Saturday, January 04, 2014

First holy communion


Here I am on the day of my first holy communion. I'm the girl on the top row, the one of the far-right, ironically. I saw this photo on an old schoolmate's Facebook page. It's amazing how many of the names of the children I can still remember, including Myron Ptasnick, the third boy from the right on the bottom row, who looked like a blond Woody Allen even in second grade, and Beth-Anne Finklestein, the girl on the bottom row far-right. I don't think her family was Catholic, I think they sent her to Our Lady of Fatima because it was the next-best thing to a private school in the area.

The lady on the left in the hat is my second grade teacher, Dolores Bound, who I thought was really cool - she still looks like the mod 60s chick I remember her as.

The tall white-haired priest on the right is the founder of the Our Lady of Fatima parish, Father John Griffin. I believe he was an alcoholic and I remember him getting into a towering red-faced rage during one Friday afternoon Mass - the whole school had a Mass every Friday, because going every Sunday too apparently wasn't enough  - screaming at us children that we weren't saying our prayers loud enough. Because I guess he knew exactly the decibel level required to reach God's ears and we were not hitting it. Ah memories of Catholicism. I was a religious fanatic when I was this age - luckily it wore off in time for adolescence.