They Call Him the Savior

Longing to leave her poor Brazilian neighborhood, Christina wanted to see the world. Discontent with a home having only a pallet on the floor, a washbasin, and a wood-burning stove, she dreamed of a better life in the city.

One morning she slipped away, breaking her mother's heart. Knowing what life on the streets would be like for her young, attractive daughter, Maria hurriedly packed to go find her. On her way to the bus stop she entered a drugstore to get one last thing. Pictures.

She sat in the photograph booth, closed the curtain, and spent all she could on pictures of herself. With her purse full of small black-and-white photos, she boarded the next bus to Rio de Janiero.

Maria knew Christina had no way of earning money. She also knew that her daughter was too stubborn to give up. When pride meets hunger, a human will do things that were before unthinkable. Knowing this, Maria began her search. Bars, hotels, nightclubs, any place with the reputation for street walkers or prostitutes.

She went to them all. And at each place she left her picture,taped on a bathroom mirror, tacked to a hotel bulletin board, fastened to a corner phone booth. And on the back of each photo she wrote a note.

It wasn't too long before both the money and the pictures ran out, and Maria had to go home. The weary mother wept as the bus began its long journey back to her small village. It was a few weeks later that young Christina descended the hotel stairs.

Her young face was tired. Her brown eyes no longer danced with youth but spoke of pain and fear. Her laughter was broken. Her dream had become a nightmare. A thousand times over she had longed to trade these countless beds for her secure pallet.

Yet the little village was, in too many ways, too far away. As she reached the bottom of the stairs, her eyes noticed a familiar face. She looked again, and there on the lobby mirror was a small picture of her mother.

Christina's eyes burned and her throat tightened as she walked across the room and removed the small photo. Written on the back was this compelling invitation. 'Whatever you have done, whatever you have become, it doesn't matter. Please come home." She did.

Max Lucado, No Wonder They Call Him the Savior, Multnomah Press, 1986, pp. 158-9

April Fools

One of the most elaborate hoaxes in broadcast history was an April Fool's joke played on the British Broadcasting Corporation's current affairs program Panorama, with its rather dignified host Richard Dimbleby earnestly relating a story about the annual spaghetti harvest filmed in a Swiss-Italian spaghetti orchard.

Cameraman Charles de Jaeger thought up the spoof and related to Denis Norden how it was accomplished.

'Panorama's first famous spaghetti harvest came from my school days in Austria," de Jaeger said, 'when a master was always saying to us, 'You're so stupid you'd think spaghetti grew on trees.'

So it had always been in my mind to do the story and I tried for several years. It was not until I was working on Panorama that I got the go-ahead.

'I went to the Swiss Tourist Office, who said they would help, and I flew to Lugano. It was in March when I thought the weather would be sunny with flowers out. There was a mist over the whole area.

The tourist office guy took me around all over the place; not one blossom out, no leaves out. It was now Tuesday and I could not find anything and said in desperation, 'What can be done?'

'Then we found this hotel in Castiglione, which had laurel trees with leaves on, tall trees. So I said, 'We'll do it here. Let's go down into Lugano and get some handmade spaghetti.'

'We did that, put the strands of spaghetti in a big wooden platter, took that in the car and we drove back. By the time we got there, the damn things wouldn't hang up. They'd dried out.

So we cooked them, tried to put them on the trees, and this time they fell off because they were so slippery.

'Then this tourist guy had a brilliant idea,put the spaghetti between damp cloths. That worked and we got local girls to hang them up,about ten pounds' worth.

Then we got the girls into national costume and filmed them climbing on ladders with these baskets, filling them up, and laying them out in the sun.

And we said in the script, with a guitar playing in the background, 'We have this marvelous festival. The first harvest of the spaghetti.'

'At the end of the three-minute film Richard Dimbleby said, 'Now we say goodnight to this first day of April.'

In spite of that hint, next morning it was surprising the number of people who didn't recognize that the spaghetti harvest was a hoax."

Peter Hay, Canned Laughter, Oxford University Press, Bits & Pieces, March 30, 1995, pp. 19-21