Adventure at Our Lady of Victory Basilica

 

On Assumption Thursday, a couple of days ago, I found myself at Our Lady of Victory Basilica, pictured above. It is one of my favorite places in the world. For one thing, things always happen to me when I am there.

Everyone has places like that. It does not have to be some place exalted, either. Another place where things always happen to me is Gates Circle Liquor. It is one reason I do not go there that often. Something always happens to me and you are not always in the mood for that.

But anyway. I was in OLV for Assumption. By the way that is my own photo at the top of this post! I never get over that place.

It was a great experience from the word go, this being Buffalo.

The church was crowded, for one thing. I remember not long ago when holy days were not crowded. It says something about how committed people are these days. It is really a new era.

The people who were there — and there were tons of them, you need tons to build critical mass in massive Our Lady of Victory — were really with the program, too. They were alert and paying attention and clearly involved and reverent. These are the people who made it through Covid and through the priest scandal and through various rounds of church closings and we are still with it, damn the torpedoes. It wasn’t all old people either. I mean, middle of the day, you get a lot of retired folks, however young people are very involved and it is great to see. Which reminds me, there was one baby who kept yelling “Amen!” LOL!

So… what happened to me? I told you things always happen to me.

I ran into my childhood friend Patricia Murphy!

Patricia lived down the street from me. She and her sister Sally were at the Mass and they came over and said hello to me afterwards. Sally, whom I love, we run into each other now and then. Always under insane circumstances — like once, our congregation at St. Anthony’s was doing a procession, for Corpus Christi or something like that. And Sally happened to be passing in her car. And she pulled over and parked and got out and joined the procession! And came back to church and prayed with us afterwards. What a cool person.

But Patricia, I had not seen her in I do not know how long. Decades. Maybe not since I was a kid. used to go over to the Murphys' when we were kids. Patricia was more or less my age and I would spend hours over there with her. That is another story for another day. It is a beautiful story. Maybe I will tell it tomorrow.

But today, what a joy it was to see her! We are going to reconnect online.

Quick other story, because it is just so Buffalo.

The organist at Our Lady of Victory, God love him, did “Immaculate Mary” as the opening hymn and “Hail, Holy Queen” as the closing. Note to non-Catholics … those are THE two hymns you have to sing when it is a Mary feast.

However fie on the organist, he cut us off after one single verse of “Hail Holy Queen.” SO disappointing! This is a magnificent hymn — it ranks up there with “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name” as the Catholic national anthem — and everyone loves singing it. It is hard to find a decent YouTube video of it. They are all too stodgy, too kitschy, too amateur, too something. However here is one that seems to date to today. I am not sure where it was in the world, but look at the choir singers’ faces. They love it!

We loved singing it today too at Our Lady of Victory. The girl in the pew in front of me was singing along too. She had a great voice. I heard her singing the Communion hymn, “Gift of Finest Wheat.” That is not a hymn I really know or care for, so I was not singing it, however I heard her singing it, and she sounded great.

When we came to the disappointing early end of “Hail, Holy Queen” there was a moment before the organist began playing his recessional. And I took that moment to complain.

I said to this lady: “I wanted to sing the second verse!”

She said: “So did I! I wanted to sing it, too!”

I said: “You have a beautiful voice. I heard you singing ‘Gift of Finest Wheat.’”

She said: “Thank you!”

I yakked on: “I sing at St. Anthony’s, with the ladies’ group there. If you ever wanted to join us, you would be most welcome.”

She said: “Oh, I couldn’t sing Latin.”

I was wearing a veil which is probably how she figured Latin might come into this.

I said. “You just did!”

She stared at me.

I sang, “Salve, salve, salve Regina!”

Ha, ha! That is of course the rousing last line of "Hail, Holy Queen."

She will likely never join our group at St. Anthony’s. However we shared a laugh. 

And as far as her joining our group, you never know.

You never, never know!

 

 

An epic Palm Sunday

This morning I sang in the choir of St. Louis Church -- remember when I joined? It was quite the adventure then and it has only gotten better. Above is a photo one of my friends in the Alto section took of me on her phone as I was looking down admiring the church. I cannot get over how beautiful it all is!

Today being Palm Sunday we sang "All Glory, Laud, and Honor." That is the traditional Palm Sunday hymn. You may not deviate from it, not that we would want to.

The organ that accompanied us this morning!

Our choir director and organist, the great Frank Scinta, he pulled out all the stops. I mean it was as if we were in a movie. An epic movie. He is improvising this, too. He is pulling it out of his head. It is not as if you can go out and get this arrangement. 

I am sure that nobody in the entire world heard an "All Glory, Laud, and Honor" remotely like ours!

Oh, brother. I wanted to put the video on the Web log however the person in charge of the live stream is not letting me do it. So here is a link to the video.

"All Glory, Laud and Honor" begins right about 16:20. Actually a bit after that, however tune in at 16:20 so you can hear the announcer announcing it... "Number 97, on page 120," as if it is just another hymn, on just another Sunday. It is not!

That fanfare that introduces it!

It was like "The Ten Commandments"!

Then Scinta just takes off with his improvisations. We were so dazzled in the alto section we were all just smiling dazedly.

It is hard to get it across just in a video. I should have been recording it up in the choir loft. The volume of it, you can't imagine. Like an ocean wave. Here is where I wish it were a Latin Mass, where I also sing. This kind of church, this kind of music, calls for incense and pageantry. 

I recommend you watch the entire video because all the music was interesting. The Mass ended with the spiritual "Were You There." It was very quiet compared with "All Glory, Laud and Honor" -- in between of course you have gone through the entire Passion, and everything feels different. I was crying in "Were You There" and I was not the only one.

An epic Palm Sunday, as I said to one of my friends.

A Mass to remember!

Sweet Sunday

It is suddenly Advent! The season sneaks up on you.

And this year it was even more so with the election and everything. I was so out of it that I was shocked, shocked I tell you, to see those purple vestments this morning at church, and the Advent wreath.

And the Advent readings!

Some of the best lines in all of Scripture are read on the first Sunday of Advent.

Excita, quaesumus, Domine, potentiam tuam ... That means "Stir up thy power, O Lord." That is why this Sunday is Stir Up Sunday, the day when you are supposed to stir up your fruitcakes and puddings so they will be ready in time for Christmas.

Ad te levavi animam meam,.. "To Thee have I lifted up my soul." This is all so great.The Gospel is Jesus saying, "There will be signs in the sun and the moon, and the stars, and upon the earth distress of nations, by reason of the confusion of the roaring of the sea, and of the waves..." And you are standing there thinking, as every generation since then has thought: This is it. We are in this time.

At the end of Mass we got to sing "Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel." The greatest hymn.



 And in the Epistle, from St. Paul: "The night is passed and the day is at hand. Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and put on the armour of light." That is thrilling and really does make me want to be less of a schlep.

And later St. Paul includes a word that I love.

It is chambering!

As in: "Let us walk honestly, as in the day, not in rioting and drunkkenness, not in chambering and impurities..."

A great word, chambering. One that we should bring back if you ask me. And the Latin is even better.

It is cubilibus!

St. Paul said nothing specifically about overeating and so after Mass I unveiled with pride this gigantic rich coffee cake I had made. I have a picture but it will have to wait because I cannot get it out of my phone. This is one I made a few weeks ago and it was bigger than this one, just to give you an idea.

St. Paul said nothing about pride either so I am in the clear.

The morning was not perfect. For one thing it was my turn to bring food to the priests we are lucky enough to have in residence at St. Anthony's. That resulted in several "I Love Lucy" situations. And there was yet another when I spilled my coffee -- What was with me? I never spill my coffee! Well, that will have to be a separate story for another day.

For now I am off to cast off the works of darkness. And put on the armor of light.

And, oh yes, stir up those fruitcakes.

Sunday in the park with Houston

This was a wonderful Sunday for music. I went to Jazz at the Albright-Knox and heard Houston Person. A saxophonist I love!

That is the great man in the picture up above. As I wrote in my review in The Buffalo News, he kind of whispers into that saxophone.



Another highlight for music was that at church today we got to sing a great old chestnut nobody ever gets to sing. It is "Daily, Daily Sing to Mary."

This hymn is so old and out of fashion that I never sang it growing up and I do not know the words. I have to follow along. It was always looked on as being out of date. My dad told me that when he was a boy they used to abbreviate it laughingly as "Da, Da, Sing to Ma."

But it is a beautiful melody.



 It is hard to find a recording because if you look for it on YouTube most people use the old German hymn tune "Maria zu lieben," which is equally beautiful ....

  .

... but is not the hymn I am looking for.

Another problem is it is hard to find any Catholic hymn recording that does not sound kitschy or weird. A lot of the time you start to listen and you hear some guitar chords and go ... uh uh. We have that big problem in the Catholic Church with bad music directors. I was one of them for a long time, so I am not throwing stones, but it is a problem, is all I am saying.

Ha, ha! I remember someone asking me once if I had heard, I don't know, "Table of Plenty," something like that.

I said: "Heard it? I've played it!"

Not only that, but even worse, I've played it on a piano!

And sung it into a microphone!

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, as Pennario used to say.

Back to my Sunday. I ended it at my friend Gary's house because it is his birthday, not that we need any excuse to go over to Gary's. The great cabaret artist Guy Boleri played the piano and because it was Gary's birthday we were able to use that as leverage to get Guy to do "Mad Dogs and Englishmen Go Out in the Noonday Sun." And Gary had garlic wine. But that is another story for another day.

How is Monday going to top all this?

I will have to figure out something!

5 things about my grandfather

July 5 was my grandfather's birthday and I always think of him even though he died when I was 9. I will get sentimental again in a few days when it is Leonard Pennario's birthday. Pennario's birthday is July 9.

Anyway, about my grandfather. A few details:

1. He loved the Fourth of July. My dad, his son, would always tell us this. Boppa, as we called my grandfather, always knew where to get the best fireworks and he would amass a huge stash. My dad's mother would pull the kids aside and warn them. She would make them count their fingers and make them promise that after the fireworks they still would have all 10 of them.

2. His favorite hymn was "O Lord I Am Not Worthy."



The person who made that video got it wrong in that "O Lord I Am Not Worthy" is not Gregorian chant. But it is a very pretty hymn.

3. Where secular songs were concerned he liked the hits of the Gay '90s, when he was a boy. "After the Ball" fell into this category. And "The Bowery."



How about that? I have not heard that song since my grandfather was alive and here I am listening to it. That was the song, all right! We used to make him sing it.

4. Boppa had been a haberdasher. In May, in The Buffalo News, I wrote a story about my grandmother and the wonderful gift she left me. My grandmother died decades before he did. In her recipe scrapbook she had written she was "the wife of George Kunz, the famous haberdasher." I loved that.

5. I saved the best for last! When I was a little girl Boppa would babysit us and my dad would come up and kiss me goodnight as I lay sleeping and he would smell whiskey on my breath.

Yep, my grandfather gave me whiskey.

No wonder I loved him!

Alleluia, alleluia, let the holy cupcakes rise

I am in my second childhood and am making cupcakes for Easter.

These were from Martha Stewart February 2009 and  the issue is all blotted with butter and cocoa. When I was frosting them I decided to soar like an eagle and crack out my new cake decorating set from Vidler's. I have always wanted to pipe swirls onto cupcakes!

And it was fun. I think I get the gist of it, how to operate this frosting press. It is kind of like a German Spritz press which we used when I was little, that is to say, in my first childhood.

The only trouble was, the press uses an enormous amount of frosting!

I had made a butter cream out of this cupcake cookbook I have, and I had already doubled the recipe because I sensed that the frosting would not go the distance as written. I piled some into the cake decorator piper thing and right away I could tell that it still would not go the distance.

Sure enough, this frosting that I had doubled swirl-frosted maybe five cupcakes! Then it hit bottom.

I could not see redoubling the butter cream frosting recipe. Already I was feeling guilty over the amount of time this was taking. I am supposed to be writing about a certain concert pianist and not blowing three hours making cupcakes, you know? So I ended up using the knife the way I have before. But my vast collection of sprinkles and jimmies from Albrecht Discount make them look pretty cool anyway.

The process was messy and involved.

But fun!

My niece and nephew are in California and do not know what they are missing. I got to lick all the beaters myself and then the spatula.

By the way, for anyone wondering about the title of the post, it is a riff on my favorite Easter hymn -- well, one of them anyway, "Alleluia, Alleluia, Let the Holy Anthem Rise." After Easter Mass I extracted a promise from our organist that we could sing it sometime over the next couple of weeks. She said in two weeks. For the recessional, the only time at Mass when we sing in English.

So, two weeks from today, 9 a.m., St. Anthony of Padua Church. Downtown Buffalo, behind City Hall. "Alleluia, Alleluia, Let the Holy Anthem Rise." Followed by coffee hour.

I will bake cupcakes!

Me and my bad taste

There is bad news about the Paul Hume book on Catholic church music, the book that arrived with the mysterious holy card.

It appears that Paul Hume, former Washington Post music critic, fan of Leonard Pennario and all around brilliant person, and the man in the above photo, used to be Presbyterian before he became Catholic. He has stringent views on Catholic church music and in this book, he makes the case that Catholic church music was in crisis. He appears to be trying to purge the Catholic church of bad music and hymns of bad taste.

Imagine, in the 1950s!!

Little did he know that he was in the kiddie pool!

I would love to know what he thought of some of the songs I grew up with. I am just saying. Mr. Hume, sir, what do you think of "500 Miles," the Peter, Paul and Mary number, sung at Mass? How about "Blowin' in the Wind"?

I hate to think. Meanwhile, it is distressing that in this book, Paul Hume, and I have to be honest, totally blasts some hymns that I hold very dear.

Like "Bring Flowers of the Fairest," the May Crowning hymn.



I figured out that that was Irish, remember? And there it is sung by this wonderful Irish tenor. A recent comment reads: "Frank was from Clonmel, in County Tipperary, and had an amazing voice. He was called Ireland's Golden Tenor."

God rest his soul. As another commenter writes, I hope that in heaven he is singing to Our Lady right now.

Anyway. So that is one song Paul Hume, music critic and Leonard Pennario fan, derides. He also sniffs at "O Lord I Am Not Worthy."

OK, I guess that is corny. But I have memories of my grandfather playing it on his harmonica. My grandfather! When did I even ever mention him on this Web log? I do not think I ever did on account of he died when I was 9.

Sure, in the May Crowning hymn, you get lines like "As long as the azure will keep its bright hue." and I will admit that the words to "O Lord I Am Not Worthy" do run off the rails in the second and third verses. "And humbly I'll receive Thee/The bridegroom of my soul/No more by sin to grieve Thee/Or fly Thy sweet control."

But I am not the only one who loves that hymn, you know? Once my friend Peggy Farrell, the jazz singer, and I were in Toronto and we went to mass and they did "O Lord I Am Not Worthy." Proving, by the way, that Torontonians love that hymn. When they started it we kind of gave each other thumbs up and went, "Yes!!" because both of us love that hymn. I always remember Peggy in the Communion line, singing along with "Or fly Thy sweet control."

You can listen to this controversial hymn here. The video title is wrong. It is not Gregorian Chant. It is however mighty pretty, in my not so humble opinion.



 What else did Paul Hume disdain? There was another one that I really liked. I kept going, "Oh, no, Mr. Hume. Oh, no!"

All of a sudden I am a Catholic of bad taste!

I do wonder though whether being a convert, Paul Hume might not have "gotten" the appeal of some of these melodies we grow up with. Oh, I remember the other one. "'Tis the Month of Our Mother." That is an amazing Mary hymn. Sure, the words can get weird, but they are beautiful songs. To his credit, he does give the thumbs-up to "Daily, Daily Sing to Mary," "Immaculate Mary" and "Hail, Holy Queen." But he misses the appeal of the cornier songs.

Oh well. He and I certainly agree on Leonard Pennario's greatness.

That is what matters!