Is this statue of an angel with a cell phone great or what? And it has numbers you can call:
...shortly after the statue was unveiled last
April, a local couple, the parents of two children, set up a number so
people could call the angel. Business cards soon appeared in pubs,
restaurants and hotels with a picture of the angel and the number. So
successful was the line that the couple opened a Twitter account, @ut_engelke, managed by the husband, which now has about 2,700 followers.
“The telephone is ringing all day,” said the wife, who like her husband
agreed to meet a reporter on the condition that they not be identified.
“It was a fairy tale,” she said over beer and snacks. “Now, it’s real.”
To identify them, she said, would end it.
What began as a joke continues because the cellphone number has become
something of a hot line, dialed by people of all ages, some in need of
help, others just because they are lonely.
At the holidays, the calls became so frequent and so pressing that the
couple was tempted to give up. “Between Christmas and New Year’s, that
was an emotional time frame, it was so heartbreaking,” she said. A small
girl called begging the angel to pray for a grandmother who had just
died; a woman asked help to celebrate her first Christmas without her
parents. A widow sought prayers for her dead children.
The statue of the Little Angel arose out of a 1997 competition, won by
the Dutch sculptor Ton Mooy, to create 40 statues, including 14 angels,
to replace those on the cathedral that time and pollution had ruined.
The Little Angel was the only unconventional one.
“You can make a phony Gothic statue,” Mr. Mooy, 63, said in his studio
in Amersfoort, about an hour north of here. “That’s not what I wanted.
It had to fit in with what was always on the church, namely, refinement,
emotion. Angels are there to guide, to protect people, they get
messages from above. How do you show that? With a cellphone.”
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