chicus.com

Some Pre-St. Patty's Day Irish
Feb 28, 2010
I've been getting in touch with my Irish heritage a bit more as of late. A few weeks ago I tried my hand at set dancing and last night I went to see The Wolf Tones.

Set dancing, as I explain it, is traditional Irish square dancing. Now you may be assuming I decided to do it just to get in back in touch but you would be WRONG. In fact the surprising answer is that I did it for a woman. In my defense, Jen and I are well past the 'I'll do this and pretend I like it because I want to date you' phase. It's something she does with some regularity and I wanted to see what it was all about. So I headed out to The Burren on Monday night to see for myself.

What it's all about is my second freaking calling! I was apparently pretty good. Nay, I was fantastic. Though there were a few differences from the video in the earlier link. First, our music was being played off a computer. No live band for my beginners lessons. Second, that tapping your feet in unison stuff you see? Yeah, we kind of skipped that part. Apparently my first night at these lessons was a night they chose to work on an advanced set so they didn't worry about my footwork as much as they were concerned with my upper body getting from point A to point B appropriately and my arms reaching out to hold hands when appropriate. But luckily I'm naturally fleet-footed so I can't imagine the next lesson being any worse. (It may be hard for you to detect the sarcasm in my writing, I absolutely blow at moving my feet in a rhythmic manner.)

Anyhow, I enjoyed myself much more than I expected (PLEASE don't tell Jen) and will probably be back in the near future. While I have no idea if my ancestors ever partook of the traditional dance I liked to think I was performing a dance they had done, if just a lot more crappily.

Last night I went to see The Wolf Tones, a traditional Irish folk band that formed in the 1960's. It's strange because I have found an equal number of people who really love their music as those who have never heard of them.

I'm still kind of processing a lot of what I saw. The band was great though I got the sense that they had performed this exact show more than a few times in the last 40 years. I suppose some of that came from the slide show they had that was synchronized to the show. Though a funny moment was in the middle of the show when Windows Vista decided to install new software and forced a reboot. I had seen it coming, a message popped up and was counting down from 15 minutes, giving a user time to reboot but they just hid the window and then...bam. The presentation was over.

The processing comes from seeing so many people drink in excess, using an Irish gathering as the reason. I'm not going to go into it any further than that, I tend to have a rant around the middle of every March so I will save myself for then. But yes, there was a great deal of alcohol consumed and I am open to the possibility that I was just overly sensitive to it and that in reality there was nothing to be bothered by.

One such overly-imbibed woman happened to be at the table in front of us. I guess I should mention this was held in the largest union hall (IBEW, electricians) I had ever seen and we were all seated around circular card-type tables. It was BYOS (bring your own snacks) but they had a full bar. The blond woman was 5 or so years older than I and shapely but was not blessed with nice facial features. So by the last 4-5 songs she was pretty drunk and had decided dancing with the people at her table was not sufficient and had taken to me with chatting and the like. Mind you, I wasn't dancing (see part 1 of this post regarding the movement of feet) but I was standing up when the band 'suggested' it and holding hands as directed, all that stuff. So there was one song where we were supposed to hold our hands up and she grabbed mine and rather than make it awkward I just went along with it. Fine, no problem, I'm happily dating so I'll selflessly help this woman have fun. Then during the next song she put this ridiculous tall Irish hat with a fake red beard on my buddy Mike and snapped his picture. Then she put the hat on me and instead of taking my picture sat on my lap and had our picture taken. The next song came along and she wanted a picture with me, her friend, and her. The next song I had moved so a chair was between her and I. She turned around and danced with me (chair betwixt us) and then pulled me away from the chair so we could properly dance. Awesome. The next song was called "A Nation Once Again". At one point she leaned over and asked "why are they singing about being Haitian?". Needless to say we all had a good laugh at her expense later in the evening.

Somewhere in the midst of the show there was a more serious conversation between Mike and I. Namely, why are The Wolf Tones still out here doing this? It could have been for money or to feed their egos but we agreed it was to promote the history of Ireland and not let people forget those stories. A lot of the slides mentioned the brave men and women who gave their life for Ireland and the trials of the nation, and obviously the music followed suit.