From Pope Benedict to Lady Gaga – Life and Love

Dear Blog Readers, Earlier this week I did a story on the Vatican’s reaction to Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage.  The Archbishop of Dublin Diarmud Martin told my AP wire colleague Nicole Winfield and me that “The Church’s teaching is very clear about this….It goes back to the original teaching in the beginning of the book of Genesis where God created the human race male and female…..the institution of marriage for the church is not a social construct which can be changed.” Then this morning I was covering a pro-life march in Rome.  Often I find myself covering issues from vastly different perspectives.  The stories this week have taken me back a year ago where in a two-week period I was covering the issues of gay marriage, love and life from very different perspectives.

From Zagreb to Rome, life and love, from Pope Benedict XVI to Lady Gaga.

On June 4, 2011, I travelled to Zagreb, Croatia to cover the Pope’s visit there. There was no space on the direct flights so I flew with the cameraman, Gianfranco Stara, to Trieste and drove through Slovenia to Croatia. As we drove along, Gianfranco described to me how he travelled that same road when driving into the former Yugoslavia to cover the war there. He was assigned to cover Sarajevo under siege.

He described the video he shot of General Mladic standing on a hillside overlooking besieged Sarajevo checking out the area with binoculars. He recounted going with BBC producer Sean Salsarola who brought a few bottles of whiskey and got rip-roaring drunk with some Serbian soldiers outside of Sarajevo.  Sean had a bad hangover the next day but he had managed to get the soldiers to give them gas for their car.  Gianfranco did not tell me about the time that he was in a car driving in Sarajevo and a sniper fired a shot that passed right through the front window, over Gianfranco’s shoulder and out the back, but others have. Times have changed for the better in the Balkans.

In Zagreb, Benedict XVI seemed to be at his best surrounded by traditional, faithful Catholics. Speaking to hundreds of thousands of people at a Mass in an open field in the city of Zagreb, the Pope extolled the virtues of marriage and the importance of family and urged couples NOT to live together before they are married. His comments were well received. I interviewed 27-year-old Nea Busic’, a pregnant school teacher from the Croatian coastal city of Split. She had taken the overnight train from Split with her husband and two children to be there. She said “We are not afraid of life, we are not afraid of children and the Catholic church approves that, the Pope especially, he encourages young people to get married and to have lots of children because that is our future.”

The next weekend, on June 11, I found myself covering the Euro Gay Pride Parade in Rome with Lady Gaga. I have to admit the story was a TV producer’s dream with all the color and characters to make a fabulously fun story. I was wearing a red cotton dress with big white polka dots (the same one I am wearing in the photo on my Home page) and matching espadrilles –looking a little too country-clubby for Gay Pride coverage. There were drag queens in long green, yellow and red wigs with matching stilettos wearing bikini tops and dancing on trucks with music blasting, several of them recognized me from past interviews for a story I did on the transvestite community in Italy.

Two men on motorcycles led the parade wearing leather vests opened over their tattooed chests which were adorned with chains. They occasionally stopped for a passionate kiss, much to the pleasure of the photographers, and cameramen. We did a first story on the parade and then it was back to the office to edit. Once we sent our first story we had to rush to Rome’s famous Circus Maximus– once the site of Roman chariot races– for the Lady Gaga appearance.

The streets of the center were blocked for the parade. So I threw on a motorcycle helmet and hopped on the back of my colleague Francesco Manetti’s Guzzi motorcyle. Francesco had the camera’s shoulder strap around his neck and the camera placed on the motorcycle between us as he drove. I had the computer bag with my Macbook for editing on my back. In one hand I held the boom mike and in the other tried to keep the camera from sliding around. Francesco–in his well-worn cowboy boots despite the oppressive heat– vroomed off and zipped through the small cobblestone streets past the Euro Pride Parade to get the the Circus Maximus in time for Lady Gaga’s performance.

As we sped up I thought “this is so cool, how many 47-year-old mammas get to do stuff like this?” Then a really embarassing thing happened. My red cotton dress with the white polka-dots flew up revealing my underwear to the world. I desperately wiggled around trying to shove the dress back down, but between the boom mike, the camera and the backpack with my computer in it, I really could not do much. Then I decided to let it go….Mozzarella Mamma was having her Marilyn Monroe moment. And anyway, who the hell cares about my nunnish looking undies anyway, certainly not the participants in the gay-pride parade!!

There were hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Circus Maximus. When Lady Gaga came out she was wearing a green wig and a Versace dress. Before sitting at the piano to deliver a powerful rendition of her song “Born this way”, she gave a long speech on the “defense of love” and called herself a “revolutionary of love.”

She said: “This is not just a peaceful demonstration…we are here today to defend love.”

My head was spinning– in just a few weeks I had gone from a field in Zagreb to the Circus Maximus in Rome, from the views of Pope Benedict XVI on Love to those of Lady Gaga.