The Balcony Is Empty

After last Sunday's mysterious apparition of a fully-frocked priest performing what looked like a Mass on a neighboring apartment balcony, I promised to check this week to see if it was a weekly ritual. Well, unless it took place early in the morning -- I stayed late at a friend's birthday party the night before and didn't get up until 10 -- there was no ceremony this weekend. The balcony still contained no pulpit and no hanging incense censer, though there are still some wooden church pews out there.

Perhaps the priest only ventures out on warm Sundays, like one of those figures that emerges from the little doors in a cuckoo clock when the atmospheric conditions are right. I prefer to think that he doesn't live there at all, but had been summoned to perform a one-time ritual. Perhaps the walls had started to seep blood or bulge with the trapped souls of disco-era Hustle dancers, or the building itself had been constructed over an ancient Mewok burial ground, and the priest had been contracted by the Vatican to perform a one-time exorcism -- and clean up the pea soup.