Columnist Susan Snyder: This is one cheese that stands alone

Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2004 | 8:19 a.m.

The Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Sandwich is on its way to Las Vegas.

I haven't been this excited since the Tropicana offered the chance to play tick-tack-toe against a live chicken.

For those who are preoccupied with drivel such as the war in Iraq or holiday preparations, the Virgin Cheese is half of a grilled cheese sandwich that a jewelry saleswoman fried up 10 years ago. Apparently, Diana Duyser had taken her first bite when she spotted the Virgin Mary's face looking back.

So she saved it, then sold it on eBay last week for $28,000. The buyer is the owner of a popular online casino company, which plans to launch the sandwich's world tour in Las Vegas.

And how is the Virgin Cheese arriving here? Learjet? Motorbus? No. It is being hand-carried to Las Vegas by Jim DeFede, a columnist for the Miami Herald newspaper who is driving it cross-country and writing about it along the way.

And y'all think I resort to desperate means to get columns.

Anyway, after failed attempts to reach DeFede, his editor and the online casino company Monday morning, I still don't know where in Las Vegas the Virgin Cheese will make its debut.

The company that purchased the sandwich doesn't run casinos here. In a sense, it competes with them. So, the idea of one of our casinos embracing the Virgin Cheese seems rather unlikely.

"That is so gross," said Erika Yowell, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority spokeswoman who evidently drew the short straw and had to answer the phone the Monday after a holiday weekend.

She finally stopped laughing and asked me to hold on a minute.

"An informal poll has determined that no one knows anything about where this is going to come in Las Vegas," Yowell said. "It doesn't seem it would fit the marketing plan of casinos in Las Vegas."

No, olive oil is the only virgin that sells around here -- legally.

And to be perfectly honest, seeing the Virgin Mary in stuff is a whole lot of trouble. A state park ranger once told me inspiration-seeking visitors overran Spring Mountain Ranch Park in the 1980s after someone spotted a likeness of the Virgin Mary in its sandstone cliffs.

DeFede is filing daily installments and updates in an online journal (blog). Read it at www.followthe- cheese.blogspot.com.

Friday, DeFede says, he was tossed out of an abandoned bank building in downtown Clearwater, Fla., where handmaidens of the Shepherds of Christ Ministries keep vigil because some see the Virgin Mary in the reflection of its windows.

By Sunday he was in Biloxi dropping $100 at a craps table, $200 on blackjack, then finally making out at the craps table again. He says he was up $200 when he left the casino. Just enough to keep him interested.

Come to Vegas, Baby. We have craps tables with your name all over them, and we need to hire a few more teachers.

It's odd that this online-casino-that-shall-not-be-named-'cause-it-ain't-ours entrusted the blessed Virgin Cheese to a newspaper reporter for a cross-country road trip.

Reporters will eat anything -- especially if it's fried and without regard to its age. Halfway through a drive across west Texas, pork rinds start looking like a vegetable.

Godspeed, little Cheese.