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Barbaro read to me from his new book about a clown not contented just to make people laugh but who dreamed of imparting a lasting joy. “I am this clown,” Barbaro said. “I wish to rejuvenate battered souls.”

Tony plucked his bass, and Paula seemed to know just how to sing Manny to sleep.

At least we weren’t in Baltimore anymore.

Some nights in that motel, just as I was about to fall asleep, I had the most brilliant ideas—bright spheres of weightless jade full of insights you wouldn’t believe. I kept a pen and notebook under my pillow, hoping, just once, to catch even a glimmer of that late-night lucidity, but even with the waking energy it took to sit up, to turn on the fake porcelain lamp, to reach for the pen, the revelation had already floated away like an early-morning dream.

I wrote only: Dazzling.

On the third day of the new year, when the sun finally seared us a path out of there, I don’t think there was even so much as a discussion about whether or not Paula would take the stage. Motel room lullabies just morphed into interstate rehearsals, and interstate rehearsals morphed into the obvious: We had a seventh player.

Paula knew all about her namesake—the legendary saint with the beard, fourteenth-century Spanish gal who’d been pursued by every man in town until one day, at her wit’s end dealing with an overardent suitor, she fled into the local Catholic church and embraced the crucifix, begged her Savior to deliver her from the stalker. Immediately, a beard grew on her face, effectively deterring all present and future men.

“I think beards are sexy,” Magdelena protested when she heard the story. “Especially on girls.”

“What do you think of the whole Catholic theme?” Tony wanted to know.

Paula just laughed. “I’m iron tracks,” she said, “nailed to unforgiving earth.”

And so it was that when we finally rolled into St. Louis for our show at the Hi Pointe Café, iron tracks took her place in the dark, hands clasped in front of her, and as the makeshift spotlight rose, she began to sing.

What I wouldn’t give now to rewind to that uncomplicated night.

Mary Magdalen

(IF YOU NEED FORGIVENESS)

A.K.A. The sinner

FEAST DAY: July 22

SYMBOLS: a mirror, a skull, a scarlet egg

There exists no evidence, scriptural or otherwise, that Mary Magdalen was a whore. The rumors of prostitution were written into Latin tradition some half a millennium after the crucifixion. How’d they do it? And why? Simple. The church took it upon itself to merge the Gospel stories of Mary Magdalen, Mary of Bethany, and an unnamed woman sinner who washed Jesus’s feet with her tears, dried them with her long hair, then anointed them with expensive perfume oil from the Himalayas. Reading into the text that the unnamed sinner was a prostitute (because how else could a girl afford that kind of perfume?) and then inventing the possibility that the three women were one, the church got themselves a high-priced hooker who fell for the Savior, a redeemed whore, a model of repentance weeping guilty-sorry for all female knowledge and sin.

See, the church was on a real antisex kick at the time—what else is new?—and they needed an example of female sexuality reined in. That’s Pope Gregory the Great for you. Even the Vatican has since admitted—albeit in the liturgical equivalent of fine print—that it was all nonsense and conjecture. A smear campaign, really.

Gnostic Gospels, written at the same time as the New Testament but not chosen for inclusion, place Mary Magdalen more constantly at Christ’s side—the thirteenth disciple, Our Savior’s partner and companion, apostle of the apostles, a forceful preacher competing with the guys for leadership in the early church. The New Testament, well edited to leave out anything that might undermine male dominance and church power, mentions only Mary Magdalen’s role in the crucifixion and its aftermath.

According to John, three Marys—Jesus’s mother, aunt, and Magdalen—stood by the execution cross like the old Pagan triple goddess.

On Sunday, Mary Magdalen