- MY LAST YEAR WITH THE NUNS Writer/star Matt Smith
On the morning of April 29, 1965, a magnitude 6.5 earthquake rumbled through Seattle, killing seven people and causing around $12.5 million in property damage. It also got an eighth-grade boy at St. Joseph Catholic School out of serious trouble. Seconds before the quake hit, the eighth grader—named Matt Smith—was sitting in a crowded pew at St. Joseph Church on Capitol Hill trying to look innocent while the severe Sister Conda studied the faces of her students, trying to find the boy who’d been making croaking noises while the class practiced “Tantum Ergo.” Then the building started to shake. A few panicked, but Sister Conda was unperturbed.
“The nuns are in their element, when you think about it,” Smith says in the first scene of My Last Year with the Nuns, his spritely—and, at times, surprisingly disturbing—autobiographical monologue about a year in his life back when Capitol Hill was Seattle’s Catholic stronghold. “The earth is shaking. This could very well be the end of the world. Who better to be than a nun? In church? With 850 uniformed children, singing ‘Tantum Ergo’ in Latin? Their life choices are looking good right now”…
