Word: vicars
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...forest, the banished Duke wears rimless spectacles and lets his shirt hang out all the time. Jaques is in sandals. Sir Oliver Martext, garbed as a Victorian vicar, periodically bicycles on and off stage blowing a hideous horn. Rosalind, in disguise, sports a hunter's red cap; while her companion Celia appears with a white boa, hatbox, and birdcage, and even paints her eyelashes using a pool for a mirror...
Clergymen are unfrocked often enough in England that the Times of London, which by a quaint tradition hires deposed clerics as literate proofreaders, is kept sufficiently staffed. But not in 29 years had a cleric been removed from office on the charge brought last week against ex-Vicar William Bryn Thomas, 62: adultery, committed with a Sunday school teacher named Elsie Brandy-and not once but, by Mrs. Brandy's accounting, "at least 75 or 80 times...
Testifying before a church trial, Mrs. Brandy told of "committee meetings" (the vicar's euphemism) on the floor in his study, in his bedroom, and in his automobile. Once, she said, when she carelessly left her umbrella in Thomas' car, he left it for her to pick up behind a statue of the Virgin in the vicar's suburban London church in Balham Hill. Nor was Mrs. Brandy the only witness against the vicar. The wife of his curate said that Thomas had grabbed her "and pressed his body into mine" when she visited his study...
Last week Thomas' 30-year career as a cleric came to an end in a formal unfrocking ceremony in London's medieval Southwark Cathedral. While a choir chanted a somber psalm and middle-aged women prayed in silence, scarlet-hooded bishops cast Vicar Thomas out of the Church of England. They read from I Samuel ("And I will raise me up a faithful priest") and Matthew ("Beware of false prophets"). Then the Bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, rose to pass final judgment: "By the authority committed to us by Almighty God, the Father, the Son and the Holy...
...last previous cleric to be publicly unfrocked for adultery, the late Rector of Stiffkey, turned circus performer and was devoured by a lion. Thomas, choosing a safer pursuit, has turned journalist. Even as the congregation prayed hopefully for the vicar's "true repentance and amendment of life," Thomas was cheerfully splashing his life story across the front pages of the Sunday newspapers. As he told it, his plight was that female parishioners continually threw themselves at him. Said Thomas: "When I look back upon my years as a minister of the Gospel, I am by no means cast down...