Mary O'Regan discovered Seinfeld when she was 17. She goes on to say...
"Watching my first episode was like watching
TV for the very first time. Nothing I had ever seen or heard had made me laugh
and forget my troubles like that 22 minute Seinfeld escape.
I started praying for Tom Leopold when I was 18. It may seem strange to pray for someone that I
had never met. I never expected to meet Leopold and be able to thank him
in person. So, when I was a young university student in Ireland, I prayed for him as
a way of ‘giving something back’.
But during my 20s, I had a much more serious reason
for praying for Leopold. As I mentioned
in the original interview, ‘years ago I got hooked on Leopold’s comedy during a dark
winter when I was pulling a suicidal friend out of a depression. I kept myself
upbeat by repeatedly watching some of the scenes that Leopold wrote for
Seinfeld…’
To be more precise, I was at the side of a young
pregnant woman who was being cruelly bullied by thugs. She wanted to die by
her own hand, by swallowing a lethal cocktail.
It
was a
bitterly frosty winter, and I would spend my days with the suicidal
lady, pulling her back from the abyss and encouraging her to cut ties
with
the bullies who were mistreating her.
After long days with the suicidal pregnant mother,
I would be emotionally exhausted, and doubted if I had the strength to spend so
much time with someone who yearned to drink a deathly draft.
When I came home, my remedy for my hopelessness was
to watch Seinfeld, which renewed me. Most importantly, I was able to get a good
night’s sleep after watching Seinfeld Season 3. People who have cared for
pregnant suicidal women in distress know that it can be hard to sleep for fear
that the woman will ‘do something stupid’ during the night. But I needed my
sleep urgently.
At that time, I would repeatedly watch The Suicide,
the Seinfeld episode that Leopold wrote.
It gave me a way of coping: the parallel black-comedy storyline about a
man who attempts suicide but fails.
At that time, when I was praying intensely for
Leopold, a room-mate of mine at the time said, ‘I can’t understand why you pray
for that Seinfeld writer. IT’S NOT LIKE ANY OF THOSE WRITERS WILL BECOME
CATHOLIC!’
I prayed for Leopold out of gratitude. To
understand my gratitude, you have to consider that I do not think I
would have pulled the young woman out of despair, had I not been able to
feed my mind with the mirth of Leopold’s comedy.
The lady survived her suicidal ideation, and she
gave birth to a lovely baby. She never
had depression or mental illness per se, but was going through a phase of suicidal
tendencies. Now, she can’t understand why she was so eager to die by her own
hand, and reflects that, ‘I don’t know what came over me. It’s like I was a
different person then’.
During
the years that I was praying the mysteries of
the Rosary for Leopold, I didn’t know and never expected that he would
convert to Catholicism. Some time later, I picked up a newspaper article
and
saw that Tom Leopold had become a Catholic. I thought that I was dreaming. I watched an
interview that Leopold gave on the inspiration behind The Cheever Letters, and made
sure that the same writer was the one who had converted to Catholicism."
Thus is the power of committed prayer...
