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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK232 Jack FritscherHim up to the parapet and showed Him the whole world and said, %u201cAll this can be Yours if You will fall down and worship me.%u201dI began to nibble at the world. Tiny bites. Baby steps toward everything forbidden to a pious seminarian. I had changed movies like a doublefeature. Good-bye, Misery with co-hit, Hello, Life. I remembered how the panicked priests had turned off the projector and ripped off the reel of Auntie Mame while all the boys were laughing at her yelling, %u201cLife is a feast and most poor suckers are starving to death.%u201dTo try life on for size, I read each billboard and movie marquee along the way. I sopped up the way of the world, the way it walked down the street, or shifted lanes with one arm and no backward glance. Clark Gable had died, like Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift, after the three of them filming The Misfits. Jack was gone. James Dean was gone. Hemingway was gone. Marilyn, Monty, and Gable were gone. Gable was the man%u2019s man women loved and men wanted to be like. Same as Jack Kennedy. Suddenly, all the grown-up people were dead. My little world shifted crazily on top of the great shifting shelves of the big world. Something was happening. Outside Misery, the world was picking up speed. The world needed new people. No more misfits. I bought the long-play album, Meet the Beatles, because it was new and an antidote against the universal sadness after Jack%u2019s assassination. John and Paul and George and Ringo made me happy. %u201cI Want to Hold Your Hand!%u201d Rector Karg would ban them.I asked our parish pastor, Father Gerber, could I go to the Varsity Theatre on the Bradley University campus. %u201cIt%u2019s an art theatre.%u201d%u201cThey show condemned movies.%u201d he said. %u201cBut with your education, you can go if you go in the side door, so as not to give scandal to people who might not know what you understand. People will never forget,%u201d he said, %u201cthat you were nearly a priest. You must conduct your life with that caution.%u201dIn one week, I saw The Longest Day, Long Day%u2019s Journey into Night, and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.%u201cI can%u2019t,%u201d Annie-Laurie said, %u201ckeep it straight where you%u2019re going.%u201d%u201cThey%u2019re wonderful black-and-white movies about life.%u201d%u201cBe careful of movies about life.%u201dI grew hungry for humans. I want to hold your hand. I wanted to see people wearing tweeds and corduroy and the foreign black sheen of faille and the weightless blue of nylon tricot. I smelled the world up close in the warm fragrant female smell entwined in long loose hair, bare scented arms pulled warm from greatcoats. I dreamed of the world applauding exhibits and lectures and theatres, till all its clapping became concerted