Popestock

The Woodstock-based events producer Chris Wangro is not a very religious person, but he has always believed that something magical happens when a big crowd gets together. (This is what led him, after stints as a clown and an agitprop street performer, to begin staging concerts in Central Park—Earth Day, Paul Simon, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, David Byrne.) So, Wangro said last week, he felt at ease when the Office of the Papal Visit hired him to plan a youth rally at St. Joseph’s Seminary, in Yonkers, to welcome Pope Benedict XVI. “It’s all very similar,” he said. “Ultimately, it comes down to creating a community through the show.”

It was four days to showtime. The Pope was arriving in Washington, and Wangro, wearing a leather jacket and Lennon-style sunglasses, was zipping around the seminary in a golf cart, attending to logistics. The audience—twenty-five thousand young people, selected by lottery from around the country—would be bused in on Saturday morning, and Wangro had planned a music festival to entertain them while they waited for the Pope. The lineup: Kelly Clarkson and groups called Saint Michael’s Warriors, the Messengers of Christ, A Fragile Tomorrow, and Jammin’ with Jesus & Friends. Wangro pointed to the stage. “This is purely a rock-and-roll rig,” he said. It was left over from a Rolling Stones show, but Wangro had installed new features, including secret exits, extra floor space, and, on the stage, a thirty-foot-high backdrop depicting a rising Christ surrounded by purple and gold sun rays. Backstage, he was setting up a papal greenroom that would impress even the most demanding diva: fresh flowers, mirrors, Oriental carpets, a decorative cross selected by the fathers at the seminary, a couch-filled seating area, a “very fancy mobile toilet unit.”