For Saginaw, a New "Waiter"

It's a pretty lonely Tuesday here in the River City; the gang's picked up and gone to Michigan.

No, the Shore hasn't moved or anything -- keeping with tradition, the hometown crowd's chartered a plane and headed en masse to Saginaw, where local boy Joe Cistone's installation as Mid-Michigan's sixth bishop begins at 2pm Eastern (1800GMT) on this, the fifth anniversary of his episcopal ordination.

For the curious, both the area's ABC and CBS affiliates are offering webstreams, as is the local Saginaw News.

(The more, the merrier -- it keeps a lone provider's servers from crashing.)

As events of the sort go, this one's especially worth watching... not because of any local prejudice, but as, so they say, Ken Untener once danced around the Saginaw chancery with a plant on his head, telling of being "so sad I didn't get to go to Philadelphia," now Philadelphia takes his chair... and the meeting of the two should make for, er, quite the experience.

Today's rites begin a four-day swing that'll come East to see two other bishops-elect take up their posts at week's end: Allentown's John Barres on Thursday, and new Philly auxiliary Tim Senior on Friday.

PHOTO: Octavian Cantill/Bay City Times

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