Easter Sunday

Easter Sunday, March 26, 1978, appears in Andy Warhol’s diary as a holiday whose public signs are thwarted by the weather but partially restored through television and a personal ritual. The day moves from a canceled parade to church, then to the practical work of bringing holy water home; a call from Nelson Rockefeller adds an incongruously everyday ending.

A Holiday Without Its Parade

The day was cold, windy, and heavily rainy, and there was no Easter parade for Warhol to watch. Television offered a substitute: broadcasts of parades in England, where people walked in hats, doing what Warhol regarded as the expected thing. The contrast is modest but telling. The local holiday spectacle had disappeared, while the screen made another place’s observance available for viewing at home.

Holy Water at Home

Warhol went to church carrying a peanut jar, which he filled with holy water from a dispenser operated by pressing a button. He then spent a couple of hours distributing the water around his house. The account dwells on the sequence and duration of the task: a small container, a mechanical dispenser, and hours of carrying the water through the home. Religious observance becomes both a visit to church and a concrete domestic activity, extending the holiday from the church into Warhol’s private space.

The Diary’s Weekend Time

The date is marked as Sunday, although the diary’s usual reporting routine did not include weekend sessions. Pat Hackett’s account of the method explains that weekend activity was gathered on Monday, when Andy Warhol recounted Friday, Saturday, and Sunday together. Easter Sunday therefore belongs to a dated sequence in the published diary while also falling within a reporting practice that collected the weekend retrospectively.

From Observance to Everyday Anecdote

After the church visit, the entry shifts to a call from Nelson Rockefeller in Los Angeles. Rockefeller recounted that on St. Patrick’s Day he and Robert De Niro had begun eating a five-pound cheddar cheese with Jack Daniel’s; after days of eating little else, he developed pain and went to the hospital. He said the cheese had turned to rock and that he was given a laxative to break it up. The anecdote is not about Easter itself, but its placement gives the entry its characteristic range: the day’s record holds a holiday ritual and a friend’s comic medical story in the same continuous account.