Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday is recorded in Andy Warhol’s diary on March 19, 1978, as both a religious observance and an ordinary day out in New York. Its defining detail is a small failure of ceremony: he went to church, but a woman had already taken all the palms. The entry then moves directly to lunch and a gathering of artists, where sacred references return in altered form—as costume, jewelry, and performance.

The Observance and the Day’s Turn

The diary does not dwell on a service or explain the observance. Instead, the missing palms mark the church visit before the account turns to lunch at Laurent on 56th Street. There, Chris Makos wore a leather jacket and his boyfriend had no tie. The restaurant seemed as though it might be formal, but it was prepared for Salvador Dalí’s crowd. The sequence makes Palm Sunday less a pause from social life than the date on which the day’s movements are recorded: church, lunch, and conversation among familiar figures.

Ultra Violet’s Recycled Look

Ultra Violet sat beside Salvador Dalí in an outfit deliberately repeated from the day Warhol had met her in the 1960s: a pink Chanel miniskirt suit, the same boots, and the same hairstyle. The remembered look linked the lunch to an earlier encounter, making personal history visible in clothing rather than in a separate recollection. She had added a bracelet made from a Brillo pad, which she said she would use to clean her pot after wearing it as jewelry. Another bracelet consisted of eight inches of corrugated bottle-wrapping cardboard, sprayed gold and glued together. Disposable household materials had become accessories, and the entry records both their construction and their intended afterlife.

Ultra Violet connected her performance to an earlier suggestion from Warhol: she said he had encouraged her to develop a new look, which she called Park Avenue Punk. She had turned that idea into Christian Punk, singing the Lord’s Prayer with an obscenity inserted into its wording. Warhol found this offensive, yet responded practically by recommending that she begin performing at CBGB rather than the Riverboat, where she planned to appear. The episode sets the church’s palms against a deliberately provocative stage persona: religious language remained recognizable, but was made part of an act.

A Sacred Date in a Social Diary

The Palm Sunday scene belongs to a diary shaped by routine rather than by a formal account of religious life. Pat Hackett describes how, after the daily log became Warhol’s own narrative in 1976, their weekday morning phone calls gathered his account of the previous day, including expenses. The process could take one or two hours, although Warhol called it a five-minute job; receipts were later attached to typed pages and stored in letter boxes. The diary usually waited through the weekend for a Monday session covering Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Against that larger practice, the entry’s explicit Sunday date preserves Palm Sunday as a named occasion within a record otherwise attentive to meals, clothes, performances, and practical details.

The day’s significance is therefore carried by juxtaposition rather than reflection. A church visit yields no palms, while religious imagery reappears at lunch in the form of Ultra Violet’s Christian Punk performance. The diary does not resolve that contrast or turn it into a statement of belief. It records how a sacred calendar date could pass through Warhol’s social world as one element among others, its associations remade in the details of a crowded lunch and an improvised costume.