reader who worries about what to wear when we meet at the Festival Of Homiletics in May, believe me, darling — I’M the one who should worry. After all, I’ve gone from being an anonymous dispenser of fashion advice to clergy to being very much out in the world as ministerial image consultant. I hadn’t bargained on that, but I’m glad it happened.

To be continued!
How I looked:

How I felt:

Hello, My Name is Ben And I’ll Be Your Waiter This Evening

I am just about to prepare a chicken recipe for a dinner party this evening, which is why this article is making me laugh in a particularly wicked way:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/16/opinion/16shaw.html?th&emc=th

Ya gotta love a guy who defends the presence of RATS in restaurants.

As far as my own kitchen safety at home goes, honey, I’m about to put on some disposable surgical gloves and get that chicken in the oven, after which I will obsessively scrub every surface with bleachy hot water and soap.

One of the reasons I can’t stand watching Rachael Ray cook is that she flings around fresh vegetables with the same icky hands she just handled raw meat with. Yeeeeeech.