With a Name Like That, Melissa Weinman Could Be, by Bill Stadick

Untitled Photograh by Samuel Zeller, via Unsplash.

​With a Name Like That, Melissa Weinman Could Be
 
some meteorologist foretelling your barometric future on tonight’s late o’clock news or the
middle contestant on a gameshow that’s spewing lucre, lucre, lucre or the five-time-Emmy-
 
nominated supporting actress who plays the smirking coroner who finds the bullet lodged deep within the brain matter then, ping, drops it into a jar as a lead detective and sidekick crack wise,
 
but is the artist who covered a 60” x 36” canvas in 1998 with Clare of Assisi, the same Clare
named patron saint of television forty years earlier by Pius XII because she could still picture
 
Mass on one of her four walls even when she was too ill to be anything but a dying couch potato.
Live-studio-audience applause to you, Melissa Weinman, for the way your Clare cradles a tiny,
 
rabbit-eared TV in her palms for it shows how sacred Love Boat reruns can be in the right hands.
Live-studio-audience applause to you, Melissa Weinman, for the way the screen behind her
 
left shoulder depicts a mysterious monkey climbing a transmission tower for it indeed foretells
the coming of an entire cable destination fixated on the hijinks of all creatures great and small.
 
And, most of all, live-studio-audience applause to you, Melissa Weinman, for the second screen behind your Clare’s right shoulder which bears the image of a firing squad in deep winter
 
because it reminds us all how a firing squad in deep winter has been the parting gift
for too many unlucky contestants on that show that only airs on The History Channel.

Bill Stadick

This poem was written in response to Melissa Weinman's painting, Saint Clare, the Patron Saint of Television. Click here to view the painting.