I like to take something to write on with me to visit my therapist. This morning, I grabbed a clip board with some blank paper on it. I don’t often write anything down but it helps. to be able to do so if something occurs to me.

As my therapist and I were sitting and talking, I noticed that he also had a clip board. So both of us were sitting, facing each other in comfy chairs holding clip boards.

I pointed it out to him and asked if had ever heard of the movies, Zelig. He hadn’t so I describe how Woody Allan made a movie about a Forest Gump-like character who moved from circle to circle and gradually transformed into the person or people he was near.

I find myself thinking about this movie once in a while.

These are all pics from that movie. The following may be my favorite scene.

It’s tough when people who have had such influence on me like Woody Allen, Garrison Keillor, and Bill Cosby have turned out to be creepy.

I can’t watch Cosby any more. But I listen to Keillor’s daily Writer’s Almanac pod cast and still think about many Woody Allen movies.

  The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

  Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

  The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

  The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

  The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

T. S. Eliot, East Coker IV, Four Quartets

Last night’s liturgy went well. The choir came early and prepared. Then later in the liturgy they sang “I give you a new commandment” by William Mundy. It was beautiful.

I just looked on YouTube and couldn’t find a recording I thought was as beautiful as we did last night.

Tonight we are going sing Viadana’s “We adore thee O Christ” as the second Anthem for adoration in the Episcopalian Good Friday service. Usually I would do it in Latin, but since it has a liturgical function in this context and was in English in the Oxford Easy Anthem Book we will sing it English.

Here’s a nice version in Latin.

We’re actually singing it a minor third higher than this recording. We don’t know it quite as well as the Mundy but with a solid pregame it should be quite lovely this evening.