Prayer in a bottle

Today, I spent a few minutes (between suicide-inducing sessions of grading student writing) perusing my old Dissent files for “prayer” in the SOCCCD, hoping to find amusing prayerful factoids. 

Frogue’s “prayer breakfast”:

In Dissent 25 (4/1/99), I reported on the March 29, 1999 meeting of the board. Prayer came up, but so did what would eventually come to be called “ATEP”:

Trustee Wagner had evidently spoken before the Little Hoover Commission, which seems to favor the elimination of locally elected boards. Wagner … doesn’t. He … also visited a site in Denver that provided “great ideas of what could be done in Tustin.”

Trustee Padberg reported that she had attended Trustee Frogue’s “"prayer breakfast,” which, she said, was “excellent.” (I assume that this was an assessment of the pancakes.)….

I recall that prayer breakfast. Reportedly, only one member of the faculty showed up. --Ray Chandos, I think. Being an instructor implies having students, right? So does he count?

At the time, trustee Frogue was basking in the glory (or at least the non-ignominy) of the failure of the Frogue recall to collect the needed 34,000 signatures (close, but no cigar):

Trustee Frogue spoke of his meeting with Buck Coe, chair of the (now defunct) Committee to Recall Steven J. Frogue. The exchange was “very very nice,” he said. Coe, who declined to attend the prayer breakfast, said he would pray for the board.

The Froguester, referring to his efforts at “reconciliation,” noted, unpleasantly, that some people are temperamental: “90% temper, 10% mental.” (Har har.)

Yeah, that was Frogue all over: conciliatory chirping followed by a swift smack upside the head. Then: “har, har, har!”

As I recall, Buck Coe was a retired Saddleback College professor who, perhaps in 1992, was elected to the board. I do believe that he lost the election of 1996 to Dorothy “Dot” Fortune, one of the union’s right-wing friends. Though he started out as a “union” trustee, by 1996, he had allied himself with trustee Harriett Walther, who, owing to her independence, had become the (then-corrupt) union’s public enemy #1. (Because of redistricting, her eligibility to run had been eliminated at the end of 1996). [Note: I do believe I'm confusing Coe with someone else. -RB]

Three weeks earlier, I had reported on the Feb. 25 meeting of the board:

Trustee Frogue led the “invocation.” He closed it with, “in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, amen.” Pretty non-nondenominational.
...
During the Trustees’ reports, Trustee Frogue asked for extra time. … He went on to discuss … the failed recall efforts. Surprising everyone, he seemed to call for a “prayer breakfast” to be held at IVC. He said he wanted to help take the district and the community past all the “contention and ill will” of recent years. He specifically invited the Rev. Buckner Coe, chair of the recall committees, to attend and asked Peter Morrison [then, the president of the IVC Academic Senate] to help with the project. A few days later, the media reported that Coe has turned down Frogue’s invitation, suggesting that he [Frogue] had better apologize to Holocaust survivors first.

Evidently, Frogue is quite sincere about the proposal. It has somehow found its way into the OC Register and some smaller papers, such as the Laguna Post News.

Later in the evening, Morrison described Frogue’s invitation as “surprising.” Peter also made reference to his own “shameless paganism.”

Funny.

Anyone who ever saw Frogue pray knows that, when he prayed, he wasn’t prayin’ to no generic Deity. (BTW: during prayer, he tended to keep his fingers crossed.)

Besides, only Christians eat pancakes for breakfast.

National Day of Prayer and Remembrance:

Evidently, some time in 2001, we reported:

Back on September 14, a Friday..., I happened to be sitting (with Wendy P, my Brown Act attorney) in front of the student services building, watchin’ IVC’s feeble contribution to the “National Day of Prayer and Remembrance.” Apparently, an administrator (one with really big hair) saw us and freaked out; soon, all the cops were placed on some kinda “high alert.” The worry, I’m told, was that we’d bring out our tombstones—memorials to Board Majority/Mr. Goo casualties—thereby embarrassing Dot and Mr. Goo during one of their beloved self-promoting PR extravaganzas.

Well, we had no such plan. Thanks for thinking of us, though.

Old-timers at IVC will recall our famous “tombstones,” which, despite their crude and simple construction, produced a fine Arlingtonesque display, hauntingly hinting at thousands of dead.

Red Emma, in the guise of “Miss [Dorothy?] Fortune,” couldn’t help alluding to Frogue’s love of prayer breakfasts. Here’s one of many examples (this one from 5/3/99):

Dear Miss Fortune

Remember me? I am the illegally appointed president of a once-esteemed community college whose door is always open. While a teacher and I we were meditating on “divine intervention” and the oneness of all things at a recent IVC Prayer Breakfast, that very teacher (oddly, the only faculty member attending) asked questions of a spiritual nature. When, he wondered, is a faculty breakfast not a faculty breakfast? How can one reconcile with one’s enemies when one’s enemies will not eat flapjacks? And what is the sound of one IVC hand clapping?

—The Amazing Mathurini

Dear Amazing

The answer to your spiritual questions is, as with all questions, distance learning. Learning from a distance, even of thirty or forty feet, elevates one’s perceptions, tunes one’s consciousness toward peace and away from divisiveness and eliminates anxieties about pesky Accrediting Teams and micromanagement. I therefore suggest you remove yourself to a great distance.

--MF

Note: I was never a Jim Croce fan, but some of his tunes do seem to have encrusted some of my memory banks.

Frogue was always sniffin' around for attention. Here, he opines uselessly about
the new millennium. (20th Century/21st Century)