| I used to be Irish Catholic- now I'm an American. | 
| Y'know, you grow....yeah. | 
| I was from one of those Irish neighborhoods in New York. | 
| One of those kind of parish schools. | 
| Wasn't typical. | 
| It
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| was, Corpus Christi was the name of it. | 
| Could have been any Catholic church, right? | 
| "Our Lady of
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| Great Agony" ..."St. | 
| Rita Moreno" ..."Our Lady of Perpetual Motion"- What's the difference what
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| you call it? | 
| The church part and the neighborhood part were typical but the school was not. | 
| It
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| wasn't one of those old fashioned parish kinda prison schools with a lot of corporal punishment
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| and Sister Mary Discipline with the steel ruler, right? | 
| (SMACK!) OOOWWWWW! | 
| MY HAND!
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| AAAAUGGH! | 
| And you'd fall two years behind in penmanship, right? | 
| "Well, he's behind in
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| penmanship, Mrs. Carlin. | 
| I don't know why." He's crippled. He's trying to learn to write with his
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| left hand.
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| We didn't have that. | 
| We got..somehow we got lucky, y'know. | 
| Got into a school where the pastor
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| was kinda into John Dewey and progressive education and he talked the parish...talked the
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| diocese, rather, into, uh, experimenting in our parish with progressive education and whipping
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| the religion on us anyway and see what would happen with the two of them there. | 
| And uh,
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| worked out kinda nice; | 
| there was a lot of classroom freedom. | 
| There was no..for instance, there
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| were no grades or marks, y'know, no report cards to sweat out or any of that. | 
| There were no
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| uniforms. | 
| There were no...there was no sexual segregation; | 
| boy and girls together. | 
| And the desks
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| weren't all nailed down in a row, y'know. | 
| There were movable desks and you had new friends
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| every month. | 
| It was nice; | 
| like I say, a lot of classroom freedom...in fact there was so much
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| freedom that by eighth grade, many of us had lost the faith. | 
| 'Cause they made questioners out of
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| us and, uh, they really didn't have any answers, y'know. | 
| They'd fall back on, "Well, it's a
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| mystery." "Oh, thank you, Father. | 
| I dunno. | 
| What's he talkin' about? | 
| Mystery.
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| Part of "class clown" was being an imitator as you've probably noticed but I used to imitate the
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| priests...which was right on the verge of blasphemy, y'know. | 
| I could do them all rather well. | 
| I did
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| Father Byrne the best. | 
| Father Byrne was the, uh, one who used to celebrate the children's Mass.
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| I always thought that was great - 'celebrate Mass' "Yeaaah! Yeah, man!" | 
| Father Byrne did the
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| children's Mass; | 
| did the sermon every week. | 
| He used to do parables about "Dusty and Buddy".
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| Dusty was a Catholic...and Buddy.....was not. | 
| And Buddy was always trying to talk Dusty into
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| having a hot dog on Friday. |