I'm not religious, but I love that I live in a house once called home by single women – nuns – of independent spirit and mindful of temperament.
Anita Caspary, the onetime mother superior who led the largest single exodus of nuns from the Roman Catholic Church in American history, died on Oct 5 in Los Angeles.
Isabella Campagnol, a textile and clothing historian, was reading a book about costume history when she "found a note about a nun singled out in Sant'Alvise, because she was wearing makeup and a lavish costume" in the convent.
Author Kenneth A. Briggs, former religion editor for The New York Times, wrote that the Mansour case "was in many respects the most dramatic, but not the only, instance of a particular nun singled out for punishment".
Raised by a struggling single mother (a former nun), she grew up in a household where humor was abundant, but money was not.
Without its ingénue, the show widens its lens, becoming truly communal, a portrait of a utopian subworld of aging nuns and single women, boarding together and sharing meals, their lives devoted to easing the conditions of a poverty-ridden London neighborhood called Poplar.
Unlike Chanel, who lived at the Ritz, and Schiaparelli, who partied with the Surrealists, their evenings on the town enhancing their fashion reputations, Madame Grès went about dressmaking with the single-minded dedication of a nun in a turban.
Students have designed independent study projects on the refugee experience, Tibetan medicine, human rights issues, Western nuns and even a single Tibetan poem.
Then aged 34, and an accomplished actor on stage and screen, Plummer had been underwhelmed by the part of Captain von Trapp, the Austrian single-parent who employs an outspoken former nun called Maria as governess to his seven children.
