Darlings, We Found This Week's Bitch By A Miracle!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Any of my girls who have been with me up till now know how much I simply ADORE the movie "The Song Of Bernadette." Ever since I first saw it on Holy Saturday night, 1968, at age 13, it has cast a spell on me. The adversity the 14 year old Bernadette Soubirous (Jennifer Jones in her stunning Academy Award winning performance) faces, and the courage with which she meets that adversity, is one of the factors that got me through that adversity of Life called My Adolescence. So I have a lot to be grateful for, regarding this film, not to mention it is so handsomely filmed, photographically stunning, almost shot by shot, that one cannot get enough of viewing it. And to see it on the screen--darlings, if you are privleged to have THAT experience, it is akin to Bernadette having a vision. When I had that experience on Sunday, May 8, 2,008 at the Walter Reade Theater in New York (a day indelible in MY memory), it was true, as the film's original publicity says that I "touched the Eternal Truth....the final fulfillment...of everything I am, or ever hope to be." Now why, you may rightly ask, am I waxing rhapsodic over a spiritual film when I am supposed to be writing a Bitch Of The Week column???? Do any of my girls doubt moi, the Raving Queen????????? I hope not!!!!!!!!!!!! Because, in addtion to all I have sound about the film hitherto, "The Song Of Bernadette" contains one of the great bitches of all time--Sister Marie Therese Vazous, as portrayed by that great British character actress, Gladys Cooper, in her Oscar nominated performance. Honey, this Sister is one tough bitch!!!!!!!! As shot by Arthur Miller, she is tall and unyielding, with piercing eyes. She terrifies her students with a look and a word, and her inflexibility is such that the higher echelons in the Catholic Church, even today, would approve. I have to say, the Church bureauacracy does not come off well in this film-- a radical enough notion for its time-- or even ours. When Sister Vazous asks, "What is the Holy Trinity??? I SAID--WHAT IS THE HOLY TRINITY???" you had damn well better know the answer. This was what REAL nuns were once thought of as being. In the Franz Werfel book, she takes Catholic suffering to an Almighty extreme--there is an episode where she sleeps each night, next to a bedside table on which she has placed a suculent, ripe peach, and she forces herself to stay awake, staring at the literally Forbidden Fruit, in an effort to resist temtation. This is one High and Mighty Nun, girls!!!!!!! She thinks she is so great, so when Bernadette starts relating what has been going on at the grotto, she unleashes the ice in her veins, subjecting her to ridicule and persecution. As the film would have it, she pursues poor Bernadette throughout most of her life; even in the Convent of the Sisters Of Charity at Nevers, Vazous is there, riding poor Bernadette at every turn. Seems she thinks she is more worthy of a Heavenly Visitation than young Bernadette. Her speech on this is Classic Catholicism 10l-- "What do you know of suffering? Throughout our sacred history, the chosen ones have always been those who have suffered. Yes, I know what it is to suffer. Because I knmow it is the only true road to Heaven. Why should God choose you? Why not me? Look at my eyes. They burn like the very fires of Hell. Why? Because they need sleep. They need rest, which I will not give them. My throat is parched from constant prayer. My hands are gnarled from serving God in humiliation. My body is pain wrecked from stone floors. And if I, who have tortured myself, cannot hope to glimpse the Blessed Virgin, how can you, who have never felt pain, claim to have seen her?" Smart Miss, this nun! Thinks she is pretty top stuff! But how the mighty do fall, because, before you know it, Bernadette shows her the truth--she has been suffering in silence--something I certainly cannot do, loves!--with a cancerous tumor on the knee and tuberculosis of the bone, from which both she eventually dies. Sister Vazous sees the Light, and repents. Before you know it she is carrying Bernadette around. To this day I cannot imagine how the diminutive Gladys Cooper was able to do the scene where she is seen carrying Jennifer Jones, who was a pretty statuesque 5'8". But carry her she does, as she makes good her promise to serve this chosen soul the rest of her days. But not before she has scared everyone around her as one of the Great Screen Bitches!!!!!!!!! So for this we salute Sister Vazous, and Gladys Cooper, as this week's Bitch Of The Week!!!!!!!!!!! You damn well better study your Catechism, loves!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!