Start your weekend off right and go to the Irish Center on Friday night, April 4, to listen to a Frenchman play Irish music on his fiddle.
Patrick Ourceau was born in Paris in 1967, but the minute he first heard Irish music he was hooked. He had planned to learn the concertina, but he had such a hard time finding one in France that he switched to the fiddle, which he started learning at the age of 12. He moved to the US in 1989 to play Irish music in New York with the likes of Andy McGann, Paddy Reynolds, Brian Conway, and Tony DeMarco (whose last performance in Philly earned him three standing Os).
Ourceau is accompanied by Dublin guitarist Eamon O’Leary who also came to New York in the late 1980s.
Expect a toe-tapping, get-up-and-dance kind of evening.
Expect an equally rousing adventure if you join the Shamrocks Hurling Club on Friday night at the Irish Times in Philly’s Queen Village for a social. Learn about this great sport that’s exciting to watch and, we hear, equally exciting to play. The Shamrocks and other Gaelic Athletic Association sports teams play on summer Sundays at Cardinal Dougherty High School in Philadelphia and it’s always a blast. What’s hurling look like? Check out the photos.
Blackthorn fan alert: On Saturday night, your boys are playing a benefit for a very worthy cause—the Special Equestrians, which provides equestrian experiences for disabled children. Tickets are $25 and it starts at 7 PM at Finnigan’s Wake.
On Sunday, at Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon, the 69th Pennsylvania Volunteers, Irish Brigade, will provide the honor guard for the annual commemoration of the late Irish activist and Philadelphian Joseph McGarrity, who played a pivotal role in the Easter Uprising of 1919, which led to the independence of the Irish Republic. A social will follow at Galileo Hall, 401 Bailey Road, Yeadon, PA, across from the graveyard. Admission to the social is $25 and includes food, drink, and music by Declan McLoughlin.
Monday night offers you a chance to hear Kevin Burke and Cal Scott at Moorestown Community House in Moorestown, NJ. Burke has been called “one of the great living Celtic fiddlers” and you’ll find out why.
On Thursday, join www.irishphildelphia.com and WTMR radio host Marianne MacDonald for Thursday night at the movies at the Irish Center. We’re co-sponsoring this six-week series of Irish films that you need to see—and if you’ve seen them, you need to see again. (We’re on our third go-round with “The Boys and Girl from County Clare,” our first film; and we can recite most of the dialogue for our second, “The Secret of Roan Inish.”) Up next: The Butcher Boy, a gritty film about a young boy’s tumultuous childhood, based on a novel by Patrick McCabe that was shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize and won the 1992 Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for fiction. The bar will be open (host Marianne McDonald says you may need a drink with this one–read her review here) and Barry Club manager John Nolan will be serving up his soon-to-be world famous hand-cut fries.
And on Friday, the AOH Comedy Show—sold out last year!—goes on stage at the Palombaro Club in Ardmore. Proceeds from the fundraiser will go to “Treasures for our Troops,” a program that supplies American soldiers with daily essentials and comfort items, as well as providing financial assistance to wounded troops.
You know where to get all the details: Our calendar, which will be seen on the next season of “Dancing with the Stars” if it doesn’t make the “American Idol” cut.
