Jesus and the Colonic Booth

Thirty Years Ago
Four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon is perhaps not the most convenient time for a concert; the wooden pews in USD’s Camino Hall are surely a minatory foretaste of Hell; and during Father Nicolas Reveles’s piano recital, the distant barbarisms of rock music kept drifting in like a flock of midges, especially during the most mystically hushed passages. Yet Father Reveles’s playing of Schubert and Schumann was so ravishing that one could have endured far greater discomfort for its sake.
— “KEYS TO THE KINGDOM,” Jonathan Saville, October 2, 1980

Twenty-Five Years Ago
Was there a plan to make San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium a rotating field? I remember that the stadium was to be round, and the field would have spun at three miles per hour or something. Everybody would have had seats on the fifty-yard line!
Allan Richards, Escondido

I think your imagination has rotated your brain right off this planet, Al. I’ve never heard of such a scheme.

Perhaps you’re confusing it with the plans for a floating stadium, which were seriously contemplated. That plan called for two adjoining fields to be connected by moats in which seating sections would be floated into place, depending on the game being played that day.
— STRAIGHT FROM THE HIP, Matthew Alice, October 3, 1985

Twenty Years Ago
My parents never encouraged their children to hop, skip, run, jump, or to be involved in any form of athleticism. Sitting was the preferred mode of getting through the day, with an occasional nod to walking. You may have seen photos and movies in which ghetto children are leaping off piers to swim in filthy city waters or dancing in water unleashed by fire hydrants. But you can be sure that not one of these was me...my family regarded any form of exercise as alien.
— “TO THE BALLET,” Eleanor Widmer, October 4, 1990

Fifteen Years Ago
[Millan] Chessman is nothing if not forthright about her beliefs, and she feels the world would be a better place if more folks were comfortable discussing issues like personal salvation and bowel movements.

“When was the last time,” writes Chessman in Stay Young & Healthy through Internal Cleansing, the book she published this year on colon hydrotherapy, “you said to a friend or family member, ‘Did you have a good bowel movement today? Do you think it all came out?’ Or, ‘You know, my bowels haven’t moved for a few days lately.’ Or, ‘Boy, I sure have a lot of gas today, so look out!’”
— CITY LIGHTS: “JESUS AND THE COLONIC BOOTH,” Abe Opincar, September 28, 1995

Ten Years Ago
My background is sufficiently troubled to make me a sympathetic listener, I think. I’ve struggled through the usual skirmishes with drugs, fate, and my fellow creatures. For several years in my mid-20s, for example, around the time my first marriage foundered, I was convinced that if I took just the right amount of methamphetamine every day, I could inch my way toward becoming the most alert, svelte, inwardly smoldering, profound version of myself possible. The usual wages of this pursuit in terms of damaged health led me to scrap that brilliant plan before I wasted away to an ember.
— ASK AUNT TRUDY, Aunt Trudy, September 28, 2000

Five Years Ago
“There are sheep and there are shepherds,” says wine broker Sean Fisher. “And I consider Bill Boyer” — whose wine bar/wine shop/cigar store the Wine Loft has been open in the Encinitas Forum Mall since March — “more of a shepherd.”

About those demographics: “Have you driven around the new areas up here? It’s unbelievable. Thousands and thousands of new homes, pushing all the way to San Marcos. It’s just an explosion of growth. And it’s families; you would not believe all the strollers that come through here. On one of the first days after we opened, we had two or three strollers lined up against a wall with infants sleeping in them. The moms were at the bar, having a glass of wine.
— CRUSH: “AFFLUENT TRAFFIC,” Matthew Lickona, September 29, 2005