Maria Teresa Teresa Maria
Laurie Anderson

Last spring, I spent a week in a convent in the Midwest. I'd been invited there to do a series of seminars on language. They'd gotten my name from a list in Washington, from a brochure that described my work as €œdeals with the spiritual issues of our time€, undoubtedly a blurb I had written myself.
Because of this, and also because men were not allowed to enter the convert, they asked me to come out. The night I arrived, they had a party for me in a nearby town, in a downstairs lounge of a crystal lane's bowling alley.

The alley was reserved for the nuns, for their Tuesday night tournaments; it was a pizza party. And the lounge was decorated to look like a cave: every surface was covered with that spray-on rock that's usually used for soundproofing. In this case, it had the opposite effect: it amplified every sound.

Now the nuns were in the middle of their annual tournament playoffs. And we could hear all the bowling balls rolling very slowly down the aisles above us, making the rock club stalactites tremble and resonate.

Finally the pizza arrived, and the mother superior began to bless the food. Now this woman normally had a gruffed low-pitched speaking voice but as soon as she began to pray he voice rose, became pure, bell-like, like a child's. The prayer went on and on increasing in volume each time a sister got a strike, rising in pitch €œDear Father in Heaven€.

The next day I was scheduled to begin this seminar on language. I'd been very struck by this prayer and I wanted to talk about how women's voices rise in pitch when they're asking for things, especially from men. But it was odd. Every time I set a time for the seminar, there was some reason to postpone it: the potatoes had to be dug out, or a busload of old people would appear out of nowhere and have to be shown around.

So I never actually did the seminar. But I spent a lot of time there, walking around the grounds and looking at all the crops, which were all labeled. And there was also a neatly laid-out cemetery, hundreds of identical white crosses in rows, and there were labeled €œMaria€, €œTeresa€, €œMaria Teresa€, €œTeresa Maria€, and the only sadder cemetery I saw was last summer in Switzerland. And I was dragged there by a Hermann Hesse fanatic, who had never recovered from reading ###130414, and one hot August morning when the sky was quiet, we made a pilgrimage to the cemetery; we brought a lot of flowers and we finally found his grave. It was marked with a huge fur tree and a mammoth stone that said €œHesse€ in huge Helvetica bold letters. It looked more like a marquee than a tombstone. And around the corner was this tiny stone for his wife, Nina, and on it was one word: €œAuslander€ €” foreigner. And this made me so sad and so mad that I was sorry I'd brought the flowers. Anyway, I de! cided to leave the flowers, along with a mean note, and it read:

Even though you're not my favorite writer, by long shots, I leave these flowers on your resting spot.


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Lyrics by Laurie Anderson

  A Curious Phenomenon   Another Day in America   Baby Doll   Babydoll   Bagpipe Solo   Beautiful Pea Green Boat   Beautiful Red Dress   Beginning French   Big Science   Blue Lagoon   Bodies In Motion   Born, Never Asked   Bright Red   Broken   Cartoon Song   City Song   Classified   Closed Circuits   Coolsvile   Coolsville   Dance of Electricity   Dark Angel   Dark Time In The Revolution   Day The Devil   Democratic Way   Difficult Listening Hour   Dream Before   EngliSH   Example #22   Excellent Birds   Falling   False Documents   Finnish Farmers   Four, Three, Two, One   Frames For The Pictures   Free Fall   Freefall   From The Air   Gravity's Angel   Hey Ah   Hiawatha   I Dreamed I Had To Take A Test   In Our Sleep   In Our Sleep [Instrumental][Mix]   It Tango   It Was Up In The Mountains   John Lilly   Kokoku   Language is a Virus   Langue D'amour   Late Show   Let X = X   Let X=X   Life on a String   Lighting Out For The Territories   Looking For You; Walking And Falling   Love Among The Sailors   Mach 20   Monkey's Paw   Muddy River   My Compensation   My Eyes   My Right Eye   New Jersey Turnpike   New York Social Life   Night In Baghdad   O Superman   O Superman (For Massenet)   Odd Objects   On The Way To Jerusalem   One Beautiful Evening   One White Whale   Only an Expert   Over The River   Pieces and Parts   Poison   Poison [Instrumental][Mix]   Private Property   Puppet Motel   Ramon   Red Hot   Same Time Tommrow   Same Time Tomorrow   Say Hello   Sharkey's Day   Sharkey's Day (Single Edit)   Sharkey's Night   Slip Away   Smoke Rings   So Happy Birthday   Someone Else's Dream   Song For Two Jims   Speak My Language   Speechless   Speechless (The Eagle and the Weasel)   Statue of liberty   Steven Weed   Stiff Neck   Strange Angels   Strange Perfumes   Structuralist Filmmaking   Sweaters   Talk Normal   Talkshow   Telephone Song   The Beginning of Memory   The Big Top   The Cultural Ambassador   The Day the Devil   The Dream Before   The Dream Before (for Walter Benjamin)   The End Of The World   The Geographic North Pole   The Guests   The Healing Horn   The Hollywood Strangler   The Island Where I Come From   The Lake   The Language Of The Future   The Mailman’s Nightmare   The Mysterious "J"   The Mysterious \   The Mysterious "J"   The Night Flight From Houston   The Ouija Board   The Puppet Motel   The Rotowhirl   The Salesman   The Soul Is A Bird   The Stranger   The Ugly One With The Jewels   The Visitors   Thinking Of You   Three Songs For Paper, Film And Video   Three Walking Songs   Tightrope   Time And A Half   Transitory Life   Turning Time Around [Lou Reed]   Voices On Tape   Walk The Dog   Walking & Falling   Walking & Falling   Walking Falling   Washington Street   White Lily   Word Of Mouth   World Without End   Yankee See

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