At a reader's request, here's a riff on Nathan's Now and Then post:

1. As an assistant papal master of ceremony, I used a lot of Italian hairspray. My coif was waterproof.
2. I played tennis everyday and taught English to embassy brats.
3. I gave haircuts to my theology classmates who shared their course notes with me. I rarely attended class. I don't think I missed much, having passed all the exams.
4. A wealthy Roman lad picked me up in front of the Stazione Termini, and then conveniently left the city for his mandatory year of military service.
5. Twin Swiss Guards attended my ordination....
6. When I had this cassock made, the papal tailors at Gammarelli's exclaimed that it had been decades since anyone requested a collar that high. I replied that it had been decades since anyone on staff had only one chin.
7. On Sundays, my apostolic work was to preach in Italian to the patients at Carlo Forlanini Hospital. My sermons were salubrious in their brevity.
8. Once, in St. Peter's while waiting for the pope to descend in his secret oval glass elevator, a young German Benedictine friend and I, having stoked the incense, had a smoke behind the curtains while leaning against the back of the Pieta and lifting our robes to practice a tap routine we had seen in A Chorus Line. I remember thinking that no one in the world was having as much fun as me.
9. One summer day, at the North American bishops' villa in Castel Gondolfo, my classmate from San Francisco and I released a herd of hungry pigs who attacked a group of picnicking American cardinals and bishops, forcing them to jump into the swimming pool.
10. As a deacon in London, I was secretary for the perpetually traveling and very tall Laurean Rugambwa, the Cardinal of Tanzania, whose bedroom was conveniently next to mine. Concurrently, I conducted a liaison dangereuse with an Anglican priest named Thaddeus and was first published, having written about Anglican/Catholic ecumenism.

I guess a lot has changed. Nowadays...