Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Virgin_Mary_Grilled_Cheese_SandwichHey, You:

Well, m’Dear Little Love Monkey You, I hope you’ve been well and happy and all bananas-‘n’-cream. Kiss, kiss, hug, hug, and so on.

This morning, I was compelled to read the following story:

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Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Back Up on eBay

MIAMI – The Internet auction house eBay Inc. reversed itself Tuesday and is allowing bids for half of a 10-year-old grilled cheese sandwich that its owner says bears the image of the Virgin Mary.

Diana Duyser, of Hollywood, put the sandwich up for sale last week, drawing bids as high as $22,000 before eBay pulled the item Sunday night. The page was viewed almost 100,000 times before being taken down.

An e-mail Duyser received from eBay said the sandwich broke its policy, which “does not allow listings that are intended as jokes.”

But Duyser, a work-from-home jewelry designer who has bought and sold items on eBay for two years, said the grilled cheese wasn’t a joke.

The auction was back on Tuesday afternoon with a top bid of $5,100. The winning bidder also has to pay $9.95 for shipping. In mocking response, two similar items were later posted — grilled cheese sandwiches bearing the images of the Virgin Mary’s used gum and Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen.

A phone message left with San Jose, Calif.-based eBay was not immediately returned Tuesday.

Duyser thought eBay would be the best place to show off the sandwich, made on plain white bread and American cheese and cooked with no oil or butter. She said she took a bite after making it 10 years ago and saw a face staring back at her from the bread.

Duyser, 52, put the sandwich in a clear plastic box with cotton balls and kept it on her night stand.

At first, she was scared by the image, “but now that I realize how unique it is, I wanted to share it with the world,” Duyser told The Miami Herald.

She said the sandwich has never sprouted a spore of mold.

‘Made in Vagina’ shirt*****

And now, m’Dear, it’s me again, yer ol’ buddy Brother Dave. Hotcha!

While mousing around the World-Wide Web, trying to find a picture of the Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Sandwich that I might share with you, I bumped into the following that has no real (or imagined) connection to the sandwich at all:

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Clean shirts that sound dirty. Sure it sounds dirty. But is it? After all, who among us was not MADE IN VAGINA? So show-off your roots! (www.madeinvagina.com)

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Personally, I’m thinkin’ the face on the grilled cheese sandwich looks more like Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo than it does the Virgin Mary.

And hey, let’s face it, Pilgrim: There are no existing photographs of the Virgin Mother, of course, because she lived and died some eighteen-hundred-and-then-some years before the advent of photography. There are no known drawings or painted portraits or sculptures or other representational works of art for which she is thought to have posed. All the images we are taught to accept as representing The Holy Blessed Virgin Mother are contrivances, based wholly on conjecture.

There are, however, a b’zillion photos each of Dietrich and Garbo.

I don’t see why every serendipitous Rorschach image is initially assumed to be Mother Mary (or maybe Baby Jesus, fer chrissake!)! Why not Dietrich or Garbo?

Dietrich_CheesyMary_Garbo_02

Or, Gosh, how ’bout Lillian Gish? Oh, well….

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Lillian_Gish_01Be well, m’Dear, be happy. Know peace, know love (deep spiritual love and/or hot monkey love, etc.). Find joy and images of the Blessed Virgin (or Jesus, fer chrissake, or Dietrich or Garbo or Gish or Almighty God Herself) wherever they await you. Live in light, live in bliss. Bless your heart. And bless your heart.

Love ‘n’ sticky (cheesy) stuff,
Brother “Made in Vagina” Dave

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PS: Sometime soon after posting the above message, links to the following follow-up articles popped up on the Offbeat Stories news page on this, our humble website. These articles are being reprinted here in hope that they may provide some sense of closure for those of you, m’Dear Web-surfin’ Pilgrims, who might be curious, or maybe even anxiously concerned, about the dispensation of the aforementioned cheesy religious relic:

Online casino gobbles up ‘Virgin Mary’ sandwich
Snack headed for world tour

HOLLYWOOD, Florida (AP) — An online casino forked over $28,000 Wednesday to the owner of a 10-year-old, partially eaten cheese sandwich thought to be embedded with the image of the Virgin Mary — and then sent the “religious icon” on a world tour.

GoldenPalace.com had secured the winning bid for the sandwich Monday after the grilled cheese received more than 1.6 million hits on eBay. On Wednesday, GoldenPalace delivered the check to owner Diana Duyser at an Indian casino in Florida.

A security guard and velour rope protected the framed snack during a ceremonial exchange.

“It represented something that we believed to be a piece of Americana pop culture,” said Steve Baker, CEO of Cyber World Group, GoldenPalace’s Canada-based parent. He said the company had expected “minimum value” — and “a laugh and a hoot about it,” but admitted: “It’s taken on more of a life of its own than we ever imagined.”

Duyser, a 52-year-old jewelry designer, is convinced she cooked up an image of the Virgin Mary for breakfast 10 years ago. When she took her first bite, “I spit it back out,” she recalled.

“I was just shocked. It scared me, really,” she said, sporting a T-shirt declaring: “Passion of the Toast” superimposed at the bottom of the sandwich.

GoldenPalace.com promotes the sandwich as a “religious icon” with a “mystifying image,” and is sending the snack on a world tour.

“By taking her all over, other people will have some of the pleasure that I did,” Duyser said.

Jim DeFede, a columnist for The Miami Herald, has volunteered to drive the framed sandwich to Vegas over Thanksgiving, with a stop along New Orleans’ Bourbon Street considered likely.

“I’ll miss her greatly because she was a comfort to me in times when it wasn’t so easy,” said Duyser, a Baptist whose husband suffers from emphysema.

…and…

Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Sandwich Nets 28K
Online casino buys 10-year-old mold-free sandwich
that its owner says bears Mary’s image.

HOLLYWOOD, Fla. – A woman who said her 10-year-old grilled cheese sandwich bore the image of the Virgin Mary will be getting a lot more bread after the item sold for $28,000 on eBay.

GoldenPalace.com, an online casino, confirmed that it placed the winning bid, and company executives said they were willing to spend “as much as it took” to own the 10-year-old half-sandwich with a bite out of it.

“It’s a part of pop culture that’s immediately and widely recognizable,” spokesman Monty Kerr told The Miami Herald. “We knew right away we wanted to have it.”

Photos posted on eBay show what can be viewed as a woman’s face emblazoned on the sandwich, a bite taken out of one end. Bidding closed Monday.

In a statement, GoldenPalace.com CEO Richard Rowe said he planned to use the sandwich to raise money for charity. Kerr and Steve Baker, CEO of GoldenPalace’s management company, Cyberworld Group, flew to south Florida on Monday to make arrangements for a sandwich handover from its owner, Diana Duyser.

“I would like all people to know that I do believe that this is the Virgin Mary Mother of God,” Duyser, a work-from-home jewelry designer, said in the casino’s statement.

The online auction site initially pulled the sale, saying it didn’t post joke items. The page was restored after the company was convinced that Duyser would deliver on the bid, said eBay spokesman Hani Durzy.

Duyser said she took a bite after making the sandwich 10 years ago and saw a face staring back at her. She put the sandwich in a clear plastic box with cotton balls and kept it on her night stand. She said the sandwich has never sprouted a spore of mold.

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So it goes, Dear Pilgrim. God works in wondrous ways. And so it goes. —BD

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PPS: But wait, there’s more! Sometime after posting all of the above, still another link to yet another article pertaining to all this cheesy nonsense popped up on our Offbeat Stories news page. So now, Pilgrim, FYI:

Grilled Sandwich ‘Holy Pan’ For Sale On eBay
‘Virgin Mary Pan’ Up For Bids

HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — If you missed your chance to bid on South Florida’s famous Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich, now you can buy the pan in which the highly publicized sandwich was fried.

Diana Duyser has listed the “Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Sandwich Holy Pan” on eBay. As of midday Monday, there were 11 bids on the pan and the price is up to $142.50*.

That’s quite a bargain, considering the 10-year-old sandwich went for $28,000 to GoldenPalace.com, an online casino.

Duyser, 52, said she took the image in the sandwich seriously.

“I would like all people to know that I do believe that this is the Virgin Mary Mother of God,” Duyser, a work-from-home jewelry designer, said in a statement from GoldenPalace.com.

In the new ad for the frying pan, Duyser says, “I have chosen to auction off the Holy Pan on eBay instead of the auction house ‘Christy’s of London’ to give the world a chance to bid on it.”

The ad goes on to say, “I’ve been to the Hard Rock in Hollywood, Florida and Las Vegas where the Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich was put on display for the world to see and I have witnessed people who would become dizzy, cry, and pray to her or just wanted to touch me, because she came to me 10 years ago.”

In the eBay ad, Duyser asks that people e-mail her only serious questions, not “jokes or ridiculous comments.”

*[NOTE: When we checked at around 1:00PM EST on Saturday – April 16, 2005 to see if we could determine the current disposition of this wholly freakin’ Holy Frying Pan, we found that the item had been relisted on eBay and the current bid was posted as $20,300 (“Reserve not met,” whatever the hell that means). —BD]

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PPPS: In response to a couple of visitors to this page who sent your ol’ Brother Dave some correspondence and pictures of their own serendipitously-discovered holy revelations, we’ve created, and invite you to visit now, a page called:

JESUS ON THE FENCE, CHRIST ON THE CROSS

And a third page in this trilogy of reflections on allegedly-miraculous, religion-related images is:

NEW AGE MUTANT SATANIC TURTLES …HERE IN INDIANA?

And so it goes. Still, forever and always. —BD

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