N O T E S “Security”: Pancakes and decapitated rooster are courtesy of Jay’sJournalof Anomalies by Ricky Jay, sideshow historian and American master of sleight-of-hand. The phrase “a verbal error” is borrowed from W. H. Auden’s great wartime sonnet “Embassy.” “Ephebiphobia”: Several years ago the Los Angeles Times ran an article on the psychological condition known as ephebiphobia—an extreme fear of the young. It included the poem’s epigraph, taken from the television program Minutes II. “Arriving Late at the Birthplace of Pentecostalism”: The religious movement known as Pentecostalism began improbably in a tiny bungalow at N. Bonnie Brae Street in Los Angeles on April , . On that evening, a black, one-eyed preacher named William J. Seymour led a group of congregants in a prayer service so fervent that several people began to speak or sing in tongues for the first time (the front porch of the house collapsed under the ecstatic weight). Seymour, the son of freed slaves, soon became both beloved and reviled in Jim Crow Los Angeles as news spread of his growing congregation of whites, blacks, and Latinos. On April , , The Los Angeles Daily News ran these headlines: “Weird Babel of Tongues” and “New Sect of Fanatics Breaking Loose.” “It is Good to Be amongst Catholics Again”: In the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles, two scarlet cardinals’ hats hang on wires suspended feet above the altar sanctuary. The phrases “tentacular metropolis” and “urbanized zones of recent creation” are from Reverend Guy Oury’s The Mass. “Mollie Fancher, Marvelous Invalid, Lives without Food!”: Mollie Fancher was Victorian America’s most famous “fasting girl” and the frequent subject of newspaper articles. From , when she was in a Brooklyn horsecar accident, to , when she died, Fancher took to her bed claiming to live without eating. Like “holy anorexics” before her, Fancher also claimed spiritual and psychic powers—second sight—during a time when Spiritualism captivated Americans devastated by civil war and rattled by rapid technological progress. (One prescient writer of the time called the condition “American Nervousness.”) The bottom line: Fancher required constant care though her doctors could find nothing wrong with her. Michelle Stacey’s The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery provided source information. Barresi pages:Layout 1 5/12/10 1:44 PM Page 97 “Don’t Leave Me This Way”: “St. Vincent-St. Mary’s / High School of Excellence in Touchdowns, Foul Shots. . . .” It seems appropriate to note that NBA phenom Lebron James graduated from my rust-belt high school. “New Trousseau”: Emma Hale Smith was the first wife of Joseph Smith. As scribe and translator of the “sacred text” Smith claimed to have received from the angel Moroni, Emma was an essential partner in the founding of Mormonism, but was shunted aside when Smith proposed plural or “celestial” marriage in . As Emma predicted, polygamy was Smith’s downfall. He was tarred and feathered in Nauvoo, Illinois. In a mob stormed the prison where he was being held and killed him. Emma went on to play an important role in the establishment of the Church of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah, which finally renounced polygamy in . “A Selective History of Los Angeles, in Seven Turns”: Frank Keating, appointed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to head a review board examining child sexual abuse by priests, noted wryly, “the Los Angeles diocese has been less than open, less than honest” in its handling of the scandal, which continues to bedevil Cardinal Roger Mahony, who, despite a landmark settlement with abuse victims, refuses to open the personnel files of predatory priests still under investigation. “Spirit Photograph”: Two books were essential to the making of this poem, Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography, by Martyn Jolly, and The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, a catalogue issued for the photographic exhibition of the same name shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in . “Motion Picture and Television Arts Home for the Aging”: non omnis moriar—“I shall not wholly die.” The nursing home was established by the Hollywood entertainment community to care for the pioneers of film and television who were often, in their old age, penniless. The home is in my neighborhood, on a street named Spielberg Way. Barresi pages:Layout 1 5/12/10 1:44 PM Page 98 ...