Columnist Susan Snyder: Sandwich has been quite a sight

Thursday, Dec. 9, 2004 | 8:11 a.m.

The Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Sandwich is on display, but you'll need to hurry to the Hard Rock Cafe if you want to see it.

The sandwich that Diana Duyser cooked up 10 years ago and sold last month on eBay for $28,000 will be in Las Vegas until noon Friday. After that it hits the road with Duyser and her husband, Greg, who renewed their wedding vows before the Virgin Cheese during a press conference Wednesday.

Jim DeFede, the Miami Herald columnist who drove 3,200 miles in eight days and delivered the famous sandwich to Las Vegas over the weekend, said a person can learn a lot from a sandwich.

"Once I got out on the road, I realized this was more about faith and religion," DeFede said from his Miami office Wednesday morning. "What amazed me most was people who had their own experiences of seeing apparitions -- the Virgin Mary or Jesus."

A screen door, a hunk of weathered plywood, the foliage of a tree -- all were places in which people claimed to have seen images of the Virgin Mary or Jesus Christ. A stripper in Austin, Texas, told DeFede of how her parents prayed to a likeness of Jesus in a Brownsville tree trunk.

It was intriguing, he added, when he took the Virgin Cheese to the judges' floor of the Texas Supreme Court in Austin the following day.

"The range of reactions at the strip club were exactly the same as the reactions at the Supreme Court," DeFede said. "The only difference is nobody got naked there."

(In court. He meant nobody got naked in court.)

A diner cook in Crawford, Texas, tried to cook up the likeness of a president named George -- Washington, not Bush. He ended up with something that looked like, well, a grilled cheese sandwich.

"He asked, 'Do you think I could get $50 for this on eBay?' " DeFede said.

Outside the diner, a taxidermist who had traveled to Crawford just to see the Virgin Cheese lured DeFede to his home to show photos of a Jesus Christ likeness his family had once seen.

"It's easy to make jokes about the grilled cheese sandwich, and Lord knows I tried," DeFede said. "But I also realized some people are moved by it. So what difference does it make if I believe?

"If people are made to act in a better way or have hope, it seems to have some sort of power. Where it comes from I don't know," he added.

DeFede's cousin traveled to Las Vegas from Southern California to renew his wedding vows with his wife in front of the Virgin Cheese before DeFede turned it over to Dennis Rodman, who accepted the sandwich on behalf of Goldenpalace.com.

The Duysers' trek with the Virgin Cheese can be tracked on www.goldenpalace.com, Drew Black, a company spokesman, said.

DeFede hopes to return to some of the towns he visited and talk more with people about their religious visions for a book about faith. The vast majority of people told DeFede they were skeptical that the image in the sandwich truly was the Virgin Mary.

"But few were willing to say with all certainty that it's not," DeFede said. "In that tiny bit of uncertainty, there's so much to explore."

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