Weekend Mail Bag 1

I received a communiqué from one Father Stephen on Saturday, taking issue with my use of mild profanity in one of last week’s posts. It read like so:

Et tu, Joe?

“Though Saccharomyces cerevisiae is one bad M.F. microbe,….”
Oh Joooooooooe! It seems there are fewer and fewer places we can go without the “cool” language. M.F. microbe? Well, in the land of casual, pervasive pornography, I suppose we should think of this as just a mild nothing. Frankly, I think the bad language trend smells like that bad starter you described.

Fr. Stephen

Being a former altar boy, this kind of criticism cuts deeply. However I was pleased that my friend noticed the difference between myself and most other bloggers out there. Namely, that I don’t “work blue”, and not just because my mother is a reader. I generally only lapse into scatology for comedic effect, but here it seems my poor attempt at an homage to the movie Shaft fell flat.

It reminds me of my grade school days back home in Chicago. My buddy Dennis and I were serving 6:30 A.M. mass before school, something none of us very much liked to do, since it required getting up at “dark thirty” (as they say here in Kentucky) then rushing home for breakfast and back before the bell rang. One day, out of either fatigue or boredom, Dennis and I decided we’re wear our black cassock gowns backwards for a lark. No one usually came to mass at that hour, so who would really notice? Turns out our old-school cigar-chewing South side pastor Father Lence noticed, and we found ourselves serving 6:30 mass every day that week. I’ve never crossed the clergy since.

As it happens, Dennis is a priest himself now. I myself came close by becoming a food blogger.