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Irish Philadelphia Film Festival: Bloody Sunday

Bloody Sunday

Released: 2002

Genre: Drama

Synopsis: A brilliant—though, at times, painful to watch—dramatization of the January 30, 1972, civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland, led by activist-politician Ivan Cooper. The march began peacefully, but it ended in a hail of gunfire. In just 10 minutes, 14 civilians lay dead in the streets, shot by members of the 1st Battalion of the British Parachute Regiment; 12 others were wounded. Two more were struck down by British armored personnel carriers. (And the official whitewash virtually on the spot.)

Why it’s one of the best: Written and directed by the innovative filmmaker Paul Greengrass, “Bloody Sunday” is shot in a documentary style, with handheld cameras. It’s all blur and herky-jerky motion, like Vietnam battle footage.

The technique yields a film of compelling immediacy. We feel as if we are all on hand in the Bogside on that awful day, marching alongside Cooper, Bernadette Devlin, Father Edward Daly—and young protestor Gerald Donaghy, who, with so many others, took a fateful wrong turn on a day when the British troops assigned merely to stop the illegal march turned instead, all too easily, to indiscriminate slaughter.

Donaghy died that day, shot in the belly.

Two performances are particularly noteworthy. The Northern Ireland (Coleraine) actor James Nesbitt—if you watch BBC America, you may know him as Murphy of “Murphy’s Law”—turns in the finest performance of his career as Ivan Cooper. Cooper was then a member of the Northern Ireland Parliament who led the ill-fated march.

The film turns on Cooper’s actions on that day—from the morning, when he and others still dared to hope that they might be allowed to march in peace, to the news conference in the aftermath of the massacre in which he warned the British government that its actions had “given the IRA the biggest victory it will ever have. All over this city tonight, young men, boys, will be joining the IRA, and you will reap a whirlwind.” Watch Nesbitt’s face as the names of the dead are read out. You’ll see why he just might be Ireland’s best actor.

The veteran British actor Tim Pigott-Smith plays the cold, pitiless Major General Robert Ford, the British Army’s most senior officer in Derry on the day the Paras ran rampant. He played a similar character, in a way, in the BBC mini-series “The Jewel in the Crown,” about the last days of the British Raj. Pigott-Smith masterfully portrays that odd combination of bloodlessness and bloody-mindedness characteristic of so many British military men, particularly in colonial settings.

As I say, “Bloody Sunday” is not easy going. But if you want to understand and appreciate the history of Northern Ireland and the “Troubles,” this film is indispensible.

March 16, 2008 by Jeff Meade

Arts

Irish Philadelphia Film Festival: The Snapper

The Snapper

Released: 1993

Genre: Comedy

Synopsis: This is a story about babies, alcohol, and the connection between the two.

“The Snapper” is based on the second installment of Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown trilogy. (We’ve already talked about the first movie: “The Commitments.” The third, “The Van,” has its moments and, although accomplished, ultimately collapses under its own weight.)

For my money, “The Snapper”—that’s the Dublin slang term for “baby”—is the best of Doyle’s three stories. It documents the trying but ultimately triumphant pregnancy of Sharon Rabbitte (Sharon Corley, in the film). The central question is: “Who’s the Da?” (Or, as the residents of Doyle’s fictional Barrytown might put it: “Who’re yis havin’ it for?”)

The prime suspect is revealed to readers early on—but to Sharon’s family and friends, his identity is veiled in mystery. (Was it really, as Sharon coyly suggests, a Spanish sailor?) Sharon was flying high at the moment of conception, but she was just barely sober enough to remember who did the deed. And it was no Spanish sailor.

Of course, a secret like this one is too big and embarrassing to keep. It’s only after Sharon’s father, the irascible Jimmy, gets wind of a bit of barroom braggadoccio—Sharon, evidently, being reported as “a great little ride”—that the answer is revealed to all of Barrytown. And, as they say in the movies, hilarity ensues.

Why it’s one of the best: First, it’s a Roddy Doyle story. It would be hard to make a better start. All the characters are engaging. Even minor characters, like Jimmy’s pals, the barflies Bertie and Bimbo, are fully realized. At the center of it all is the relationship between Jimmy and Sharon. Let’s just say it’s complicated, but it is clear that this daddy-daughter bond is unbreakable—even when Sharon’s great secret is revealed, to Jimmy’s everlasting horror.

The dialogue, as is always the case with a Roddy Doyle yarn, is spot on. It’s salty, peppery, and any other kind of spicy seasoning you care to add. Most of what turns up in the book survives, mostly intact, in Doyle’s screenplay.

The cast is first-rate. The ubiquitous Colm Meaney plays Jimmy; the role of Sharon is played by Tina Kellegher, who would go on to play the part of Niamh Egan in the BBC Northern Ireland series Ballykissangel. The brilliant Ruth McCabe plays Jimmy’s long-suffering spouse Kay. All of the kids—and there are many—are well cast.

But of course, the story revolves around Sharon, and Kelleher shows herself more than equal to the task of slipping into Sharon’s skin. She’s a tough kid, this Sharon, and she accepts her fate with grace and ballsy good humor. She has moments of doubt—but doubt, so often described as “nagging,” never really gains a foothold here.

Finally, there is the masterful direction of Stephen Frears (“The Queen,” “Dangerous Liaisons,” “My Beautiful Launderette”) who mostly tries not to get in the way of great material and talented actors. Frears keeps the whole enterprise moving along at a fast clip, and he never descends into gross Hollywood sentimentality.

Oh yes … and you’ll love the theme music in the opening and closing credits. Elvis, wherever you are (and I’m pretty sure I saw him working in one of the toll booths at the Ben Franklin Bridge), eat your heart out.

March 16, 2008 by Jeff Meade

Arts

The “Belles” Are Ringing Once Again

The Belles: Polly MacIntyre, Kim Robson and harper Evangeline Williams.

Center City actress Polly MacIntyre’s “Belles of Dublin” is returning for its third engagement at the Society Hill Playhouse. The night of songs and stories, adapted from the works of Irish author Edna O’Brien, is starting to seem like a Philadelphia St. Patrick’s Day weekend tradition. But the critically praised show might never have made it to the stage at all, were it not for one incredibly enthusiastic singer.

Back in 2006, MacIntyre was in a master acting class at Philly’s old Triangle Theater with George DiCenzo. As part of the class, MacIntyre was expected to bring in and perform a monologue.

“I had written some original monologues before, for the Philly Fringe Festival, and I was dying to do something with an Irish accent, because I could do it,” she says. “I had been listening to Edna O’Brien’s ‘Country Girls’ on tape, the trilogy. It had been banned in Ireland. She [O’Brien] reads them herself. I went back to them and I adapted the first of the four monologues just to do in class.”

The monologue was a “coming of age” piece in which her character Cathleen, as a teenager, meets a man she calls “Mr. Gentleman.” He wants to take her to Vienna. The relationship is doomed from the start—he’s married—still, she toddles off to bed, cherishing the orchid he gave her. And so the monologue ends.

Her reading, she says, made a huge impression—particularly with one woman in the class. “She was a wonderful singer,” she says. “She just went crazy. She wanted to do it as a show with me. She said, ‘I can sing, you can dance. And we can do fog.’”

MacIntyre laughs now when she recalls the bit about the fog—she was never keen on that idea. And though she would ultimately go on to perform the monologue—and three others based on O’Brien’s novels—she says, “The original singer dropped out before I ever did it, but I would never have thought of this if it hadn’t been for her.”

The show has undergone a gradual metamorphosis. MacIntyre’s success with the monologue encouraged her to write a second. “I call it ‘The Drummer.’ It’s an account of a married woman who meets a drummer at a dinner party and she tries to have an affair with him, but it’s a disaster,” she says. “He fools around with her all day, but nothing ever happens.

In 2005, MacIntyre performed the second monologue as part of the Triangle Theater’s Valentine Cabaret.

She soon created a third monologue. Given her character’s track record of unluckiness in love, it’s a fitting dénouement. “It’s a story of a woman who’s the other woman, it shows things from her side,” she says. “She’s in a terrible relationship (yet another married man) but she doesn’t have the guts to call it off. This one is called ‘The Plan.’ She has an idea to have a confrontation with the wife and raise suspicion with her. It’s very, very dark. It’s a lot of fun.”

With a singer and harper, MacIntyre performed the show at the Society Hill Playhouse in March 2006 (two performances) and again in March 2007 (three performances). She has also performed the show solo, in New York and elsewhere, as a one-act play, “She Moved through the Fair.”

MacIntyre recently added a fourth monologue. “I always had a sense that things were unresolved,” she says, describing the three-part show. “I kind of liked that. That was interesting in itself. At the end, the three of us would sing “The Parting Glass.” And that’s how the show closed, with us drinking Irish whiskey together.”

But an actor friend suggested that a fourth monologue might wrap things up, especially for the solo show—and possibly get more bookings as a longer show—so MacIntyre returned to O’Brien’s works for inspiration once again. “The last one came out of the story, ‘The High Road,’ a novella,” MacIntyre says. “It’s absolutely an adaptation. I was a lot freer with it. I brought in situations that didn’t exist in the book at all.”

MacIntyre’s heroine has gone to Provence, supposedly for the summer, to get over things. While she’s there, in a sidewalk café, she meets a middle-aged Irishman. She swears she doesn’t like him—but does she or doesn’t she? MacIntyre’s character finds out that her Irishman got married to someone else, but it turns out the woman he married has taken his money. “He comes back to her and she doesn’t know … does he just want sympathy? The act leaves her waiting for him in the café,” MacIntyre said. “The monologue ends on a note of hope. Whether he returns to her or not, it’s clear, she can live alone.”

Each year, MacIntyre says, the show changes in small ways, but it still remains true to her original vision, celebrating the creative genius of Edna O’Brien’s tales of several women and tying them together in the form of one character played by MacIntyre.

Given her heritage, MacIntyre says, the project remains near and dear to her heart. “I am part Irish myself and I’ve been to Ireland,” she says. “I suppose I had always had an affinity for this stuff. If I count up all the times I’ve done the whole show in front of an audience, it hasn’t really been that many times. But months can go by and I still remember all the lines.”

You can see MacIntyre’s vision come to life over the St. Patrick’s Day weekend as the Society Hill Playhouse presents “The Belles of Dublin.” MacIntyre’s show will be presented March 14-17 in the Playhouse’s Red Room. MacIntyre shares the stage with soprano Kim Robson and harper Evangeline Williams.

For tickets, show times and other details, visit the Society Hill Playhouse Web site. You can also find driving directions and other information on the irishphiladelphia.com events calendar.

(Polly will be a guest on Marianne MacDonald’s radio show on WTMR, “Come West Along the Road,” on Sunday, March 2, between noon and 1 p.m.)

February 20, 2008 by Jeff Meade

Arts

Former Ardmore Artist Brings His One-Man Show Home

This pastel drawing is called "Wild Irish Rose."

Pat Gallagher is just this much closer to getting his “license to be a little weird.” The former Main Liner who now lives in Kentucky is parlaying his penchant for doodling into a fulltime art career. In the past year, he’s achieved notable success:

He did a one-man show at the home of former Philadelphia 76ers’ coach Larry Brown.

He’s currently on a cross-country tour (called “From the Outside Looking In”), bringing his paintings not only to art galleries but to the livingrooms of high-rolling art lovers in Atlanta, Miami, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Boston.

On Derby day in Louisville, that will be Gallagher, the Ardmore-born son of Irish immigrants, drawing his heart out in “Millionaires’ Row” (“where the Queen was last year,” he points out).

Starting February 1, he’s having a month-long one-man show at the gallery at Advanced Medical Solutions, 52 Oakland Avenue in Doylestown, where you can see a little art, get a little acupuncture.

In March, one of his canvases (he works in pastels, pen and ink, and Sharpie) will be part of the WMGK Classic Rock Art Show to benefit Bon Jovi’s Soul Moving Experience charity, which sends needy kids to Soul games.

And he’s gotten the ultimate compliment. “I was going to a frou-frou event and I asked the person running it what I should wear. She said, ‘You’re the artist. You can wear whatever you want.’ And I’m like , that is so cool. I have a license to be a little weird. I like that! People always considered me a little quirky and now that’s okay because I’m an artist.”

Gallagher, who is self-taught, needed a push from the unseen powers of the universe to discover the artist inside. It first came from a New York art dealer who saw Gallagher in his usual artist mode, sitting in a bar with a glass of Woodford Reserve bourbon in front of him, doodling on an art pad. “He told me my style was like Henri Matisse and I said, ‘Who’s that?’ I had one art class in high school and I got a D. But he convinced me that I had talent worth exploring.”

Since then, he’s had a painting on loan to a Louisville art museum, invitations for exhibits and art shows, and at least one appreciative nod from an art world legend. Gallagher recalls meeting noted sports painter Leroy Neiman at an event in Kentucky and, of course, the conversation turned to art. “He happened to see a picture of mine called ‘Sisters’ on my phone and he interrupted me. He said, ‘Sorry, but whose work is that?’ I said it was mine. He said, ‘Really?’ And he asked me, ‘Is this your main form of expression?’ I said it was my only form of expression besides talking and I’m really good at that. He reached out and shook my hand and said, ‘It’s really a pleasure to meet you.”

Unlike many neophyte artists, Gallagher’s talent isn’t just for creating art that spawns an emotional connection between himself and the viewer (he’s actually had one prospective buyer burst into tears looking at one of his canvases). He’s a funny, friendly guy who knows how to market himself. He’s convinced the makers of Woodford Reserve bourbon to provide the alcohol for his home showcases and sent complimentary art work to prospective patrons (like Larry Brown’s wife) to encourage them to sponsor an event. Ultimately, it’s the artwork that clinches the deal, but it’s Gallagher’s Irish charm that first opens the door.

But it’s not about the money. Well, it is, but not so Gallagher and his wife Trisha can live in a McMansion and own a Saab apiece. The man who has spent his life in the business arena has finally found his calling and he’d like to spend his life heeding it.

“Before I found the art, I always felt like an outsider,” he confesses. “Back when I was hanging around Villanova, even at family get-togethers, I always had these crazy insecurities. But with the artwork, I feel like this is what I’m supposed to be doing. Weird things keep happening that encourage me to keep at it. And I’ve never been as remotely as happy as I am. When I’m pissed off, I paint. When I’m happy, I paint. When I’m bored, I paint.”

In fact, the only time he doesn’t paint is when his wife is worried. “Trisha has always been supportive, but she’s a military brat and she’s all about structure and plans,” he says. “I’ve learned this: If my wife is nervous or concerned about our stability, I can’t paint. If she’s feeling good, I’m painting like crazy. I hate that she has this over me, but she has. If momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. My paintings are true love stories, because between her and I, that’s what this is.”

He admits that what he’s looking for now are his own Medicis, the Florence family who supported leading Renaissance artists such as Botticelli, Michaelangelo, and DaVinci. “If I had a backer I could storm the world!” he laughs.

But, like a true artist, Gallagher knows it’s ultimately not about the money. “If I never sell another painting, it’s what I’m going to do every day,” he says. “I recently told my mother, God forbid I was to croak, I would die a happy man. Of course, we’re morbid family, obsessed with death. What can I say?” He laughs again. “We’re Irish.”

To see more of Pat Gallagher’s work, visit his website.

“From the Outside Looking In,” a one-man show, will be at the gallery at Advanced Medical Solutions, 52 Oakland Avenue, Doylestown, PA (215-348-4002) the entire month of February. On Friday, February 1, meet the artist at a reception that starts at 6:30 PM.

February 1, 2008 by Denise Foley

Arts

Two Homicidal Brothers, a Drunken Priest, Poteen, Dead Bodies …

Anthony Lawton and Ross Beschler as the two homicidal bachelor brothers.

By Marianne MacDonald

It’s fortunate that Martin McDonagh chose to become a playwright and not a travel writer, otherwise he would have singlehandedly killed the Irish tourist trade. Like the other two plays in his trilogy, “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” and “A Skull in Connemara,” his work, “The Lonesome West,” now playing in a Lantern Theater production at St. Stephen’s Theater in Philadelphia, is set in a small town called Leenane on the west coast of Ireland.

His is not the romantic Irish vision of quaint thatched cottages, colorful town characters, and cute colleens. In his portrayal of small-town Ireland, McDonagh is merciless, mining the pettiness, gossip-mongering, back-stabbing and barely contained malevolence characteristic of rural places everywhere, where a tiny population becomes too close, too familiar, and too stifled to grow emotionally. This is not the Ireland of the travel poster. It is a vicious black comedy that makes light of the dark.

“The Lonesome West” opens with a bang–a front door is slammed by Coleman, played by long-time local actor Anthony Lawton, who is returning from the funeral of his father, whom he has shot and killed “accidentally.” In fact, homicide, fratricide, suicide, even mutilation are practically local sports in Leenane. Coleman is at perpetually war with his brother, Valene (Ross Beschler), over everything from poteen, bags of crisps, Valene’s holy statue collection, and a laundry list of grievances that includes Valene’s prize possession, the felt tip marker which he uses to engrave all of his household possession with a large V.

Wandering through the town is the local parish priest, Father Welsh (Luigi Sottile), a lost soul with a penchant for a drop of drink, who attempts to calm the bachelor brothers while decrying the state of his parish which he calls “the murder capital of feckin’ Europe.” Then there is Girleen (Genevieve Perrier), a flirt who delivers quick comebacks to all in her path along with the mail and bottles of poteen she has nabbed from her own Da. She is also the conduit for the currents of unspoken emotions and heartaches of the town’s lonely souls, two of whom come to a tragic end.

Having spent some time in a small town in the west of Ireland, I recognized some of the citizens of Leenane. McDonagh may have turned them into cartoons, but every small town has them and you will find them both funny and disturbing.

The play, directed by David O’Connor, is not for the faint of heart nor the sentimental. It dares to ask us the tough questions: “Is there such a thing as redemption? Can we forgive our childhood mistakes? Can siblings live together in harmony? Who drank my poteen?”

Be prepared for more than a biteen of raw anger and violence. But also be prepared to laugh at one moment and gasp at the very next.

“The Lonesome West” runs through October 14 (extended from October 6). There are other events being run in conjunction with the play, including a Meet the Artists post-show discussion to be held this Wednesday, September 26 after the matinee show. For information go to www.lanterntheater.org.

Marianne MacDonald is host of “Come West Along the Road,” on WTMR-AM 800 every Sunday.

September 25, 2007 by Guest

Arts

“Trad,” the Play, Makes Its Philly Debut

"Trad" director Tom Reing

In the play, Trad, by Irish comedian Mark Doherty, which will open September 12 at Philadelphia’s Mum Puppettheater, the character, old Thomas, a 100-year-old Irish bachelor farmer, sets off with his ancient “Da” to find the son Thomas fathered many years before in a short-lived dalliance with Mary, whose last name he can’t recall but who “had a certain stare on her.”

In this comic take on the hero’s journey, Thomas is the reluctant Don Quixote (fill in your favorite literary quester) who sets out on the road because his father, on his death bed, has been lamenting his lack of an heir. To the old man (make that older man), that means “the end of the name,” the end of everything. When Thomas confesses his apparently singular indiscretion to his dying Da, his father makes a remarkable recovery. “Get me my leg,” he orders, and the two men hobble off into the countryside in search of the lad, who is 70 if he’s a day–or alive.

On their way, Thomas and his Da encounter the realities of modern Ireland, a country now wired on coffee and wireless with Bluetooth, where the waitress serving you tea might speak Polish and those nice folks who moved into the McLaughlin’s old cottage emigrated from Abuja, Nigeria. Director Tom Reing (it’s a Cork name, he says) experienced a little of that culture shock between 2002, when he lived in Ireland on an Independence Foundation fellowship, and just recently when he met with the author of “Trad” in Dublin.

“In 2002, I stayed in a hostel, and when I was in the area again, it had been completely transformed into a Chinatown. Even the signs were in Chinese,” says Reing, a Penn graduate who used his fellowship to work with the Rainbow Theater Company in Belfast, a cross-community group for Catholic and Protestant children and teens. (He founded a similar company in Philadelphia’s diverse Gray’s Ferry neighborhood.) “The old Irish pub on the block was the only thing still in existence from my previous visit.”

Playwright Doherty mocks not so much tradition as he does those who cling to it. He’s like the modern Irishman who snickers (or bristles) when American tourists are disappointed not to find thatched roofs, craggy farmers, and barefoot beauties in a farmyard, but a bustling, thriving economy and all–good and bad–that Ireland’s new prosperity entails. When Da praises the Irish tradition of never giving up, Thomas retranslates this cultural precept as, “standing still and facing backwards.”

“The father is into tradition–Ireland’s old ways are the best ways–so the play examines tradition versus modernity, what you need to keep of the past, yet at the same time with the knowledge that you can’t stop change,” says Reing. But Doherty is a comic actor, so the play doesn’t take its solemn side seriously. Not in the least.

“He uses the stereotype of old bachelor farmers and takes it over the top and subverts it,” explains Reing. Although the Abbey Theater, which commissioned the work, is meticulous about regional dialects, in “Trad,” even the accents are exaggerated. “Not quite ‘ Lucky Charms’ but definitely not realistic,” laughs the director, who is also an adjunct professor at LaSalle University, where he is the resident theater director, and the founder of the Inis Nua Theater Company in Philadelphia, which is producing the play.

“Trad” is a perfect play for this fledgling company which Reing founded three years ago to produce contemporary works from Ireland and the UK. Inis Nua is Gaelic for “new island,” and Reing’s choices reflect a leaning toward the modern; don’t hold your breath waiting for him to direct “Playboy of the Western World.” Nothing against Synge–but a new generation of playwrights has its own take on the changing human condition.

Unfortunately, Inis Nua doesn’t have its own theater, so the company has had to improvise. The first Inis Nua play Reing produced and directed, “A Play on Two Chairs,” was staged at an art gallery. Fortunately, the play is performed on, yes, two chairs, so the production wasn’t expensive. Last year’s Fringe Festival entry, “Crazy Gary’s Mobile Disco” by Welsh playwright Gary Owen (the story of three guys stuck in the same deadend small Welsh town) was staged outside the upstairs men’s bathroom at the Khyber, a rock club and bar on Second Street. That led to some interesting improv.

“In the middle of a performance, someone from the bar got incredibly sick in there. No one mopped it up–they just threw bleach in. The actor was almost nauseous,” Reing says.

You can see “Trad” at the much more comfortable Mum Puppettheatre at 115 Arch, where, normally, the actors are made of cloth or plastic. “Theater space is at a premium,” says Reing. “But it’s a legitimate theater, with 100 seats, and we won’t have to endure bleach or anything.”

That’s good to know.

“Trad,” starring Mike Dees, Jared Michael Delaney and Charlie DelMarcelle, will run from September 12 through 15 at the Mum Puppettheatre at 115 Arch Street. Curtain goes up at 7 PM. Call 267-474-8077 for tickets or go to the Live Arts Festival website to order online. Price: $15.

August 29, 2007 by Denise Foley

Arts

Book Club, Irish Style

Now, here’s a concept we can get behind. Tonight (Friday, July 6), at 7:30, writer Daniel Hennessy will be signing his newly published book, TwoFer, at the MacSwiney Club, Greenwood and Walnut Streets in Jenkintown, where the conversation more often revolves around the latest issue of “Set Dancing News.” Hennessey will also answer questions and the South Jersey Irish Book Club will be discussing his book, published by AuthorHouse.

The book discussion will be followed at 8:15 by socializing and then set dancing to tunes played by Kevin and Jimmy McGillian till 11:30 PM.

Now, that’s the way to run a book club!

June 30, 2007 by Denise Foley

Arts

Love Stories

Anne and Joe Hill at Joe's book signing in Ambler.

It’s hard to know which of Joe Hill’s love stories to tell first, the one he wrote about in his novel, “The Irish Rose,” which celebrates the life and mourns the death at 59 of his wife, Lillian, or the one he’s living with his second wife, Anne.

“I met two beautiful women in my life and I married both,” Hill said, laughing, at a recent book signing at the Shanachie Pub and Restaurant in Ambler.

We’ll start with Lillian, who is Tara O’Shea O’Malley in “The Irish Rose,” A Dublin-born 24-year-old who emigrated to the US and married at the age of 29, bearing four children. In his book, Hill starts this love story with the beginning of its end, when Tara–Lillian–learns she had breast cancer. As it does in life, the diagnosis tinges everything, even the recounting of the happy days of their marriage to the last pages, when both husband and wife come to grips with the inevitable.

“Lillian died in 1994,” says Hill, who was an elementary school English teacher, now retired from the Philadelphia schools. “I thought my life was over.”

Not long after her death, Hill began writing their story. “When I’m by myself I’m either reading a book or writing. Writing this was a catharsis for me. I wrote it in longhand and went over it many times over the years. Every time I made changes. I’m not computer literate so my kids typed it for me.”

While the writing tempered some measure of his grief, Hill still felt like a shell of a man. “I was a biological, functioning person. My wife died. My life died. But. . .” he smiles. “Then I met Anne and I learned that you can live again. Anne brought me fully back to life.”

Anne, who is 12 years Hill’s senior but looks 20 years younger than her age (83), was a widow, a business owner, and, most important, the head of the St. Christopher Singles Social Support Club. She was, as one of Hill’s friends, who urged him to attend one of the club’s dances, called her, “the redhead who runs the place.”
The dance where they met was actually Anne’s last. “I’d been head of the group for 10 ½ years and I’d stayed too long at the prom,” explains Anne, whose penchant for wisecracking is reminiscent of Myrna Loy’s sparkling, snappy dialogue in the “Thin Man” movies of the ‘30s. “This was Joe’s first dance. In my job, I made a point to go over and greet anyone who was alone, so I approached him and we chatted. Then he asked me, ‘Are you allowed to dance?’”

She was, and they did. And they talked. “It wasn’t love at first sight,” admits Anne, “but there was something there. I knew this man was special. After that night he kept calling and calling. He was determined.”

In fact, Joe called Anne on the anniversary of her husband’s death. “It was July 21 at 11:20 AM and Joe remembered that,” she says, clearly awed. “He talked to me for a half an hour and I asked him at one point, ‘Where are you calling from?’ He said, ‘Rome.’ I was amazed. But that’s the way he is. When he got off the plane he called and asked if he could come over. I had a date that night and I cancelled it!”

He remembers their first kiss. They were standing near the river, looking out at the lights on the water. “Anne was talking and talking, as she does,” he recalls. “I looked at her and I thought, ‘I have to stop those lips from talking!’ So I kissed her.”

He also entrusted her with his book. “I wanted her to read it,” he says. She found it heartbreaking. “When I got to the end I couldn’t read anymore. It was like my husband, John’s dying all over again. It was so real,” says Anne, who later helped her husband by editing the last draft of the manuscript before it was published.

In fact, the last few chapters of “The Irish Rose” are so compelling and sad, it’s as difficult to put the book down as it is to read it. Hill leaves Tara’s husband and family on the morning of her funeral, at that time after a death when the polarities of finality and uncertainty both clash and meld. In the last paragraph, Hill writes, “From my bereavement will I one day awaken reconciled to a new life?”

Clearly, yes.

June 21, 2007 by Denise Foley

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