Sister Mary Joanna was four feet nine. She was a Sister of Notre Dame. It would be many years before I understood that she had nothing to do with the Fighting Irish football team, the Four Horsemen or “Touchdown Jesus.” For that matter, it would take a long time for me to figure out why they called her “sister,” because I had four sisters at home and they weren’t even close to the same thing. She spoke broken English (it might have been broken Italian). She had a pretty impressive black mustache, only a day or two from the combing and trimming stage (for this we labeled her Mister Joanna, even though we knew that mocking God’s sister might trigger a natural disaster).
Sister Mary Joanna & The Invention Of The “Fun Fact”
