Check Out My Reliquary 5.3

If it weren't so cluttered with kitsch, the National Museum of Catholic Art and History might be the kind of venture a Medici pope could get behind. It's most important chamber, you see, is the luxuriously appointed boudoir where the institution's director, a busty former Playboy bunny named Christina Cox, grants intimate audiences to financiers, racketeers, union bosses, and other great men interested in the preservation of sacred art.

In fact, so compelling are Cox's appeals that the New York City museum--which has

TERRY LABAN

no formal ties to the Roman Catholic Church--has raised more $6 million in the past decade. As the Village Voice reports, Cox is something of an old hand with generous playboys. She has been linked romantically with several current and former museum trustees, including Lee Iacocca and Ed Malloy, head of New York's Building and Construction Trades Council. (Other, presumably platonic, friends of the museum include Donald Trump and presidential pardon beneficiary Bill Fugazy.)

Prince Albert of Monaco, the swankest of the museum's priapic benefactors, submitted to the charms of former museum associate director Stephanie Parker and even enjoyed a four-day swing-a-thon with her and Cox. The grateful prince lent his name to the museum's letterhead as an honorary trustee--a nice boon to fundraising efforts--until the Princess Grace Foundation forced the museum to remove it.

The Catholic Archdiocese of New York, too, is understandably embarrassed by the false impression that it is linked to the museum. It doesn't help that porn magnate Bob Guccione showed one of his paintings at the archdiocese's offices in an art show associated with the museum.

Now under fire for financial improprieties, Cox nonetheless remains devoted to sacred art. According to a former employee, she recently commissioned a 10-foot portrait of the Last Supper. "Everything was done except the faces of the apostles," the employee told the Voice. "She wanted the faces of the museum's top benefactors painted into the portrait, and then she wanted to put it in the museum. She wanted Trump and Malloy and Fugazy all depicted as apostles. I kept asking her who would be Judas."

Not Hot for Trots 4.1

For several years now, the Oakland Education Association, the union representing public school teachers in that city, has had its hands full staving off a takeover by a cadre of sectarian leftists. The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action and Integration and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (or BAMN for short), a small group of ex-Berkeley jacobins, has not exactly endeared itself to the union rank and file with its hectoring rhetoric and inflexible political style. Nonetheless, the East Bay Express reports, BAMN has carved out a niche in the union's power structure--simply because most teachers are too tired and preoccupied to oppose the group.

For its part, BAMN is a little too preoccupied with grandstanding to watch the kids. In March it organized a rally at Berkeley to protest university affirmative action policy, and BAMN leader Tania Kappner brought some of her students along as a field trip. News footage of the event, which ended in a melee of fistfights and looting, show Kappner declaiming from the steps of Sproul Plaza. That evening, however, Kappner's assistant principal took a call from an angry parent wondering why his son came home with six pairs of new shoes.