Irish music played, little kids danced. grown-ups ate, talked, laughed, and plunked down money for dozens of raffle baskets. In other words, it was a typical fun Irish event–this one at Cardinal O’Hara High School in Springfield, Delaware County, to raise money for the Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day Parade. The parade takes place Sunday, March 10, and will be broadcast live on CBS3. Check out our photos and join us along the parade route! We’ll be the ones with all the camera equipment.
All Posts By
Denise Foley
Happy St. Patrick’s season!
And it’s off to a roaring start. We have a lot to cover this week, so we’ll do it in order.
Saturday, March 2
The Burlington County St. Patrick’s Day Parade takes over high Street in Mt Holly at 1 PM.
Marita Krivda Poxon, author of “Irish Philadelphia,” will be signing her pictorial history at McKenna’s Irish Shop in Havertown starting at 1 PM.
At 3 PM, the Glenside GAA is holding its first fundraising beef and beer at the Irish Center. There are activities for the kiddies.
At 3 PM, two Galway natives come together for the first time in eyars to make some music. Gabriel Donohue and Seamus Kelleher are dueting at Paddy Whacks Pub in northeast Philadelphia.
At 7 PM, Scythian raises the roof at a special concert to benefit The Little Sisters of the Poor and their Holy Family Home for the elderly in Philadelphia.
Also at 7 PM, you can see a showing of the classic “The Quiet Man” featuring John Wayne, enjoy Irish food from Paddy Rooney’s Pub, quizzo, and fun at Sacred Heart Parish at 109 N. Manoa Road, Haverford. Contact Brian Cleary at briancleary1@verizon.net for tickets. This is for folks 21 and older, so think “babysitter.”
At 8 PM, Eileen Ivers & Immigrant Soul raise another roof, this one at the Landis Theater in Vineland, NJ.
Also at 8 PM, Derek Warfield and the Young Wolfetones will be performing at the VFW Post on Martins Mill Road in Philadelphia.
At the same time, the Gloucester County AOH is holding its annual St. Patrick’s Day Party at the Gloucester Heights Fire Hall in Gloucester City, NJ.
Sunday, March 3
Start the day off right with a real Irish Mass at St. Malachy Church on N. 11th street in Philadelphia at 10 AM—that means bagpipes, fiddles, Irish harp, and refreshments afterward in the parish hall.
At 1 PM, Gerry Timlin and Tom Kane, two of our favorite musicians and people, will be performing at Glen Foerd on the Delaware on Grant Avenue in Philadelphia.
At 3 PM, the second of two fundraisers for the Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day Parade takes place at Cardinal O’Hara High School in Springfield. Please note that this is a different location than was previously announced.
You get a break the rest of the week (unless you want to go to a session) until Friday, when all Irish breaks loose again.
Friday
At 11:30 AM, former Irish President Mary Robinson will be addressing a group at the World Affairs Council at the Philadelphia Downtown Marriott on Market Street.
At 7:30 PM, the dynamic trio of Brian Conway, Billy McComiskey, and Brendan Dolan will be appearing at the Madeleine Wing Adler Theater in West Chester.
Also at 7:30, Belfast Connection, another dynamic trio, is appearing at the Darlington Arts Center in Garnet Valley, PA.
At the same time, the Irish Rovers are beginning their Long Goodbye Tour at the Keswick Theatre in Glenside. That’s right—they’re breaking up, though you may have one more year to hear them live.
At 8 PM, do a little dancing at the St. Patrick’s Day Ceili Mor, sponsored by the Philadelphia Ceili Group, at the Irish Center in Philadelphia. Don’t worry if you don’t know how to dance—instructors are standing by!
Whew! I’m exhausted already. But don’t flag. Also on Friday night, Black 47 comes to World Café Live and The Dropkick Murphys kick off Paddy Palooza with their annual St. Patrick’s Day visit to the Electric Factory (there’s also a meet and greet before the concert) and a Claddagh Fund (Dropkicks’ Ken Casey’s charity) fundraiser at Dubh Linn Square in Cherry Hill on March 9 featureing the Broken Shillelaghs and Slainte.
And next week? The Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day Parade marches on Sunday, March 10, with a couple of more parades following not far behind. And there is so much more that we’re going to have to continue this next week.
Check our calendar frequently for late-breaking fun as well as details on these and other events.
Sister James Anne steps lively.
It’s always one of the first events of the St. Patrick’s Day season in Philadelphia and the pre-parade party at the studios of CBS3, which has been broadcasting the Philadelphia parade for a decade, is the official start of the excitement.
But the event was tinged with sadness this year: Parade Director Michael Bradley called for a moment of silence to remember two longtime members of the Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day Observance Association who died in the last two weeks: Knute Bonner and Paul Phillips.
Still, since it was an Irish thing, there was also merrymaking. Brian, Michael, and John Boyce and their sister Karen Boyce McCollum, along with Blackthorn members John McGroary and Michael Callaghan provided the music and the McDade-Cara School and 2011 Grand Marshal Sister James Ann Feerick provided the dancing. There was a legendary grouping of former grand marshals, an amazing buffet table provided by IBEW Local 98, whose leader, John Dougherty, was last year’s grand marshal, and some impromptu crooning by another former Grand Marshal, Vincent Gallagher, and Judge James Lynn, whose St. Patrick’s Day breakfast at The Plough and the Stars is the place to be on March 17. This year’s grand marshal, Harry Marnie, a retired police officer who injected new life into the city’s Emerald Society, an organization made up of police and fire personnel of Irish ancestry, was introduced. When he faltered a little with his written speech, he got some help from his wife, Pat, who yelled out to him, “Wing it!” So he did, with a laugh, thanking his wife for “her support.”
Check out our photos for all the fun.
And here’s a video wrap-up of the night’s festivities.
A father of four from County Cavan and a mother of five (including eight-year-old quadruplets!) were the winning couple in the Delco Gael’s “Dancing Like a Star” fundraiser on Friday, February 22.
Eight amateur couples competed in this second annual event, which drew 700 people—a sellout crowd—to the ballroom of the Springfield Country Club in Springfield, Delaware County. Martin Fay of Havertown, whose daughters play with the Delco Gaels, and Geana Morris of South Philadelphia, whose dancing was influenced, she said, by movie musicals and 12 years with the Mummers, were named the winners at the end of the evening, after a comical star turn as the Blues Brothers.
The judges, who included Wayne Saint David, jazz department head at the University of the Arts; Carole Orlandi Barr, of the Orlandi School of Dance, and Barr’s granddaughter, Jenna Rose Pepe, who teaches at Orlandi and competes herself as a dancer, chose Sean Brady and Kathy Konieczny as their top dancers of the night.
It was a tough call. The couples, who performed two Latin dances and whose individual dances called to mind everything from “The Honeymooners” (Mary Patrick and Joe Roan, who many of the dancers thought were the biggest competition going into the evening) to the ‘50s Beatnik era (Cecelia Quarino and John Kildea) to the Sinatra years (Mary Kay Bowden and Hank Clinton), learned their lessons well from choreographers Jennifer Cleary and Lisa Oster. They also practiced for more than 6 weeks.
One competitor, Sinead Bourke, a 21-year-old psychology major at West Chester University, followed her father, Pat, into the dance contest—he was a crowd hit last year. Her partner was Brian Anderson, a roofer from Ridley Township whose personal note in the program read, “Where the hell am I and how did I get here?
There was at least one experienced dancer in the group: Maureen Heather Lisowski, the daugher of the late Maureen McDade McGrory, founder of the McDade School of Irish Dance, is a teacher at McDade and also instructs the Second Street Irish Society dancers. Her partner was Stevie Robinson, formerly of County Derry, who plays Gaelic football for the St. Patrick’s team in Philadelphia.
And Fred Rigsby, a manager at Market Intelligence and Corporate Research, got to mimic his idol, Michael Jackson, in the number he did with his partner, Eileen Reavy, from Havertown, a math teacher who is now a stay-at-home mom.
The Delco Gaels is the largest and longest established Gaelic youth club in Pennsylvania. Hundreds of children ages 4 to 17 participate in Gaelic football, hurling, and camogie both indoors and outdoors throughout the year. They regularly compete in the Feile Peil na nOg, or Feile, a national festival of Gaelic football for boys and girls under 14, held annually in a host county in Ireland. The proceeds from “Dancing Like a Star” helps fund that trip and other things the club needs.
The organizing committee comprises Carmel Bradley, Una McDaid, Fionnuala McBrearty, Lorna Corr, Leigh Anne McCabe, Trish Daly, Anne Bourke, Aisling Travers, Anna Bonner, and Ethel McGarvey. Louie Bradley is the chairperson of the Delco Gaels.
This year’s host for the evening was Fox TV’s Jennaphr Frederick.
Professor Bill Watson and Vince Gallagher. Gallagher donated the plot in the Donegal cemetery where John Ruddy will be buried on March 2.
The remains of John Ruddy, one of 57 Irish railroad workers who died at an area in Malvern known as Duffy’s Cut, will be buried on Saturday, March 2 in a donated grave at Holy Family Church in Ardara, County Donegal, Ireland—181 years after his death.
The remains were shipped to Ireland several weeks ago, said Professor William Watson of Immaculata University who, with his twin brother, Frank, discovered the remains of the victims who may have died of cholera—or were murdered by vigilantes—near a railroad embankment in the woods in East Whiteland Township.
Vincent Gallagher, a businessman and president of the Commodore Barry Club (The Irish Center) in Philadelphia, donated the grave in his family plot. The Watsons had hoped that Ruddy, who was believed to be an 18-year-old from Inishowen, would be buried near his own family, but the DNA tests on the body and a possible family member in Ireland have not been completed.
The remains of six other victims, including one woman, that were recovered from the site were buried in a donated grave in West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Lower Merion last fall. Skulls of several of those victims exhibited signs of violence and a University of Pennsylvania anthropologist confirmed that one was shot through the head. The Watsons have speculated that the seven may have tried to leave the site after the cholera outbreak and were killed to keep them from spreading the disease, which is caused by a bacteria and is usually spread by consuming contaminated food or water.
Work is expected to begin this spring to unearth the rest of the Duffy’s Cut victims who are buried much deeper than the first seven and close to the Amtrak railroad tracks. Following the intervention of US Sen. Robert Casey and other legislators, Amtrak, which originally told the Watsons that it was too dangerous to dig up the remains so close to the tracks, finally gave permission.
The Smithsonian Channel will be airing the documentary, “The Ghosts of Duffy’s Cut,” on March 7 at 8 AM and 5 PM, and again on March 15 at 10 PM.
It’s almost here!
The first fundraiser for Philadelphia’s St. Patrick’s Day gets the season off to a good start, with Jamison, the Bogside Rogues, and No Irish Need Apply providing the music at The Heroes Ballroom at the FOP Lodge 5 in Philadelphia on Sunday. A second, set for March 3, has moved from the Springfield Country Club to Cardinal O’Hara High School on South Springfield Road in Springfield. It features the music of Slainte and Round Tower, with performances by the McDade, Cara, and McHugh Schools of Irish Dance.
Also this weekend: Gael Scoil! That would be Irish school, an annual two-day event during which kids between the ages of 7 and 17 learn about Irish history, sports, dance, mythology, and language at Notre Dame High School in Lawrence Township, NJ.
On Sunday, the Burlington County St. Patrick’s Day Parade is holding its grand marshal dinner at the High Street Grill in Mt. Holly, NJ. This year’s grand marshal is Francis X. McAneny, EdD, a longtime educator and currently the principal at St. Mary School in Bordentown, NJ. He is also a longtime Irish dancer who has appeared with the Crossroads School of Irish Dance and won many awards. The parade, always the first in the region, is scheduled for Saturday, March 2.
Irish language lessons are available in the Glenside area starting on Monday. See our calendar for more details.
“Jimmy Titanic,” a new play from Belfast-born playwright Bernard McMullan debuts at the Second State at the Adrienne in Philadelphia on Wednesday, Feb. 27. It explores “the Irish side” of the Titanic disaster through the eyes of a former shipyard worker turned sailor who died on the voyage. Colin Hamell stars in this one-man play which runs through March 10.
And Lunasa will be on stage at the Sellersville Theatre on Wednesday night.
At a luncheon on Thursday at the Hyatt at the Bellevue in Philadelphia, the Irish Ambassador to the US, Michael Collins, will present the annual Irish American Business Chamber and Network’s Ambassador’s Award to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), the Taoiseach Award to James and Frances Maguire and the Uachtaran Award to Sr. Marguerite O’Beirne, OSF. The Maguires are principals of the Maguire Foundation, a philanthropic organization that funds education. Sister Marguerite O’Beirne, OSF, is vice president of mission and ministry at Neumann University.
If you didn’t get a chance to get your copy of “Irish Philadelphia” signed at the Irish Center a few weeks ago, author Marita Krivda Poxon will be autographing again on Saturday at McKenna’s Irish Shop in Havertown.
Also next Saturday, March 2, the Glenside Gaelic Athletic Association is holding a beef and beer at the Irish Center on Emlen Street in Philadelphia.
Don’t forget: The Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day Parade is coming up on March 10. Stake out your chunk of curb now.
Lunasa (Trevor Hutchinson in the middle)
It’s rare to find an Irish musician who could be described as “full of himself.” In my experience, and I’ve met quite a few, they tend to be pretty modest, more interested in playing music than anything else, including, in some cases, making money playing music.
Lunasa’s Trevor Hutchinson (the tall one with the stand up bass) takes humble to a whole new level.
When I asked him the other day about how it felt to be part of a group that was named “Performers of the Decade” in 2010 by popular internet radio-TV station, liveireland.com, this was his response:
“We were? I didn’t know that.”
When we both stopped laughing, he admitted, “I’m actually unaware of these things, which makes it hard to bask in the glory then.” And we laughed some more.
I didn’t ask him if he knew that when you Google the band, the website that comes up reads, “Lunasa, the hottest Irish acoustic group on the planet.” I’m guessing, no.
There’s no getting around that this is a hot band. After 15 years and soon-to-be nine releases, they’re till getting five stars on amazon.com. Still being showered with superlative adjectives like “exhilarating,” “superb,” “the new gods of Irish music,” and “better than the music you hear in an Irish pub.” Okay, so that last one was on one of those internet sites where any yahoo can make an unmoderated comment, but you get the idea.
When you’re that hot, you can take some chances, and with their new CD (due out April 16), they are. When the band performs at the Sellersville Theatre on Wednesday, February 27, you won’t be getting the full effect of their latest effort, “Lunasa with the RTE Concert Orchestra.” That’s because they’re not traveling with the orchestra, which has backed performers as diverse as Luciano Pavarotti, Cleo Laine, and Sinead O’Connor. The concert at which the two groups performed together last summer sold out Dublin’s Concert Hall.
I asked Hutchinson, one of the founding members of the group back in 1997, how this collaboration—an intriguing one—came about. The link, he said, was Niall Vallely, the concertina player and composer from Armagh, whose brother, Cillian, is Lunasa’s piper. RTE approached Niall Vallely about creating arrangments and working with a traditional band. For some reason, Lunasa sprang to mind.
“We jumped at the chance,” said Hutchinson, who is from Cookstown, County Tyrone. They knew that Vallely would create arrangements that would enhance rather than drown out the traditional tunes. “Niall is a traditional musician who understands the music so we knew we weren’t going to get something that was full of schmaltzy strings and that.”
In fact, says Hutchinson, Vallely chose tunes from Lunasa’s back catalog that would work with just a little orchestration. “He had to look for pieces that had a deeper kind of arrangement already there.”
On the CD you’ll find “Casu” and “Merry Sisters of Fate” from their 2001 CD, “Merry Sisters of Fate;” “Leckan Mor” from Se; and other Lunasa tunes that, as his band mate, Kevin Crawford said, “had been banished to the wilderness, destined never to see the light of a Lúnasa day ever again.” Vallely rescued them, rearranged them for trad band and orchestra, and made them into something very new.
The band would like to mount another orchestral concert. The first was exhiliarating, says Hutchinson. “It does work fantastic live,” he says. “At that concert in Dublin, to be surrounded by all those fantastic musicians and that great big wall of sound was incredible. We’re seriously considering doing it again, but so far nothing definite.”
The band is currently touring the US (Florida after Sellersville) and is known for spending many weeks on the road every year, though Hutchinson says they’ve cut back some. “We don’t do as much as we used to, though we’re gearing up to do a bit more again,” he says. “Most of our touring is really in America. Some years we go once, some years two or three times, usually this time of year. Every two or three years we tour Japan, a bit in the UK and Europe.”
Are there lots of Lunasa fans in Japan? “Irish music is very big in Japan,” says Hutchinson. “Big in the sense that we can do nice sized theaters and get a really good audience. The Japanese are a dedicated type fan. They take any kind of hobby really seriously there.”
How serious? “I think we might even have a Lunasa tribute band,” says Hutchinson, laughing.
Colin Hamell as “Jimmy Titanic.”
Titanic: The Comedy?
Even 101 years after the sinking of the unsinkable ocean liner—1498 souls lost in the icy sea—no one is going to turn the story of tragedy and hubris into an SNL skit. But Belfast playwright Bernard McMullan, like all good Irish writers, was able to find the humor at the bottom of the pit of sadness—and craft a story that, despite the books, plays, movies, and Discovery Channel specials, you likely haven’t heard.
He’s bringing his play, “Jimmy Titanic,” to the Adrienne Theater on Sansom Street in Philadelphia, for two weeks starting Wednesday, February 27.
“This was a bit of a challenge of a play,” said McMullan in a phone interview two weeks ago. “It’s been done before, so it had to be innovative. I’m not sure people want a new serious story of the Titanic, so it was up to us to bring it to another level, to instill some comedy into it.”
The eponymous Jimmy—played, along with 20 other characters in this one-man play, by Colin Hamell—is actually Jimmy Boylan, a former shipyard worker who knew every rivet on the ship where he was also a sailor on its first—and last—voyage. But the play opens in Heaven, where Jimmy is “good friends with the Angel Gabriel and God” and a figure of some prestige, so closely associated is he with the “Titanic brand,” says McMullan.
“It’s a little bit of a play on all of us slaves to marketing and branding. The Titanic brand lives on and Jimmy used the brand to give him status in heaven.”
McMullan uses the comedy as comedy is often used in Irish plays—as juxtaposition with the horror, as relief from the “dark passages,” including how people met their death.
“It’s ultimately the story of dreams shattered,” he says.
“Jimmy Titanic,” which was critically acclaimed in its New York run, explores many ruined dreams, from the immigrants looking for a new life to the officials and people of Belfast who were so proud of “their ship” and fearful of what the sinking will do to the future of shipbuilding in Belfast.
“I’ve really concentrated on the Irish side of things, including ship building in Belfast,” said McMullan. “Being from Belfast, it’s really part of the culture there and I grew up hearing stories from people who worked on the shop. In Belfast, people will ask, ‘Why do you celebrate this ship that sank?’ and the people of Belfast will tell you, ‘It was allright when it left here.’ That’s their way of shifting the blame elsewhere.”
Though the Titanic was a luxury liner, its sole purpose was not to carry wealthy people from Europe to America and back again. “It was built as an emigrant ship,” said McMullan, a former TV news reporter who read and studied Titanic’s history, even attending lectures by its discoverer, Robert Ballard of Woods Hole Oceanagraphic Institute in Massachusetts and visiting Titanic exhibits all over the world, including one in Pigeon Forge, TN (yes, the home of Dollywood).
In fact, according to the Titanic exhibit now on display at the Franklin Institute, the White Star Lines raised the bar on comfort even in steerage because it was counting on European immigration to boost its profits. “But the stories of the immigrants on the Titanic are forgotten amid the stories of the Astors, the Rockefellers, and other millionaires on the ship,” said McMullan.
Colin Hamell, who starred in the play in New York, plays many of those immigrants from all over Europe who were fleeing oppression, poverty, or the law—or just looking for a fresh start. “He wouldn’t tell you this himself, but he does a great job,” said McMullan. “He’s wonderful with accents and changes of character.”
Hamell has some high praise for McMullan too. “Talking to people after the play was interesting. They found the historical parts as compelling as the humorous parts. Bernard really got the balance right,” he said.
You can see “Jimmy Titanic” at the Second Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom Street, in Philadelphia, Wednesday through Sunday, from Feb. 27 to March 10. Tickets are $25 for adults, $18 for students. Call 215-567-2848, or go to http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/316089
See more photos from the play.