Pope-a-Palooza.(The Talk of the Town)(youth rally)

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."

To assemble it all, Wangro had called in many old collaborators. The pre-Pope scene at St. Joseph's was starting to resemble a roadie reunion: on hand were Ken Viola, a burly man in a Bruins jacket, who had been, for fifteen years, the head of the Grateful Dead's security, and Chris Falciano, who'd handled Paul Simon with Wangro. The catering was being done by a vender out of Florida, ...