Tales from High School X - Mr. Manicotti: King of the VCR

As can be inferred from the name, St. Francis High School is/was a Catholic school. As such, students were required to take a religion course each year. While over the course of four years I experienced increasingly strong theological disputes with course material (a foreshadowing of my future agnosticism), I generally liked the teachers I had for religion. For the first two years I had Mr. Corey Cycle, a pretty young teacher and a fairly cool guy. He would joke around with us but still was good at presenting material in an engaging way. My senior year I had Dr. Albert Focaccia, a Greek Orthodox deacon and a phenomenal person. He was intensely knowledgeable yet easygoing and genuinely cared about students. But my junior year, ah my junior year, that was the year I had Mr. Joseph Manicotti.

Mr. Manicotti, or "Average Joe" as we referred to him as occasionally, seemed like a legitimate average Joe. Generally genial and sporting a moustache, Mr. Manicotti was prone to saying bizarre things or explaining complex ideas in oversimplified ways. For example, to try to teach us about how environmental factors can affect behavior, he explained to us that "Arabs are shifty because they live in the desert." The scarcity of water leads to shiftiness. It's just science, clearly. He truly did not believe this was a racist statement, and said it with no malice, but it was indicative of the kind of skewed or not-thought-through viewpoints he'd periodically present.

Mr. Manicotti was a funny guy, in part because he seemed to lack some of the professional boundaries of conversation that many teachers maintain. While at a retreat before our senior year, Mr. Manicotti told the epic tale of his wife's four pregnancies and childbirths ("two of my kids were accidents!") complete with quoting the phone call from his wife about the fourth pregnancy, which for some reason was quoted in a deep, masculine voice. The spectacle was so outlandishly hilarious that another teacher, Mr. Saismost, had to run out of the room laughing. Other times Mr. Manicotti would attempt to be funny on purpose, usually less effectively. Each of his classes watched the film Romero about the life and assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero as portrayed by the late, great Raul Julia. From talking to other students in other sessions of the same class, apparently Mr. Manicotti scripted a gem of a comment for the climactic assassination scene when Oscar Romero is shot to death with an automatic weapon while performing mass (spoiler? it happened in real life, so...): "Now that's a mortal sin!" Each of the three junior religion classes got to experience that zinger.

Romero was not the only film we watched with Mr. Manicotti, however. No sir. In fact, as the class progressed through the year, my friends and I were convinced that each class session would be a 50/50 chance of watching a movie. We weren't complaining about this by any means, but it did seem strange to us. The films started out very relevant to course material. We watched films such as Romero as discussed above, or Peter and Paul about the early church after the death of Jesus Christ. Schindler's List was a bold choice, and one I enjoyed. Lorenzo's Oil was a bit of a stretch to tie to the material though. At Christmastime, Mr. Manicotti was surprised to discover that some other faculty were actually going to show movies as well and did not reserve a Christmas film in time before they were all grabbed up. Our holiday treat was a random entry from the Eyes on the Prize PBS documentary series about the civil rights movement. A fine series, but How the Grinch Stole Christmas! it ain't. One time we had Mr. Manicotti substitute teach for another class and got to enjoy a documentary about the 1980 USA vs Soviet Olympic match dubbed the "Miracle on Ice."

Things got ludicrous by the end of the year. We watched Deep Blue Sea. You may be familiar with this film. It is about genetically altered "super sharks" that systematically hunt and kill the scientists responsible for their creation. You may know it as "that one movie where Samuel L. Jackson gets eaten by a shark that leaps out of the water behind him" (spoiler? The movie isn't really good enough to merit discretion). The tie to religion class may be the fact that LL Cool J plays a master chef who is also a preacher who manages to defeat a shark by stabbing it's eye with a crucifix (spoiler? Who WOULDN'T see that coming?). Somewhere along the line, we started to suspect that maybe Mr. Manicotti just didn't own a VCR at his home.

The most bizarre movie we watched and the strongest evidence for the "this is the only VCR readily available to Mr. Manicotti" theory cannot be found in any video rental stores. You cannot buy a DVD of it. Youtube does not offer any clips. That is because this movie was a home movie. One morning, we walked in to see the TV/VCR cart set up and ready to go (coin flip came up heads today? Great!). We took our seats and waited for today's entertainment. The image came up on the screen: a girl between 11-13 years old riding a horse. Not in a show or anything. Just like, at a horseback riding lesson. I thought that maybe Mr. Manicotti had taped over this with something we should see, and the real show would begin momentarily. But it did not. "What is this?" asked someone. "That's my little angel!" replied Mr. Manicotti, a proud smile on his face and his eyes fixed on the screen. We watched for like five solid minutes until some less than classy student proclaimed, "hey, she's kinda hot!" Mr. Manicotti was aghast; "Hey, she's only 12 years old!" he chided. "Whatever man, give her a few years," the anonymous commenter shot back. Mr. Manicotti declared movie time over. But the memory would live on in our hearts for years to come.