If you squint, it does look like her
So Houston finally has its own Virgin on a random object. She appeared on a pizza pan at an elementary on Ash Wednesday, and there's been much discussion about her. From the HoustonistBig news in Houston this weekend: the Blessed Virgin Mary, that holy trickster known for showing up in all sorts of unexpected places, chose to make an appearance on a pizza pan in a local elementary school kitchen. It happened on Ash Wednesday when Guadalupe Rodriguez, a cafeteria worker at Pugh Elementary, was washing the pizza pan in question and noticed a stubborn stain. "On the third rinse I started watching it, trying to discover what it was," Rodriguez said. She eventually figured out that the spot formed the silhouette of the BVM; Rodriguez took the pan to her manager, Coralia Pacay, and school Principal Lyda Guerrero, who both said they saw the image.
Students saw the pan and told their parents, who showed up at Pugh wanting to see Mary, too. Pacay propped the pan up near the lunch line and more people came, including HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra. The general consensus: The pan was drawing so much attention that it needed to be moved. So the school gave the pan to the PTA, which displayed it on a makeshift shrine in member Sylvia Calderon's yard.
As I'm sure you can imagine, Ms. Calderon has had quite a number of visitors in the last few days. The problem, of course, is that the pizza pan is HISD property, and, as you can see from the image, aside from the stain, it's a perfectly good pizza pan. So the school asked for it back. I thought that maybe there'd be some tension over that, but the PTA brought back the pizza pan yesterday, albiet adorned with flowers and candles.
I think that HISD is struggling to figure out what to do now. Apparently the pizza pan has been locked in an office, and there have been several requests to look at her. The obvious course of action, of course, is for the PTA to hold a bake sale to raise money to buy another pizza pan and swap out the non-holy pizza pan for the Virgin Mary's.