Julia Sweeney is the rare celebrity I admire. She's done sincere and thoughtful work on what she has called her "beautiful loss of faith story," soon to be published and/or released in numerous forms, one movie and two audio versions, and a somewhat different book. I attended an early workshop of the stage presentation she calls "Letting Go Of God," coming up on two years ago, at the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood. (Steve Allen was publicly, but quietly, a non-religious person, and among the products of his Zappaesque personal industry was The Center For Inquiry West, where the Steve Allen Theater presents music and lectures throughout the year.) LGOG was excerpted for a longish segment of Ira Glass's public radio program This American Life, bringing unprecedented listener response to the broadcast. Julia's web site and web log experienced a spike in traffic, and listeners responded to her story in overwhelming numbers.

Julia erupted in a flurry of broad-ranging response to this passionate and divided audience, writing daily for a while in her otherwise leisurely web log. She's now devoting herself to the shaping of her story into what promise to be complementary but different takes on the story of her painfully funny transition from devout Catholic to godless disciple of reason. Her many archived blog entries are very good reading, intimate without oversharing, guileless but not without their art.

In the "Get A Load Of This" section of her web site Julia has posted a loving tribute to her late father, Bob Sweeney, who has figured irreplaceably in her monologues. There's a slide show of family snapshots of Bob as she likes to remember him, and I was honored to give her the go-ahead to use some of my 'ukulele music as a soundtrack.