Mr. Squish and the Virgin Mary.

Don’t get the wrong idea. I don’t rule out the possibility the Virgin Mary can, God permitting, appear to people. Moses and Elijah appeared to Jesus, after all. The problem is when people want Mary, or Jesus, or angels, or space aliens, to appear to them so bad, they’re willing to desperately grab onto anything. That’s kinda what happened in November 1990, both in Colfax, California, and in the above Mr. Squish strip.

This wasn’t new news, but it had just gone viral. (No, the term hadn’t been invented yet in 1990.) It hit the Sacramento Bee and the TV news, and people were starting to make pilgrimages to go see it. In fact, if you still wanna see it, the “sighting” is visible every morning between 9:30 and 10:30 a.m.

Leonard’s shirt in the last panel largely sums up my view: “From God, but no miracle.” I’ll explain: I don’t rule out miracles. But if they’re really, truly miracles, meant to impart revelation, they’re gonna be far more blatant and obvious. Mary isn’t gonna look like the reflection off a Coke bottle. She’s gonna look like a human. She’s gonna communicate something to you that isn’t vague and open for interpretation or debunking. Like, “Repent,” or “Follow my son.” Or even a parable, which is open to interpretation, but it’s something. In comparison, the reflections on the wall of a church building is the sort of goofy “News of the Weird” story which is interesting, but inspires nobody but the already-inspired.

[Colfax Record]

And of course there’s the water stain in the other church which might be her, or an interesting burn mark on a tortilla, or anything else which clearly isn’t her.

Reporters always manage to find someone who’ll talk about how nice and uplifting such things are. Embarrassingly, sometimes they’re even priests or pastors. With all due respect to my sisters and brothers in Christ, it’s one of the dumbest things a Christian can say. Embracing an odd reflection on a church wall as a significant mystical experience is not faith. Faith is trusting and acting upon what God tells you—often despite skepticism. Fake faith is anything else. This desperate clawing need to find anything to believe, especially sparkly things, is something I call “imaginary faith"—but in many ways it’s the opposite of faith, and more like magic. People who want things so hard to be true and meaningful, don’t have faith. They have fantasies. They’re looking for signs, and because any sign will do, they’ll miss the real ones.

Anywho. Bishop Francis Quinn, of the Sacramento archdiocese, was eventually called upon to give his opinion. At first he did the usual “If it’s a miracle to you, then it’s a miracle to you” bit. His attitude was more of the "Whatever gets you to church” school. Thousands were coming from as far away as Texas and Alaska to see the light show, creating traffic jams (especially in as tiny a town as Colfax; I used to live in the area and it’s not set up for crowds). Trouble is, the sight-seers weren’t sticking around to attend mass, so the bishop changed his tune to the more honest, “No, it’s not a miracle.”

Sac State physics professor James Phelps was also called upon to give his expert opinion, and did: It consists, he said, of light through one of the stained-glass windows, bouncing off a light fixture, and hitting the wall. When Quinn finally said it was no miracle, and December clouds made the image fade, the crowds faded too.

That semester, my first class wasn’t till 10. But Mike, my ride from Vacaville, had a 7:30 class, and he liked to be early—partly to beat the traffic, and partly because if he got to campus at 6:30 he could get an awesome parking place. I minded being up so early, but not that much.

So my daily habit, at the time, was to go to the Hornet office, have a bagel and several cups of tea (I hadn’t got into coffee yet), and read the papers. The Hornet subscribed to five daily newspapers: The Bee, the now-defunct Sacramento Union, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, and the New York Times. If that sounds like a lot of reading, it’s really not. All of them carry the Associated Press stories, and once you read ’em in the Bee, you can skip ’em in the others. The original content in the papers, other than the Times, wasn’t much. It’s closer to reading two daily papers.

But I was probably the only one who read all of them. And I’d rant about what I was reading to anyone within earshot. Sometimes that’d be Hornet writers who came into the office between classes to turn in, or write, stories. Other times that was people like me, who preferred to hang out at the Hornet rather than the library, the quad, the University Union, or any of the other places designated for student distraction. I have no idea how many of my listeners were actually amused by my rants. But it quickly got around, “Leslie reads five papers a day.” Pretty soon, any time a Hornet staffer wanted to know what was going on in the news, they’d pick my brain. It was usually in there.

So when the Mary sighting hit the press, of course I ranted about how stupid it was to just assume it was her without further evidence. Randall’s statement, “You’d think she’d look less like a Coke bottle and more like a virgin,” was what I blurted out when I first saw the photo in the Bee. Dave Brumfield, my editor, thought that was hilarious and said I ought to make a strip of it. So I did.

The reference to “32 News at Nine” was a minor poke at KRBK-TV 31, now CW 31. Back before CBS Paramount took it over, it was an independent station. Most of those stations would try to get a jump on the network stations’ news ratings by broadcasting their news at 10 p.m. Channel 31 decided to get an even bigger jump on ’em by broadcasting its news at 9 p.m., so as to hit that all-important going-to-bed-early demographic. Of course, most of those folks had already watched the news at 6, and weren’t gonna learn anything new in 3 hours; and had already watched the far superior news shows on the other stations. News at Nine only lasted a year; the ratings were dismal.

A few of my fellow journalism students interned at Channel 31. At the time it was a sad little operation, barely better than public-access cable. Today, three owners and two callsigns later, the news operation has combined resources with CBS 13 (the other Paramount station in the area) and pours all its effort into the morning show, Good Day Sacramento. So it’s better, and cheesier. But in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Channel 31 was a joke. That’s why they sought so many college interns: Tiny budgets need the free labor. Of course, if all your producers are interns, your content isn’t gonna get any better, and people still aren’t gonna watch your crummy news. It’s a vicious cycle.

I had a running gag—not in Mr. Squish, but in real life—where every time I referred to News at Nine, I tagged it with a slogan. Kinda like KCRA 3, which, every time they referred to their station, added, "Where the news comes first.” That’s their trademark. My taglines changed around a bit. Most were profane. “Channel 31 News at Nine…

• …Where the news comes cheap.
• …Where your career dies before it even begins.
• …Where our Synonym for feces is extra Synonym for fecal.

I can’t repeat most of them here, and I couldn’t put them in the strip. The Hornet had no official editorial policy about profanity, which is why when I became Arts & Features Editor, I let my writers go nuts. But naughty words were absolutely forbidden in comic strips. Not sure why; they just were. So I pushed that envelope as far as I could. Even so, most of my fake slogans were unprintable, so I went with the non-profane one which made people laugh the most: "Please watch our show. We’ll name our children after you.”

Thing is, most of what made people laugh was my delivery. You need the fake-announcer voice, and when you deliver the tagline, you need a desperate, pleading tone to your voice. Which you can’t hear at all, ’cause it’s in print. So half the joke is gone. Ah well.