Advice

Image by Whiteling and found on johnnydeppreads.com.

I have an extremely important volunteer position at our church. I simply don't know how our parish would survive without my efforts most Friday mornings when I put the various inserts into Sunday's bulletins, commonly known around here as "stuffing".

It's a liturgical term, I'm sure.

My friend Agnes and I usually are in charge of the stuffing process, which goes something like this: we lay out the various inserts in neat stacks next to the pile of bulletins. Then, after daintily licking the index finger, we snag each of the papers and stuff them into the bulletin. I wonder if everyone in our parish knows that when they grab a bulletin, it has a minuscule amount of my spit on the top right corner of each inserted page.....hmm. Well, sometimes there's a spit addition. There's those days when my mouth feels all cottony dry in which I grab a paper towel and soak it with water and put it next to the first stack of papers. THEN I lick my finger, stick it on the wet paper towel and THEN start snagging papers.

Oh, stop making that EWWWWW face. Y'all lick your fingers when you turn a page all. the. time. I just know it.

So, anyway, last Friday as I was sitting in the parish office working on this vital task as Terese and Father O. and the rest of the staff were working on much less important things, I heard Fr. walk by the desk humming a tune. I couldn't place it.....Terese perked up her ears and asked, "Sweeney Todd?"

Fr. grinned. "Yup."

Sweeney Todd? Never heard of it. They both looked at me with skepticism.

"Johnny Depp? Tim Burton? Musical about a murdering barber?"

No, never have seen it.

Father O. said, "Oh, it's GREAT. I'll loan you my copy."

Terese agreed. "It's got some good music. And a barber chair that dumps people into a meat grinder." She smiled broadly. Her enthusiasm for this gross stuff wasn't surprising to me at all since I know that this seemingly demure and quiet (pffffftttttttt) woman has a passion for watching blood and guts movies. But that's a whole another story..

Sure enough, a few days later, Terese handed me a dvd case with a post-it note stuck to the cover: For Julia.

After Mass the other day while the congregation was filing out of the church, I stopped by to greet Fr. O. As he took my hand he asked with a mischievous smile, "So? What did you think about the movie?"

A friend walking by stopped to listen, then chortled when she found out that we were not talking about a religiously-themed movie, like a biography of a saint, or something like that.

No. We were talking about a story about a maniacal barber and his weirdo associates that grind people up and sell them as meat pies.

So.................my spiritual advisor recommended that I watch a gruesome horror movie. Ahhh. I love my parish.