Sluts are coming! (Let me rephrase that!)

Beantowners! Next month, The Slutcracker is returning to the Somerville Theater for ten shows over two weekends: December 10-13 and 17-20 (Thu-Fri-Sat-Sun @ 8PM and matinees Sun @ 2PM). All tickets are $20. It is, if you don't know, a burlesque parody of The Nutcracker which is joyous and rowdy and very very funny. I saw it last year, and wrote:

The Slutcracker is BRILLIANT. It sold out the main theater at the Somerville, and earned a ten-minute standing ovation from a crowd of hipsters and middle-aged ladies and assorted perverts. [...T]he dancing was really quite lovely and technically adept, with stage combat and on-stage costume changes and hula hoop spinning and belly dancing and whatever else you can think of. [It] manages to be coy and sweet and sexy and hilarious, all in pantomime. [...]

I know you're all sad you missed it last year. Well, now is your chance to atone — I'm going at least once this season, and I know a couple of people out there want to get in on the trip. Anybody else interested? Let me know in comments if you have a preferred date.

Better Lateran than never

Monday, June 29 - Rome

Saint John Lateran is the highest church in Roman Catholicism. #1. El guapo. Most people expect that to be Saint Peter's in the Vatican (at least I did), but the papal cathedra (throne) is here, and that makes it the mother church for all Catholics. Within its ridiculously opulent walls are (ostensibly) the heads of the apostles Peter and Paul, the table at which Jesus ate the Last Supper, and St. Peter's altar, which is built into the high altar, which only the Pope may use (and then only if he's been very good).

The cathedral abuts the city walls of Rome — if you could look over your shoulder, you'd see the Aurelian Wall and the Porta Asinaria ("gate of the donkeys"). (You can see a bit of wall in the lower left, below the umbrella pines.) The orange building is the Lateran Palace, where the popes lived for a thousand years before moving to the Palace of the Vatican. It was a gift to the Bishop of Rome from the emperor Constantine, who aquired it when he married his second wife, Fausta; the palace hosted the bishops when they convened to declare Donatism a heresy in 313. Constantine also built the cathedral, as well as the baptistry next door. The obelisk in front (see below) was built by Thutmose III in the 15th century BC, moved to the Circus Maximus by Constantine's son Constantius II in 357 AD, and erected in front of St. John Lateran by Sixtus V in 1587. (Sixtus V never saw an obelisk he didn't want to move somewhere.)

We were only there by chance — it was a public transportation node, between catacombs and San Clemente. Fortunate fools we. ( Bring me the church of John the Baptist! )

More pix here.