This is a caricature of my grade school directress Mother Loreto of the Alcatraz like Dominican Catholic School. When I was seven, I thought nuns were God's interns sent to Earth to spread holy atrocities. I thought they were immortals...angels minus the wings and that funny illuminated ring circling their heads...the type Roby Rosa junkies used to wear in Menudo concerts. One dog day afternoon, I was standing in the school quadrangle alone, the maid 30 minutes late from picking me up, both of my knees smudged with classroom platform filth. Then there she was, a towering 5'10", clad in her immaculate white attire, her smooth veil revealing her pallid face and part of her white earlobes. Then I saw something that scared the hell off me. Her earlobes bore earring holes! Mother Loreto was human! What a cruel trick this dang Catholic School had played on us all.

Then I witnessed her pig out in all of our annual school Christmas parties, wave at the spoiled brats in their neatly pressed uniforms after dismissal time, a nonchalant, listless expression written across her face. Each morning, after the daily rosary, she would proceed to yelling opprobriously at the janitors, her saliva showering down on the pretty heads of Memories of Paradise nodding at her feet. I examined broken Jesus in His cross laying on Mother Loreto's bosom. He looked forlorn--all despondent, all disconsolate. I thought--why it sure is difficult hanging on like that all wounded. On second thought, I pondered, Jesus' sorry disposition was possibly inspired by the toxic combination of Mother Loreto's halitosis and constitutional viciousness.

It was then that I learned my first lesson on irony.