Today we honor Saint Mary Magdalene (died first century). In the Gospel of Luke, she is identified as a woman who had seven devils cast out of her by Jesus; and in the Gospel of John, she is the first witness to the Resurrection. One tradition holds that she lived the rest of her life in Ephesus (now in Turkey), with the Blessed Virgin Mary; but another tradition (which says she is Mary of Bethany) went to Provence (France) with her brother Lazarus. Pope Gregory the Great made a speech in 591 where he seemed to combine the actions of three women mentioned in the New Testament and also identified an unnamed woman as Mary Magdalene. He stated that she was a prostitute. This erroneous view was not corrected until 1969 when the Vatican issued a quiet retraction. An amazing amount of legend and literature surrounds the person of Mary Magdalene; but I will confine myself to the tradition which says that that following the death and resurrection of Jesus, she used her position to gain an invitation to a banquet given by Emperor Tiberius. When she met him, she held a plain egg in her hand and exclaimed “Christ is risen!” Caesar laughed, and said that Christ rising from the dead was as likely as the egg in her hand turning red while she held it. Before he finished speaking, the egg in her hand turned a bright red, and she continued proclaiming the Gospel to the entire imperial house. She is the Patron Saint of penitent women, of reformed prostitutes, and of women in general.
First, I forgot to mention an incident Richard heard about yesterday at the casino; on Monday, a woman had missed her bus to get back home, and was quite irate. She was hanging around the hotel lobby when a man came in to register, leaving his Hummer running outside; she then ran outside, jumped in the Hummer, and took off in it. One can only wonder what she was thinking; being charged with a felony for car theft is not an appropriate response to missing your bus back to Texas. (I hope she won enough during her time at the casino to hire a very good lawyer.) Also, I forgot to mention that the New Moon arrived last night at 9:35 am.
After my day yesterday of being up for some 22 hours, I slept this morning until morning was over, waking up at 12:00 noon on the dot. Before I woke up, Richard had gone out, and while he was out he mailed my birthday cards out for me. (Thank you, Richard.) When I emerged into the front room, Richard and I went out to eat Chinese for lunch; then, upon returning home, I read the morning paper. While reading the paper, I got a phone call from the psychiatrist’s office, and they gave me an appointment date and time of Friday, August 21, at 5:45 pm. I then went out to get my lottery tickets for tonight’s drawing.
For the rest of the afternoon and evening, I was on the computer working on my weblog and on my books via my Goodreads site. I did finish my Weblog tasks, but did not finish what I was working on regarding my Goodreads project; however, I did add a new friend to my Goodreads list (one of the people from the Third Tuesday Book Club).
For dinner, after my daughter arrived home from work (and after she went back again to the grocery where she works, for French bread) we had barbecued shrimp for dinner at 8:30 pm, and the three of us agreed that it was a very good meal. Now it is almost 10:30 pm, so it’s high time for me to abandon the Internet and this Daily Update, and to go do some reading while I take a bath.
Tomorrow I will be doing my laundry and doing the TV scheduling; I hope to also do some more Goodreads housekeeping online, if I don’t abandon the computer altogether and watch television instead.
Our Parting Quote today comes to us from Estelle Getty, American actress in film, theatre, and television. Born Estelle Scher in New York City, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Poland who worked in the glass business, she got her start in the Yiddish theater and also as a comedienne in the Catskills borscht belt resorts; among her most notable stage roles was as Harvey Fierstein’s mother in Torch Song Trilogy during its original Broadway run in 1982. She stood only four foot ten and a half inches, which limited her acting roles. She was best known for her role as Sophia Petrillo on the popular 1980s sitcom The Golden Girls. Her character was the wise-cracking Sicilian mother of Dorothy Zbornak, played by Beatrice Arthur (the other main characters being played by Betty White and Rue McClanahan); in real life, Getty was in fact one year younger than Arthur. Getty won an Emmy Award in 1988 for Outstanding Supporting Actress. During her time on the The Golden Girls, she wrote an autobiography, with Steve Delsohn, titled If I Knew Then, What I Know Now… So What? (1988). In 1991, as later reported in Star magazine, Getty helped to nurse her 29-year-old nephew Steven Scher, who was near death and suffering from the final stages of AIDS. Because Scher’s parents lived in England and his friends were no longer able to care for him in Greensboro, North Carolina, Getty had him flown to California and admitted to hospice care; he died in January 1992. In 1992 she won the dubious award of Worst Supporting Actress for Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992) at the Golden Raspberry Awards. In 1993 she released an exercise video for senior citizens. In 2000, Getty stopped making public appearances after revealing she had Parkinson’s disease and osteoporosis. In 2002, media reports claimed she was also suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Doctors later discovered she actually had Lewy body dementia; both the Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diagnoses were incorrect. In 2003, Lifetime television hosted a Golden Girls reunion, but Getty did not appear due to her failing health (died 2008): “Age does not bring you wisdom, age brings you wrinkles.”
From The Recamier 
When I was 17, a dentist, looking at x-rays during an exam, said, “With age come wisdom teeth…”