Julia Sweeney is a sweetie. Beyond that, she is also clever and skilled. She is a comedienne, with a good eye for topics, a good ear for language, and an excellent tongue and voice for delivery. She has been part of the well-known Second City comedy factory that has spawn so many of our better comics.
I very much like Audible.com, now a part of Amazon.com. I find their prices very good and the audiobooks they sell (their only product) are very good. They combine with iPods and iTunes conveniently and I can listen in the house through a Bose player, through earphones and through the car speaker. But, I was paying a monthly fee to Audible and many months went by when I didn't buy anything but still had the monthly charge. So, I dropped the membership and on the way out, received some enticers to stay. They were offered at good prices with no strings so I bought three of those offered. One was Julia Sweeney's "Letting Go of God".
Until I was 6 years old, my family attended a Baptist church. Then, we attended the Unitarians until I was 21. When I got married, I attended my wife's Lutheran church with occasional returns to the Unitarians. Eventually, my wife found herself more in tune with the Society of Friends, the Quakers, and I often accompany her to their service. Sweeney was raised in the Northwest of our country in an active, engaged Irish Catholic family. Her monologue describes her religious journey from childhood to about age 40. It is poignant, respectful, lively and clever. I think it is terrific and so is she.
Since then, I have listened to her two other products, a DVD/Audio, called "God Said,"Ha!" and a CD/audiobook called "In a Family Way". I have learned that she had cancer and had to have a hysterectomy. She has adopted a Chinese girl, Mulan. She is married now and spends her time between California and Illinois. Just as I discovered her blog "Julia Sweeney", I found that she had developed a sensitivity to her public revelations and jokes about her life and her family. She announced in the blog that she was halting her work on monologues. What a disappointment! Thankfully, she has recently reconsidered and is resuming. The main impetus to examination of the meaning of her activities and their implications was presented to the increasingly respected T.E.D. conference. She received a standing ovation for her description of her conversation with her daughter, now aged 8, in a restaurant. It was a discussion that moved from how frogs reproduce to how humans do. As in her "Letting Go of God", she describes a touchy and important subject respectfully, honestly and with good humor.
