This coming Wednesday, August 21 a cover story will appear in the San Diego Reader on songwriter, folksinger, journalist and close friend of Woody Allen, Judy Henske.
The story’s author, Barry Alfonso, found her while doing compilation albums for Rhino Records. Alfonso was Henske’s friend until her death two years ago. Among her effects he found an essay she wrote for the Los Angeles Mission, one of four publications that preceded California Catholic Daily.
From Alfonso’s story:
In between such flights of fancy were slightly moere serious meditations on weighty subjects. In an essay submitted to the Los Angeles Mission (a Catholic monthly), Judy examined her complicated yet unshaken connection to her faith. She contrasted the exalted sights, sounds and scents of a traditional Catholic service with the blandness of modernism (an indicator of “creeping Protestantism”). Judy reveled in the shimmering colors of stained-glass windows, the smell of incense and beeswax, the transformational mystery of worship. She closed with a bohemian’s benediction: “All the old ideals, the places and people and the things that were so new and so perfect to us in childhood, deep in our lives we continue to search for them, and finding them, hold them close until we journey home.”
Read the entire Alfonso cover story on Henske this coming Wednesday, August 21, 12 noon in the digital version of the San Diego Reader.
To listen to Henske’s “Salvation Army Song” click here
To listen to her sing “High Flying Bird” click here
Why this article of the past? The anti-society, anti-Christian, immoral, Godless beatniks, with very little talent and lots of evil, sickness, disorder, and sin, no respect at all for God, religion, or society, were a terrible, highly subversive influence, a curse, an ugly blight on our society and churches– which they so hated. Many were homosexuals (before the word “gay” was invented). They were cheap derelicts in the gutter, untalented, often dirty and scandalous, cheap, immoral songwriters, singers, comics, artists, authors and poets, who reveled in vices of alcohol, marijuana, and smoking, (cigarettes) and sexual immorality, heavily mocking God, religion and society. They were the sick and sinful, smart-aleck, “smarter-than-thou,” anti-siciety, anti-Christian forerunners of the filthy, Godless, immoral 1960s hippies, who tore our society to pieces and wrecked our churches, too. UGH! I so detested them all! Yes, I recall the laughter of the “Salvation Army Song”– “…throw a nickel in the drum, save another drunken bum…” but it really wasn’t funny, it was a terrible mockery of God and Christianity. And it was so pitiful to walk past a serious Salvation Army evangelizer, trying to help the poor at Christmas time, with their famous Red Kettles, ringing Christmas bells, at shopping malls– and to giggle and remember that song– how awful. For that, to this very day, I always give them extra donations, because of the evils of the beatniks mocking them, in that song, and silently praise their good works for Christ. Like St. Mother Teresa, they always ask the “bums in the gutter” that they try to save, to listen to sermons about Christ and Salvation, and they give them each a Bible, along with food and material assistance. Yes, that is the only way to carry out the modern “Social Gospel”– and I always have pointed that out, over the years, in our Catholic Church, which has so often, since the Godless, rebellious 1960s, neglected and abandoned inviting the poor and/or derelicts in the gutter to our churches for Mass, teaching them the Catholic Faith, along with social services work. That is truly God’s work– not just social work– with some seeking and preaching an economic, worldly “utopia,” criticizing our Church and society, since the 1960s, ignoring God and Christ’s holy salvation and Eternal Life, won for us on the holy Cross.
I don’t know much about the folk singer, Judy Henske, but she seems to have been more mildly subversive, not extreme. Not dirty, no glorifying sexual immorality or gayness, no profanity, no drugs, just “bohemian,” more mildly anti-society, anti-Christian. But a Catholic writer? No. Woody Allen (born Jewish) was a substandard, anti-socirty, anti-Christian, sex-obsessed, subversive filmmaker, and a sick, immoral, filthy sex pervert. He had a sexual relationship with an adopted daughter of his and actress Mia Farrow’s (Allen and Farrow never married, but adopted several children together) and Allen later married the girl, who was Korean. He was also accused of molesting another adoptive daughter, and Farrow was accused of child abuse.
It doesn’t sound like the bohemian and beatnik folk singer, Judy Henske, was a practicing or believing Catholic. Why are Catholic readers directed to read her soon-to-be be-re-published online essay, in the “San Diego Reader,” next Wed., Aug. 21st?
In the 1950s, the beatniks’ vulgar poems, books, songs, nightclub acts, etc., were banned. The cops were always after the derelicts, for obscene material, sexual deviance, drug addiction and drug peddling, savagely mocking the Church and our society, trying in every possible way to destroy it. May there be no memory at all of them. And start over, with Christ Our Lord leading the way, in His holy light, love, goodness, holiness, righteousness, and truth. Speech is a responsibility in our society. Respect Christian Love and marriage (one man and one woman) and the precious Gift of children. More than anything, our Western Civilization is in desperate need to humbly repent of sin and return to God, and to Christian marriage with children, and loving, strong family homes, with deep Christian morality, respect and maturity.
The college kids of today, who insist on highly disruptive, reckless, savage demonstrations for the Palestinians, tearing up college campuses, engaging in Anti-Semitic words, speeches and sactivities, harrassing, threatening and persecuting Jewish students, should be strictly warned that so-called “Free Speech” is NOT “free,” it is a responsibility– and Anti-Semitism, and all other types of “Hate Speech,” will result in prosecution and jail time– and permanent expulsion from school. You cannot use your “freedom of speech” to harm others, in America.
I didn’t know Los Angeles had a mission. I’ve heard of San Gabriel and San Fernando missions, and San Juan Capistrano south, but not the Mission Los Angeles. Any help finding it?
The monthly paper did have the website address http://www.losangelesmission.com
Does not seem to work now.
I think that “L.A. Mission” refers to a publication. Not a California mission.