I Can Write The Saddest Poem Of All Tonight. I Loved Her, And Sometimes She Loved Me Too.

Pius XII - the Pope who exploded!

The embalming of Pope Pius XII in October 1958 was so botched by his doctor that this much loved pope exploded while on public view in the Vatican

One of the most botched examples of embalming in history with catastrophic results was that of Pope Pius XII when he died in October 1958. Dead popes are put on display and processed before an elaborate burial. Therefore they need to look presentable. Unfortunately for Pius XII, his doctor was clueless when it came to embalming and made it up as he went along. The result of this? Pope Pius XII…

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Wee Kirk o’ the Heather Wedding Chapel, Las Vegas (1940-2020)

Photo: Undated, mid 50s. ‘51 Studebaker.

This was an adobe home built in the mid 20s at 213 South 5th Street, later 231 Las Vegas Blvd S. When U.S. Route 91 connected through Las Vegas via 5th St in the late 20s, chapels, motels, and other businesses catering to tourists opened along the road.

Mrs. J. Edwards Webb began performing wedding ceremonies in her front room either in the late 30s or early 40s. It came to be known as Webb’s Wedding Chapel and/or Wee Kirk o’ the Heather. According to the chapel when they were still open, “The city decided they needed a business license, so in 1940 they got a license and chose the name Wee Kirk.”

The earliest reference we can find to “Wee Kirk” is a listing in the RJ, 5/5/41. The name might come from the popular Wee Kirk o’ the Heather in Glendale CA, built in the 20s as a replica of a 17th century church in Scotland.

Wee Kirk was modified in the 50s: a steeple was added to the top of the building and the front room was enlarged. Nearby Graceland Chapel aka Gretna Green also started as a home, was converted into a chapel in the same era as Wee Kirk with similar modifications made in the 50s.

Wee Kirk's original sign was remade with neon at some time in the late 40s or early 50s. It was and replaced in the 70s or 80s with a signboard seen in the ‘84 photo below.

Wee Kirk closed during the 2020 pandemic and was demolished 10/3/2020.

Undated circa '40-'43. L.F. Manis Collection, UNLV Special Collections & Archives.

Circa '44

Postcards, circa 40s

Undated photo c. '50

Postcard, circa 60s – with the steeple

4/18/84 – Photo by Jane Kowalewski. Clark County Historic Property, Wee Kirk O' the Heather Wedding Chapel, Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas.

Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

After all, good old Xi said he might consider not sending the US all the components they are so heavily dependent on anymore… so…

To ravish

It is easy to make light of this kind of “writing,” and I mention it specifically because I do not make light of it all: it was at Vogue that I learned a kind of ease with words (as well as with people who hung Stellas in their kitchens and went to Mexico for buys in oilcloth), a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as tools, toys, weapons to be deployed strategically on a page. In a caption of, say, eight lines, each line to run no more or less than twenty-seven characters, not only every word but every letter counted. At Vogue one learned fast, or one did not stay, how to play games with words, how to put a couple of unwieldy dependent clauses through the typewriter and roll them out transformed into one simple sentence composed of precisely thirty-nine characters. We were connoisseurs of synonyms. We were collectors of verbs. (I recall “to ravish” as a highly favored verb for a number of issues, and I also recall it, for a number of issues more, as the source of a highly favored noun: “ravishments,” as in tables cluttered with porcelain tulips, Faberge eggs, other ravishments.) We learned as reflex the grammatical tricks we had learned only as marginal corrections in school (“there are two oranges and an apple” read better than “there were an apple and two oranges,” passive verbs slowed down sentences, “it” needed a reference within the scan of the eye), learned to rely on the OED, learned to write and rewrite and rewrite again. “Run it through again, sweetie, it’s not quite there.” “Give me a shock verb two lines in.” “Prune it out, clean it up, make the point.” Less was more, smooth was better, and absolute precision essential to the monthly grand illusion. Going to work for Vogue was, in the late nineteen-fifties, not unlike training with the Rockettes. Telling Stories, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Joan Didion.

The anti-social media of a century past. LIFE, December 23, 1926