Father Ed Brady picks up a few steps from one of the Timoney Dancers.
There sure was a lot of dancing at Sunday’s “Spirit of the Fallen” fundraiser at the Philadelphia Irish Center. And how appropriate—dance photographer Brian Mengini planned the event to raise money to produce a calendar featuring some of the region’s finest dancers who volunteered their time to pose wearing angel wings to commemorate the city’s fallen policemen. Proceeds from the sale of the calendar will benefit the Philadelphia Police Survivors’ Fund.
Rosemarie Timoney brought her Timoney School dancers who not only performed but taught a few step dance steps to audience members. They included musicians Joe Hughes and his wife, Laine Walker Hughes, of Paddy’s Well. With a friend, the Hughes provided the music, along with Mark O’Donnell, a piper with the Emerald Society Pipe Band. Father Ed Brady of St. Ignatius Parish delivered the invocation—and he danced too.
Representing the Philadelphia Police Department was Joseph Sullivan, chief of the department’s counter-terrorism unit and a police academy classmate of Officer Chuck Cassidy, who was shot to death in 2007 when he interrupted a robbery at a West Oak Lane store.
The 2011 calendar will go on sale after a release party at Finnigan’s Wake in Philadelphia on October 2, starting at 7 PM.
Mengini didn’t make his goal at the fundraiser, although, he says, “we had a blast.” To make a donation, buy an ad in the calendar, or become a sponsor, go to the calendar Web site.
- “The Gay Gordons” or Irish bumper cars.
- The House Band plays a favorite
- Piper Mark O’Donnell plays “Amazing Grace”.