Here’s a press release about something very Irish going on Thursday. Sorry it took me so long to post this:

One hundred and twenty-five years after a group of Irish Chicagoans came together to strengthen their community and celebrate their heritage, the Irish Fellowship Club of Chicago will mark its 125th anniversary on Thursday, Sept. 17, at Theater on the Lake. Former Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny will be the special guest at the celebration, which will run from 6 to 10 p.m. and feature performances by the Shannon Rovers, who are also celebrating their 100th anniversary, along with Tom Gleason, the Chancey Brothers and Jimmy Moore. The evening will conclude with fireworks over Lake Michigan. Tickets are $175, with sponsorships available for $2,500, including 10 tickets.

The Club’s legacy also extends beyond fellowship. Through its Foundation, it has provided scholarships to Chicago-area students and supported Irish cultural organizations. It is known for its Christmas lunch the first Friday of December at the Hilton Chicago, which raises massive funds.  The  Club has raised millions of dollars in grants and scholarship assistance, continuing a tradition of giving that remains central to its mission.

Founded in 1901, the Irish Fellowship Club began as an organization dedicated to bringing Chicago’s Irish community together and strengthening its civic presence. From its earliest gatherings, the Club developed a tradition of welcoming leaders from Chicago, Ireland and beyond. That tradition was evident in 1910, when President William Howard Taft attended a Club gathering, recognizing the accomplishments and growing influence of Irish Americans.

The Club’s relationship with Ireland became particularly significant in 1928, when William T. Cosgrave, the first president of the Irish Free State’s Executive Council, visited Chicago at the Club’s invitation. According to the Club’s historical record, it was the first official U.S. visit by the leader of an independent Ireland and helped establish a pattern for future diplomatic relationships between Ireland and the United States.

Over the decades, the Club became woven into Chicago’s civic history. Its presidents have included political leaders, business executives, labor leaders and other prominent Chicagoans. The Daley family alone represents several generations of leadership, beginning with Mayor Richard J. Daley, the Club’s 56th president, followed decades later by Mayor Richard M. Daley as its 100th president.

Kenny’s appearance carries its own piece of Club history. He previously participated in the Club’s St. Patrick’s Day festivities in 2012, when he was Taoiseach and also served as Guest of Honor of the Chicago St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

“This will be a special evening to recognize the accomplishments of the Club and Irish leaders across the Chicagoland area,” said John Wrenn, 125th Anniversary Co-Chair.  Irish Fellowship Club President Devon Bruce of Power Rogers said, “We are delighted to have [Enda Kenny] celebrate this auspicious occasion with the Irish Fellowship Club.”  After 125 years, the people and times have changed, but the purpose remains: fellowship, Irish heritage, community and service.

On September 17, the Irish Fellowship Club will gather once again to celebrate that enduring legacy.

Tickets and sponsorship information: www.irishfellowshipclub.com

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You might not think a damn-near-perfect day would get underway by going to the gym, changing into a kilt, and then dropping off electronics for recycling. But it did.

The fashion choice was made for hitting a Celtic fest, Shenanigans on the Green, in Hoffman Estates. As per our tradition, Best Fest Buddy Tom and I wore kilts to the event.

Recycling was on the way to the gathering. Kilts provide central air conditioning in summer. This time, for some reason, the garb turned us into low-key, sort-of celebrities.

My first brush with fest fame—at least in my mind—came after I took a selfie with a statue of my long-lost twin, Shrek. Not sure why a place called the Hideaway Brew Garden has the big green Disney dude on display, but hey now. You’re an all star.

Anyway, a woman saw me and offered to take better photos. I knew she wasn’t trying to steal my phone—because it’s an inexpensive Android. She was being out-of-the-blue nice to me in my green garb.

Then, while milling about the merchandise tent, people asked if they could take photos with either or both of us. I wondered if we were being mistaken for other people. Somebody wanted by the law, perhaps? Over-55 influencers? Guys who wandered off from the senior center without telling their families?

The fans included a T-Mobile guy giving out plastic cups and two guys hawking solar panels. What either product has to do with anything Celtic is anybody’s guess.

Anyway, next we decided to do a whiskey/bourbon/rye tasting. While sipping our small samples, people came up to us and started conversations. Sure, Tom did look a bit like Scottish Santa, or a dapper publican. Maybe that was it.

Either way, the kilts had never worked this well as magnets for drawing curious, friendly attention and pleasant small talk. We should become brand ambassadors. For what products, I’m not sure. Depends on who’s offering. Pun intended.

If that weren’t enough fun for one day, that evening we hit Jamboree Days, a fest in a park near where I live. This was a revival of a big town party held every summer from sometime in the 1970s until 1998, before being revived this year.

We stayed kilted. Again—some saw us as a photo op, which was fine by me. Had this been a Jamboree Days 20 years ago, there would have been a good chance somebody would have tugged on the kilts, hoping for the big reveal, or at least spilled a light beer on our tartans.

Times change. This was a mellow evening, one for the Modern Maturity set. That’s to say it featured bands that personally knew the Flintstones: The Buckinghams, followed by The Ides of March.

Apparently, The Buckinghams played Jamboree Days ages ago, and the version of the band that Saturday night featured some original members, even. One joked with the crowd that his doctor had come to see him. He must have one of those extra-premium Medicare supplements! They were affable, sang their own hits, a couple of new numbers, threw in a tune from a fellow Chicago-based ’60s act, the Cryan’ Shames, and even one from Van Morrison. The band featured a horn section, too—nice to hear that, since it would be easy enough these days to have a keyboard simulate those charts.

A mid-sized, mostly older crowd meant not a lot of dancing, and not a lot of drinking—just water for us, in fact. Just older folks sitting in their lawn chairs enjoying a pleasant evening in a summer where there’s been way too much schizo weather.

Chicago’s Ides of March, of course, had one big hit: “Vehicle,” the catchy number from 1970 with the creepy lyrics about a friendly stranger in a black sedan. A bit before my time, I had forgotten that they had jangly, harmony-laden tunes like “You Wouldn’t Listen” and “LA Goodbye” in their songbook. The Ides had a horn section, too, and a light show to boot.

I had also forgotten that Ides main man Jim Peterik had co-written songs for Southern rockers .38 Special, including “Hold On Loosely,” “Caught Up in You,” and “Rockin’ Into the Night.” I felt my hair growing back into a mullet when the band played those songs that Saturday.

I did remember Peterik led Survivor and wrote “Eye of the Tiger” for the Rocky movie that featured Mr. T as the villainous Clubber Lang. Survivor also scored hits with the cheery “High on You” and “The Search Is Over,” the perfect, ultimate ’80s prom and wedding-reception slow-dance tune. They had nothing to do with Survivor, that stupid CBS so-called reality show.

Alas, Survivor and 38 Special tunes made me miss Spring Hill Mall from near where I live, which has been torn down as it awaits redevelopment. Is it wrong that the music made me crave a big, greasy slice of Sbarro? To make up for that, I shared a bowl of what was left of brisket ends and some cornbread being sold out of a food truck with a doctor buddy of mine who hung out with us. Food trucks reminded me of Austin, Texas. We didn’t have food trucks back in ancient Chicago. Just ice-cream trucks constantly playing “Turkey in the Straw.”

Tom and Mark smoked huge-ass cigars that were big enough to last through both sets—and then some. We politely sat away from the crowd, who probably didn’t want to be reminded of the Canadian wildfires. Brisket, cigars. Good thing a doctor was with us. OK, she’s a retired family physician, the old fashioned kind that delivered babies, too. By the way, she plays accordion with a folk act. Their own show the next afternoon in a local park was called off on account of rain. That’s how this summer has been.

After the show, the Ides met fans and signed stuff at an autograph table, much like The Buckinghams did. By the way, for some reason my text called them a rhyming name that begins with F. Who would do that to ham, anyway? Tech frequently frightens me.

Mark and the doc left for their homes. Tom and I wound down the night with a couple of perfect pints of plain on the patio at Rosie’s, our local. The barkeep joked that when a regular named Cesar comes to the pub, he plays the Ides big hit.

We ran into some friends there and talked a bit with a big guy who wants to get a kilt of his own. Even heard from a man who played in a band we missed that was on before The Buckinghams.

With all that’s going on in the world, in my life, in my friends’ lives, in anybody’s life, really, it was nice to have a day like this.

I said thanks to Tom when he dropped me off back at my place. Pretty sure he said the same: That made for a perfect way to end a perfect day.

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Man, July blew by.

In some cases, literally, with monsoon winds and wetness — followed by a dry spell with more (temporary) silt islands popping up on the Fox River not far from where I live. My buddy Shay said we should have waded out there and claimed the newfound land for Ireland.

After a soggy Fourth, a baby drought preceded another soggy weekend at the end of the month. Because it’s been that kind of year. Which is to say, Seals & Crofts to the contrary, July wasn’t blowin’ jasmine through my mind. Smoke was, thanks to the wildfires elsewhere.

Pre-Fourth Stuff

Anyway, my July actually began in late June. Making my contribution to the semiquincentennial, I marched in my hometown’s pre-Fourth of July parade, which was held a full week before the Fourth of July.

Semiquincentennial is not to be confused with quinceañera. One is a 250th birthday party, the other a big celebration for when your Latino friends’ daughter turns 15. And that’s not the same thing as cancionera, which is a songstress.

But back to the Fourth of July parade in June. I liked that it was short and sweet. I rode on the back of a flatbed float at the invitation of a buddy and wound up throwing beads at and/or to parade-goers. Bead-throwing is in my skill set after having taken part in the Mardi Gras parade in St. Louis a time or two, thanks to my dearly departed buddy Mary Hendron. I miss her.

The parade lasted about an hour, which is the perfect length. Along the way, I saw that even alternative-type folks were feeling patriotic. They had their giant skeleton dressed as their really skinny version of Uncle Sam. Goth bless America!

The route ended at a park where a blues fest was taking place. I wanted to order food, but it would have been a 90-minute wait to get the pulled chicken sandwich. I kid you not. The chicken wasn’t ready when the festival opened.

That night, Tom, his brother Mark and I went to the Hideaway Brew Garden in Hoffman Estates to hear a Pink Floyd cover band. Well, we sat on a hill overlooking the venue so my pals could smoke cigars. After all, Pink Floyd has a song about that.

The next afternoon, I met Best Fest Buddy Tom’s grandkids on the festival grounds. They badgered me (just slightly) to get face paintings and cartoon sketches of themselves. That felt like a very American summertime holiday thing to do, even if it did set me back $75. Hey, the young art guy even gave me a discount — and I tipped him for being so patient with the kids.

The Actual Fourth of July Weekend

As for the actual Fourth of July weekend, it was mostly a washout.

A midday downpour July 3 dampened my trip to get an All-American Chicago-style hot dog followed by a stop at the gym.

I had a ticket that night for a drum corps show in Rockford and saw the rain was supposed to return in the evening. So I messaged the folks running the show to see if it was still going to happen. They claimed their weather source said it was going to clear up. I had my doubts. Still, I told my pals from Rockford with whom I was going to the show I would visit either way, if just to catch up and have dinner.

Well, dinner went fine at a nice Mexican place, Lucha Cantina. But on the way to the high school football stadium where the drum corps show was to happen, my two pals received a message that the show was being delayed because of an incoming storm.

We all parked in the designated lot at a megachurch near the school and waited. Storm clouds hovered. Apparently there was a tornado watch, too. And all these people were waiting in their cars, like ducks on a concrete pond.

Then my friends got another message that the show was delayed once more. The rains came. We headed to a McDonald’s a couple miles away to wait it out and to try the return of the All-American deep-fried apple pie. It took awhile to get them, but it didn’t matter. A message arrived that the show had been canceled.

Oh well. We sat around a bit in the McDonald’s — which is across the road from Shogun, a Japanese restaurant in Rockford, a city where they also have a Japanese garden. The three of us were pretty much the only three in the place. We swapped stories, much like being back in high school — which was a very pleasant way to spend a Friday night.

The manager seemed like a nice fellow who probably wanted to close since it was so slow due to the storm. He checked on us a couple times, much like one should check on senior citizens.

On my drive home down the tollway, it rained hard again for a bit. That’s always fun, with drivers either going way under the speed limit or reckless jackasses going 85 mph weaving in and out of lanes.

Oh. The show had a no-refund policy. I went on social media before bed that Friday and learned that the host corps, Phantom Regiment, was offering a 20% discount on their merchandise because of the cancellation. They also wound up offering a discount on tickets to a July 25 drum corps show in DeKalb. How thoughtful.

The Actual Fourth of July Weekend, the Sequel

The actual Fourth of July was a rainy day, too. So much so that a good many towns had decided early in the day to cancel or postpone any events they had planned. However, in East Dundee, the show being shot off from a footbridge over the Fox was still going to take place.

I went to Tom’s brother’s house for dinner and stayed later than I thought I would. Still, from my house I walked over the Main Street bridge in my town, which provides a good view of the footbridge, hoping to catch the end of the fireworks. There were a few dozen people standing along the bridge — and some preteen idiot kids riding their electric bikes on the sidewalk and doing wheelies down the street.

Turns out, the display had been delayed. It didn’t start until around 10:15 p.m. It went off in fits and starts, as wet fireworks are wont to do. Most people wandered or drove home before the finale, in part because it was tough to know what was actually the finale.

On my walk back, I saw and heard big-ass booms and fireworks being shot off by households — with nary a police siren to be seen heading to check on the nonsense.

Turns out one of the displays was going off in the street, pretty much right in front of my house. My downstairs neighbor had just returned home around the same time I returned from my walk. JFC, as the kids say.

As people were driving home from the professional display, there was a short line of cars, to boot, trying to maneuver around the mayhem. My neighbor and I sat toward the back of my house to keep an eye on the show.

A driver got into an argument with the people who live across the street from me. Some knuckleheaded woman kept taunting him to call the police. Some remnants remained on fire on the street. A not-too-bright teenage girl cautioned others not to throw water on the fire as it would make it burn even more.

Yup. These weren’t geniuses. Thankfully, things calmed down, and all was quiet from that gathering by 11:30 p.m. at the latest.

Oh. I did find shrapnel on my driveway and front stoop. I kept some of it as a souvenir of the semiquincentennial. And I wondered if my homeowners insurance would have covered the damages if anything worse had happened.

Take Us Out to the Ball Game

In keeping with the All-American July theme, Tom and I took his three grandkids and two of their cousins to a Kane County Cougars game July 12. The kids won free tickets through taking part in the local library’s summer reading program.

That was nice, because even minor league baseball ain’t cheap these days. Parking was $25. Snow cones and Dippin’ Dots were $8. A bouncy house-laden play area would have been another $5 per kid — half price on Sundays. Such a deal!

But hey. A fellow scribe told me she and a pal went to see the Savannah Bananas Broadway-meets-baseball game at Wrigley, where their tickets were a relatively reasonable $40 each. However, their order of a bottle of water and a hard seltzer was $30.

Making it worth our trip, though, was that the mid-grandkid wound up retrieving a foul ball. At his first game, mind you.

The kid has a math mind and noticed right off the bat (pun intended) that a good number of foul balls were heading to the upper deck above us. He kept intent watch, particularly after one ball early in the game wound up careening down maybe 100 feet or so, if that, from where our seats were.

Later in the game, his chance came. Another foul ball headed to the upper deck. The kid kept watch as it made its way back to our level. It bounced a bit in a relatively empty section to our left. He scurried his way through the first-base-side bleacher-style seats to retrieve the ball.

People clapped for him. That was pretty awesome.

On top of that, the Cougars let people run the bases after the game.

Alas, the game dragged on, as the home team blew a three-run lead. Yup, the Chicago Dogs of Rosemont scored five runs in the top of the ninth to win the game, 11-9. It was a hot day, too, but we all mostly managed to keep our cool. And we figured out you have to traipse through the stadium to the bullpen in the outfield to get to run the bases.

Runners even received Sonic coupons and could head to get autographs from the team mascots after that. We used our coupons on the way home, too, ending our fine All-American July day with kiddie meals. Sure, it took them an extra 10 minutes or so to get the order right. It gave me time to visit the nearby Aldi to buy some wine.

This is a pretty nice place to end this post. Sure, I’ve whined a bit. But that’s an All-American pastime, too.

Past July

Speaking of, the name of the baseball stadium in Geneva where the Kane County Cougars play is Northwestern Medicine Field. Ask me about the phone system that that hospital system has or how calls from them can come up on your mobile as potential spam. While that goes along with my All-American July Whine Club, it’s a topic for a different day.

August, though, is off to a mostly okay start, with Home Depot kid crafts, taking in the new Spider-Man movie, a pool party the kids attended per the reading program and a National Night Out out my way where a Chicago Police Department helicopter did a flyover, you could don goggles to simulate drunk driving a golf cart and a Toasty Cheese chicken sandwich was a tasty $20.

There’s so much to do as the daylight fades to fall, eh?

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A friend of mine is on a vacation to Europe. One of her first stops was Dublin, in part to celebrate Bloomsday, June 16. The single day in 1904 on which James Joyce’s set Ulysses.

All 265,222 words of it.

Of course, it took Joyce about 7 years to write the damn thing. Still, it made me wonder – but not like in Stairway to Heaven.

Reflecting back – but not like Diana Ross or the algae-fied pool in DC – I wondered if I picked one day on which to set a novel, what day that would be.

Novel 1: DuPage, Scotland

On June 13, Best Fest Buddy Tom and I made our umpteenth trip to Chicago Scots Scottish Festival & Highland Games – the 40th edition, in Wheaton. Wheaton was dry until the mid 1980s.

Along the way to the festival we saw firefighter paramedics attending to a motorcycle vs auto accident in front of an amusement park.

A half hour or so later, we passed a gas station where the pumps had been leveled like broken robots by a tornado the day before. But the awning over the pumps remained up, missing just a couple pieces of siding.

The parking deck for the DuPage County government building and adjacent fairgrounds was so crowded we wound up on the roof. Had we known, we would have parked here the two prior years the games were in Wheaton.

See, the roof provided a godlike view of the heavy games below. You haven’t seen a caber toss until you’ve seen it from above.

It was a bit windy up there, too. That’s always a challenge when donning a kilt in proper Scots fashion.

Ambling about the grounds we saw the usual sites and stuff for sale. OK.  Maybe we hadn’t seen a first responder kilt before, replete with reflective trim. Where and when would a firefighter wear a kilt like this anyway?

There was a camel-colored camo kilt, too. Maybe that one’s for someone who is way too into AI to wear at home when chatting with a chatbot.

Scots actor David Tennant is in everything these days. At the fest he appeared as a Japanese doll style pillow with really big eyes. Is there nothing that guy won’t play?

Walking around I noticed pipers from all over the country practicing in any available space. At one point I thought I heard sheep bleating. Nah. It was pipers in a barn.

Some skinny old guy brought his unruly Rottweiler. Then again, based on the way the dog was behaving, maybe the beast decided to bring the old man out for the afternoon. Why or why can’t people leave their pets at home?

To complete his Highlander look, Tom brought along some cigars. He dropped one, startled by the Rottweiler that was either barking at pitbull or unhappy with the jacket his owner was trying on.

A good Samaritan returned the stogie and struck up a conversation about smokes with Tom.

My pulmonary system disallows me from taking part in such discussions.

On the way home we stopped at one of our locals in our festive garb. I took a picture of my reflection in the entry window. AI made a version and removed my facial features. Sweet.

We sampled wine next to a woman who told us about her bariatric surgery. Is this Modern Maturity-style flirting?

Anyway, this meandering seemed like it could make for my take on Ulysses, my mundane yet meaningful suburban novel.

Alas, I’m at just 500 words for that day.

Novel 2: Step On Wolves

So maybe I could set the novel on June 14, when Irish Buddy Shay (IBS) and I drove to Chicago to see playwright Mia Chung’s Catch As Catch Can, the final show for Stepppenwolf’s 50th season.

I admit. While having sliders and beverages before the show, Shay and I had to look up what the phrase “catch as catch can” means. We made do with what the internet told us.

Two old guys in a balcony at the theater. How muppety!  But not.

Both of us are at the point where we’re happy to have a non-health related reason to travel more than 10 miles from where we live. Plus, even with Chicago traffic, the Steppenwolf is pretty easy for us to reach and handy for capped parking.

The play marks Gary Cole’s first time back onstage in Chicago in more than 25 years. Cole and fellow ensemble members Audrey Francis and Tim Hopper each play dual roles – one male and one female role, one at least in their 60s, the other at least in their 30s.

In one dizzying scene, set at a pre-Christmas party, the actors all switch back and forth at breakneck speed. The fine cast is up to the task.

The press kit says Catch as Catch Can is a kitchen sink drama that asks what happens when we refuse to play the roles we’re prescribed. It’s also not to be confused with Ketchikan, a small town in Alaska. Actually, it’s mostly set in a living room in a working class home somewhere in New England.

One of the families has Irish roots. The other, Italian. The Italian son is estranged from his Korean wife. The Irish son returns home for the holidays claiming to be involved with a Korean woman but in love with the Italian daughter who was one of his childhood friends.

It’s funny in a good Norman Lear sitcom way until just past the halfway mark, then it takes a turn into a drama involving suicide, mental health care and aging.

I may not be as literate as I’d like to be, and sometimes I am too literal.

For instance, while the play first opened in 2018 and is set in contemporary times, the old characters make a joke about Father Mulcahy from MASH and Catholicism in Korea. While I do know some folks who still watch MASH reruns, that was about the only pop culture reference to Korea and its relationship to the United States. How old are the old folk characters in this play, anyway?

Splitting what little hair I have, I would have expected a reference to BTS, the K-pop act that first hit the US charts in 2017. Even if the younger characters are in their 40s, they would know about them from friends’ kids.

I missed it if there was a reference to the dictator in North Korea. Or to Kia or Hyundai.

How my mind works: I wound up checking when the Oscar-winning Parasite came out (2019) and when Squid Game hit Netflix (2021).

One thing the play is pointing out is how insular and stereotyped views of other cultures can be. What I wrote above probably helps make that case.

As this essay by May Treuhaft-Ali puts it, the play proposes “that multiple generations live in each of our bodies, and that we perform race and gender the way we do because of the way our ancestors live in us. With this play, Mia invites us to reflect on the histories we carry, the identities we enact, and the ancestors we bring to life through our actions.”

Or something like that. All those generations inside my body.could explain my weight gain.

Past that, if these were working class families, I was impressed that the three parental characters all seemed to be retired.

See, their grown kids keep talking about wanting to have babies or about having kids on the way. That clouded my math for figuring out how old everybody was supposed to be.

Oh. One line of the play’s dialogue turned out to be an adage I hadn’t heard before: Koreans are the Irish of Asia. It made me hungry for colcannon and kimchi, a true intermingling of cabbage and culture.

Yes, they had snacks afterward for the opening night crowd. Alas, no ethnic dishes tied to the play, but tasty nonetheless.

Heading back to the parking lot, I stopped to take a sunset photo of Steppenwolf’s marquee. The sign and the street reflected off the glass front of the building.

It was a fitting image for a trip to a theater where the troupe is reflecting back on its first half-century with a play about identity and how we all play multiple roles in our own lives.

Sometimes metaphors are that obvious.

But my reflection on the play gives me less than 800 words on which to base my day-in-the-life novel. Plus, I took a nap that afternoon, which would make it even tougher to top Joyce’s word count.

Novel 3: Minding Matters

Ok. Back in the day I learned about the rule of threes for writing. Thus, another novel day could involve one of my adventures in babysitting.

I took Tom’s youngest grandson to see the Mandalorian and Grogu movie for his birthday.

I even bought him a Star Wars t-shirt for the occasion, which he gladly wore. I wore a Star Wars t-shirt, too. Cute or cringe? You decide.

The boy’s brother and sister weren’t interested in going to the movie. Just us. He seemed quite engaged. And he asked a lot of questions during it, which I thought was adorable. Even if I didn’t have answers for a good many of them, which may have disappointed him.

I didn’t burden his burgeoning brain with the question I have with many a space epic or space alien adventure: Why do so many of  the nonhumans all have human features? Spoiler alert: In Disclosure Day, the alien looks like a prototype of the Intergalactic Basketball Association. The alien might also be naked. Who or what would travel through space – and probably time – without some sort of garment?

Back to the Star Wars spinoff experience. If anything, this might be the inspiration for the kid to write his own novel, or make his own YouTube movie that becomes a blockbuster hit to make. His

Flashback to May 2. BFB Tom was working a wine fest, so he asked if I would take his grandkids to their monthly Home Depot craft project, then to their swim lessons.

Pushing my luck, in a Mrs. Doubtfire mood, I decided the night before that we would make a full day of it. I even bought frozen French toast sticks at Aldi  to feed them when I picked them up to head for the craft class.

When I arrived with breakfast, they conned me into taking one of their cousins along. But not before I made sure it was okay with the boy’s parents.

So gray-bearded me became springtime Santa.

First stop was a car show being set up in a park where there was going to be a pre-Cinco de Mayo festival.

The kids told me their grandmother told them Cinco isn’t really a holiday in Mexico, that it’s really more of a white people thing. Being Irish, I could relate, per what SPD can become.

At Home Depot, the kids seemed more interested in eating popcorn than in making and painting a small Mother’s Day keepsake box. (A couple days later they told Tom I suck at making crafts. That’s true. Everyone’s a critic. At least they didn’t post a Yelp review.)

After Home Depot we made a brief stop at a car show being set up in a park that’s on the way to the rec center pool.

Since the cousin wasn’t enrolled in swim class, he played Roblox or Minecraft or a combination thereof on his phone during the session. I wandered on my phone, too.

Afterward, I heard reports from the swim teachers about how each of the three did that day. HIPAA law disallows me from relaying those notes to you – just to Tom.

Going Joycean novel, next was a trip to the nearby woods by the to check on forts made these kids fortnights ago, twinges of nostalgia from the under-11 set; woods scare me, particularly ones with a shed holding fossils, animal bones and possibly clues that teens or unfortunate homeless suburbanites have been hanging out there; but we cleared any litter we saw, because that’s how we rolled.

We rolled into the library, too, to join the summer reading program, scavenge a hunt, play with the computers, prepare pretend plastic food meals and maybe even read.

Off to Bricks and Minfigs we went. Each kid had a budget for how much of my money they could spend on LEGO stuff. Tom’s granddaughter bequeathed her allotment to her cousin.

The visit was in advance of May the 4th, the Star Wars nerd holiday. Sure enough, a grown man bought a good-sized Yoda someone else had built.

LEGO makes kids hungry, so we stopped at a nearby taqueria. We’ve been before. The staff there has been impressed by how well the kids behave. Am I a good influence or do they just want me to spend more money on them?

Either way, they ate and played in peace. For the most part. The youngest grandkid and his cuz pranked me. They said they left my car door open. They hadn’t. Hilarity ensued.

I got back at them during our Kohl’s cash  spending spree. I let the youngest pick out his birthday gift. After much deliberation and some horseplay, he settled for some marked-down battling robots.

His sister browbeat me into getting her a hoodie. I forgot to mention it was a crisp day, yet they all dressed as if it were July. Plus, she didn’t get anything at the LEGO store.

Lucky for me that on top of a Kohl’s cash coupon, I had Kohl’s bucks to spend in my account. After Kohl’s math, the total for the toy and the top was just $7 or so. Tom’s granddaughter seemed either impressed or that I was a cheapskate.

In the car, panic ensued. The cousin couldn’t find his phone/ Did he leave it in the store? Haha. I had it in my pocket. PRANK you very much.

Not content to call it a day, we returned to the park. Cool weather kept the crowd down for the pre-Cinco de Mayo gathering. The kids played with a disc and wound up chatting it up with some cops who were keeping watch from a UTV.

The boys posed for selfies with the friendly officers. I hoped that the police would never have to take photos of this trio for other reasons. The kids also asked the cops if Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo was their soccer GOAT.

All that talk made them hungry for overpriced ice cream truck ice cream. Treats consumed, we watched the aforementioned car show cars leave the grounds before leaving ourselves.

Our final stop was back at Tom’s house where the three could see their mom and play with a neighbor kid from two doors down.

Drama ensued. The next door neighbor was talking with police. Maybe my being a sort-of reporter inspired the kids to inquire. They learned the neighbor’s German shepherd had bitten somebody.

Again, the boys asked the cops to choose between Messi and Ronaldo.

I sat in my car, keeping an eye on the proceedings, listening to the radio, waiting for the Kentucky Derby to start.

More drama ensued. Tom’s youngest and the neighbor kid had been riding their bikes up and down the blocks. They came peeling around a corner, with Tom’s youngest grandson precariously pulling along another bike.

I asked them what the hell was going on. These wannabe Hardy Boys claimed that the bike they found was Tom’s granddaughter’s bike that had been pilfered weeks before.

I asked for evidence, which they provided.

I may have said something about it not being a good idea to take back the bike per what that could have led to depending on where the bike was and who may or may not have taken it.

The less I say about their mom during this – or in general – the better.

I told Tom’s granddaughter to put the bike in the garage or back yard to prevent a further theft. She sort of listened. I groused about them leaving their stuff all over the front lawn all the freaking time. No wonder things get lost or stolen.

Frosty me decided it was time to take the three and their cousin back to their grandma’s house.

It was dinner time. The derby had been delayed because a spooked horse threw its jockey on the way to the starting gate.

That seemed apt for my grumpy mood.

It didn’t help that the mid-grandkid smuggled a box of cereal into my Camry. He used it to fill a plastic dispenser of some sort he found among all the crap their mom keeps at Tom’s house.

That mess was addressed. On the way to grandma’s we reviewed our long day. The consensus: it was a good day but for when I turned crabby at the end of it. (Nobody mentioned that I sucked at crafts.)

I offered to buy dinner, but they weren’t hungry. They insisted 6-7 is still a thing. They were doing their part to keep it going.

I drove home. Exhausted, I fell asleep watching basketball or some PBS murder mystery, Or both.

Yeah, you can pack a lot in a day. In this case, almost 1,400 words. That’s not even close to my novel goal of matching the verbosity of Joyce’s masterpiece. Still, it does provide a lot for people to reenact 100 years from now.

Me, I am not sure if this would be the start of a kid-based Ulysses more like one of the endless phone conversations my mom would have with my aunt.

In fact, all told, I’m approaching 3,000 words for this entire piece. It would take 88.4 more meanderings like this to equal Joyce. That’s a lot of purposeful dilly, dally dawdling.

As the kids might say, clock it. Or not. Who knows what anything means anymore?

The post Novel ideas with Danahey on the Loose appeared first on FREE CRAIC.

Les Miserables describes pretty much anybody’s drive into Chicago from the suburbs.

So I was in the right mood for seeing the final leg of the current national tour of Les Miserables at the Cadillac Palace Theatre. It plays there through Sunday, May 24.

I first saw this pop opera decades ago when I took my mom downtown to see it for her Mother’s Day gift. What mom wouldn’t like a musical based on the classic, 1,500-page Victor Hugo novel from 1862? One featuring human trafficking, graft, corruption, greed, obsession, child abuse, political violence murder, suicide and a few dick jokes thrown in for good measure? OK, there’s young romance, unrequited love and Jean Valjean, the dreamy, saintly leading role for a hunk, plus all that singing.

Given the above I was still slightly surprised when a buddy told me he once sat through a version of Les Miz a teacher friend of his was involved with, a variation for kids. That seemed like something some PTA somewhere in Florida would have worked to ban so they could get social media attention and go on cable news to whine about how oppressed they are.

Anyway, since I was crabby from my drive – and a 3-hour show stood  ahead of us just down the block – my theater-going pal and I hit City Social for a bite to eat beforehand.

Yes, there was an irony about dining before seeing a musical where the lead character is a guy who spent time in prison for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s hungry kids. In fact, it seemed the cheery restaurant drew a good number of young, fresh-faced youngsters there with their friends or parents to grab from grub before the show.

On the short walk back to the Cadillac Palace, we heard singing coming from somewhere. A young woman – probably a student at one of the downtown colleges – had set up an amp with backing tracks and was doing show tune karaoke. She had her resume and social media links handy.

Who did she think would hire her? She didn’t belt out any protest tunes, which would have made her busking fitting for the play. But we only heard her for a smidgen. (Smidgen seems like a Les Miserables word, doesn’t it?)

Once in the lobby, nobody was selling any bread along with the iconic Les Miserables t-shirt and other tchotchkes.

Nobody was dressed like a French peasant, or in a blocked bicorn hat or as if they were going to take part in the ill-fated, anti-monarchist June Rebellion of 1832. That is, no cosplayers, but for a guy in a top hat that made him look like Abe Lincoln’s tubby brother.

Plopped in my seat, I wondered if the guy who played Javert – Valjean’s central, stalking nemesis –  would have a better voice than Russell Crowe did in the movie version of Les Miserables, which I saw 13 years ago. Russell’s a method singer. He was nominated for an Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, not for A Beautiful Voice.

Of course, everyone in this tour had the great vocal chops needed to be in work where not a word is spoken. I marveled at the training involved.

It’s also wondrous how far stage craft and audio technology have come since Les Miserables made its way from France to make its Broadway debut in 1987. Imagine, too, a time when no old guy sitting a couple seats away would be checking the time on his cellphone every 10 minutes. Those were the days!

I also had forgotten how frenetically paced a show based on a really long novel was. Les Miserables is an aerobic workout for the cast and the audience. (Is that line stolen from a poster for the production? If not, it should be on one.)

Once the music began, it reminded me of what Les Miserables hath wrought. While this sort of thing may have started with Jesus Christ Superstar, Les Miz certainly took a certain type of  megamusical theater and of singing to new levels. Or at least contributed to it.

Not that Broadway was ever particularly fond of subtlety. But Les Miz was part and parcel of the era of maximalist works. The over-the-top Phantom of the Opera first hit Broadway in 1988, just a year after Les Miz.

Then there’s the irony of a big budget musical like Les Miz dealing with themes related to abject poverty.

Les Miserables and Phantom also laid the groundwork for PBS Pledge Drive-friendly productions of a different ilk, namely Irish dance and/or music offerings. Those include Riverdance, Lord of the Dance, Celtic Woman, Celtic Thunder and the like.

Then there’s the musical style. Whitney Houston was big in 1987, too. So her, plus Les Miserables – then Celine Dione just a couple years later –  laid the foundation for decades to come of a particularly dominant strain of adult contemporary music.

You know it when you hear it. Lush orchestral accompaniment. Weepy ballads. Soft parts followed by loud parts. Lots and lots of vocal gymnastics on display. Reverb. Not just walls, but halls of sound.

The likes of Michael Bolton, Richard Marx and Kenny Freaking G fit this late 80s mold, too.

Ok, maybe the Pixies and Nirvana adapted this to rock. Or not.

But Nirvana didn’t lead to American Idol, The Voice or anything else involving Simon Cowell.

Aye, in the spirit of Jean Valjean, I hope one day I can find it in my heart to absolve Les Miz for the above.

Speaking of the kindly, forgiving hero of Les Miserables, the late 80s also saw Barney the Dinosaur unleashed upon the world. On the opposite side of the pop culture tar pit stood Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko.  The villain with the slick backed hair uttered the “greed is good” mantra in the movie Wall Street. To some, though, Gekko was a hero.

The internet amplifies that dichotomy today. Whatever the hell the manosphere is, the techbro oligarchy and all the social media noisemakers bully the easily-mocked Barneys.

Maybe that’s why Les Miz remains popular today. It’s downright Hallmark romantic to believe grace, compassion and kindness are what the world needs now. And that’s exactly what the world does need and always has.

On a planet where big bucks bad guys believe empathy is weakness: Fight the power with power ballads!

Protests obviously aren’t passée these days, A good many, if not most recent ones stateside have been tame. At the same time, the most recent near-riots here and elsewhere involved throngs swarming in front of Swatch stores to be the first folks to buy a $400 pocket watch. Hooray for materialism!!

The things I think about when I watch a musical, eh? You didn’t really expect me to review it, did you?

Anyway, on the way out of the theater, we smelled what seemed to be soup. Great marketing? Nah. It was a street vendor selling sausages with grilled onions.

In the parking garage elevator, I joked to strangers. Les Miserables antagonist, the buy-the-book Inspector Javert, wasn’t really a bad guy. He was just misunderstood. And he was just  doing his job.

(Plus, why the hell did he go by just one name? I thought that started with Cher. No wonder he was so frustrated. Nobody even bothered to give him a first name. That’s the part I didn’t say out loud.)

Uneasy laughter ensued. My buddy told me afterward that one of the women in the elevator with us was wearing a 24601 t-shirt, that being the prisoner number for Jean Valjean. C’est la vie!

On the way home, stuck in construction traffic, I thought about various ways you could rewrite and set Les Miserables. A few days later I wasted  gallons of water having AI do that for me.

Poor AI didn’t understand when I asked it to come up with a version of Les Miserables starring Barney.

Then I asked AI to make an image of Barney starring in the musical. That it could do.

Sigh.

Where’s our Victor Hugo?

AI didn’t understand that question either, but did let me know where he’s buried.

So maybe there’s hope for us yet.

The post Les Miserables with Danahey on the (too) Loose appeared first on FREE CRAIC.

St. Patrick’s season is most likely finally over.

I waited a week past March 17 just to make sure. Here’s a recap of my shenanigans.

Grew a beard 

This was my attempt to look more Irish, like an extra in Darby O’Gill and the Little People, but with better teeth. Or the Notre Dame leprechaun. Or maybe George Bernard Shaw.

Either way, Best Fest Buddy Tom’s beard came in better than mine. He could play a crusty old Irish guy better than I could anyway.

I did not dye my beard ginger, nor give it a spray tan. Neither did Tom.

I did go to the local barber school for a trim. I was nicked by the 18-year-old student, but survived. I told him the small cut built character. My modeling career ended long ago.

Bought lots of corned beef  – and one solitary cabbage

On a dare from Tom and his brother, I shopped to find the least expensive corned beef. 

This American Irish briney brisket ain’t cheap. Even on sale, it was more than $8 a pound for the name brands

Bargain-hunting-me found flats, points and rounds for around $4 a pound at Aldi, Jewel, Meijer and Butera. Butera had cabbage for 17 cents a pound, so I threw one of those in for good measure.

I wound up giving two packages and the cabbage to a neighbor – and still have two left in my fridge.

Found a new flat cap

Tom gave me his spare $10 Kohl’s cash, which went to me picking up a lined flat cap, on clearance. That was a fortuitous choice, given the weird weather and its arctic spells during St. Patrick’s season.

Used a gift card to by libations

Showing discipline, I saved a Binny’s gift card received at Christmas, to buy some Jameson and Guinness. A week or so later, I added to sale-priced Tullamore Dew, Bushmills and another eight-pack of beer to the St. Patrick’s stash.

Lest you get the wrong idea, much of it remains available to drink come Easter and beyond.

Put up two decorations

There’s been a small silver tree in my hallway since Christmas time. For Valentine’s Day I put hearts on it. For St. Patrick’s season, a Dollar Tree leprechaun hung from its branches. I adorned a doorknob with some wooden shamrocks. Martha O’Stewart would be proud.

Avoided a parade

The town near where I live held its parade March 7. That’s too early. 

Plus, Tom’s grandkids had swim lessons the same time the parade happened. So after that, I took two of them to the Bricks and Minifigs store to shop for Lego. Then we had horchata, tacos and Mexican Coca-Cola. Does anyone else remember the Carlos Murphy’s chain of restaurants?

Saw Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man

The same afternoon as the premature parade I went to the local cinema to view the latest piece of product in the Peaky Blinders line.

This time, brooding old Tommy Shelby battles ghosts, his rotten Romani son and Nazis. A good time is had by all.

Everything looks brown and dirty. Blue-eyed boyos Cillian Murphy and Barry Keoghan can mumble and pout with the best of them. Parts of the flick play like MTV videos for Irish band Fontaines DC. You might not want to eat pork for a bit, given what happens in a couple scenes.

I watched the movie a second time this past weekend, when it came out on Netflix. It looked bluer on the streamer. 

A sequel series is in the works, starring Keoghan. They should have an amusement park, too, where everybody can smoke cigarettes and opium and where they sell all the Peaky merchandise. They’ll shoot anyone who calls the holiday St. Patty’s Day at this place. For sport.

Watched The Quiet Man for the umpteenth time

It’s become a tradition – particularly since I sent my dad a Korean bootleg copy I hope he watched just before he passed away 11 years ago.

Sure, The Quiet Man is quaint, dated and cornball. It plays like an old fashioned musical, without the singing. Still, there is some sly dialogue to be heard and general Technicolor wackiness to be seen.

Had an Oreo Shamrock McFlurry 

Another personal tradition is to slurp a Shamrock Shake and, since its Lent, wolf sown a Filet-O-Fish during St. Patrick’s season. 

Changing things up a bit, I tried an Oreo Shamrock McFlurry. It looked like how Irish American arteries look after eating too much corned beef. 

I wound up having the shake and fish at a later date. That was $10. The shake was blander than I recall, with little mint taste. The fish sandwich seemed smaller, drier and salty.

That might be because as a New Year’s resolution, I gave up going to McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King. For real.

Caught some Irish cheese on WTTW pledge drive 

A Chicago area St. Patrick’s season TV tradition, WTTW shows Irish cheese during a March pledge drive. 

In keeping with that, I happened upon a bit of Riverdance 25 and Celtic Woman. I felt glossy afterward. I wore my shirt unbuttoned to the navel for a couple days after this.

Attended The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings live in concert 

Tom’s brother and I caught the screening at The Auditorium where 238 musicians played live along with the first part of Peter Jackson’s take on the trilogy.

It was impressive to hear and to see how they fit all those singers and players on stage. While I spotted the didgeridoo,  I didn’t realize there was an accordion player until everyone took a bow at intermission.

Lest you forget, at least three of the Hobbits in the 25-year-old movie have Irish accents. Frodo, Sam and their buddies also do an Irish goodbye at the end of this one – leaving the rest of the Middle Earth resistance movement behind for a bit in the endless saga.

What people do forget is theater etiquette. One douchebag divorced dad type – dressed in pre-ripped designer jeans – had to be told to take his feet off the railing of the box seat where he was sitting with tween daughter. She had her shoes off and feet on the railing too.

It goes without saying some folks were making videos and snapping photos with their smartphones. Apparently this was allowed at this show.

It also goes without saying that some people dressed up like their favorite characters to attend. The guy in the bar line dressed like Gandalf, though, looked more like a big mushroom. I wonder if he ordered the Shire Sunrise.

Anyway, adding to the St. Patrick’s season of the excursion, we went the Friday before the St. Patrick’s parade in downtown Chicago. Across the street from The Auditorium, a bagpipe group was practicing in the alley. Celebrants were checking into The Congress Plaza Hotel.

We grabbed some grub at the hotel before the movie. I had never been inside this bit of history. The dining room was very Mid-Century Modern – and looked like any number of places in the suburbs where dads smoked and drank too much back in the 1970s.

Ghostbuster types claim the Congress Hotel is haunted. But no red rum was on the menu.

The staff was friendly and getting ready for the storm. I wished our elderly, Eastern European waitress good luck in dealing with the incoming crowd and Saturday’s silliness.

Paraded in St. Charles

The Saturday before St. Patrick’s Day, Tom and I took his three grandkids to the big, hilly march in St. Charles.

Lucking into a parking spot, we only had a quarter mile or so to walk to the staging area – as opposed to the hike with an Irish sherpa we took the prior year. 

Tom and the youngest lad met up with the gang from Rosie’s Color Studio (oh the irony, per the baldness). They wound up sharing duties, carrying one of the Irish county flags along the route, the one for Leitrim.

The other two kids just wanted to collect candy and other parade swag, so I watched them watch the parade. They don’t even eat most of what they get. It’s like money is for billionaires. It’s basically a game all about being able to get as much as you can.

To that point, the middle lad brought along a brightly colored fitted bed sheet to gather his stash. It matched his holiday outfit. He’s destined to be an inventive engineer or some sort of product designer.

For once, they listened to my advice. They set up along a curb close to where the parade route started. This allows for maximum volume, as marchers work to unload their treats ASAP. The other good spot is at the end of the route, where the slowpokes have leftovers they don’t want to haul back home with them.

The snow flurried on this parade. The following Monday it was close to 70, and we took the kids to the park. March is schizo that way. Also frightening:  saw a mom with a Mar-A-Lago/Kardashian/Kris Jenner face at the park. It scared me.

Gave fashion advice to a dinner host

The Sunday before St. Patrick’s I headed to another local establishment I frequent to offer fashion advice.

The Village Vintner would be hosting Scotch-Irish dinners the Wednesday and Thursday after St. Patrick’s Day. The waiter hosting the meals wanted to borrow a kilt. He’s thin. I’m not.

So I suggested he wear a flat cap, vest, dress shirt and jeans, like they dress Irish in American movies about Ireland.

My good deed done, I had a Scottish ale to mark the occasion.

Saw Sean Cleland fiddling  at Brix

As luck would have it, the local library sponsored a free performance from Sean Cleland and a couple of his musician buddies the night before St. Patrick’s Day at The Brix, a banquet hall out my way.

The fabled fiddler and his pals shared tales about Irish music, instruments and of Chief O’Neill. I learned that bodhran is just a fancy word for a tambourine.

Weary from all their St. Patrick’s season performances, the trio quipped that to novice ears all Irish music sounds the same. Then, for those playing it for years and years, they realize that’s probably true.

As an added bonus, I went home with some Lucky Charms bars and a couple chocolate coins.

Lunched at Bennigan’s

On a frigid but sunny St. Patrick’s Day, I met a buddy for lunch at Bennigan’s in Elgin. It’s one of the just six full-scale Bennigan’s left in the United States. Remember the one across South Michigan Avenue from the Art Institute of Chicago? That makes you old, like me.

I opted for grilled cheese and a salad, not the traditional Turkey O’Toole. 

Contrarian by nature, aside from my green DKM T-shirt, I wore mostly blue for the day. Track pants and a hoodie, even, like a Euro gangster in a TV show. 

Besides, blue was the first color associated with St. Patrick. But blue and orange would have made Ireland the Fighting Illini.

Headed to ECC to see Switchback

After lunch, a bunch of us Irish guys headed to Elgin Community College for Switchback’s matinee concert, a dry one at that.

See, the Blizzard Theater there is the same building that was serving as a polling place for the primary. A nice touch was valet parking for the show and for voters. 

Marty McCormack and Brian FitzGerald put on an energetic show. The fellas are my age and can still kick their legs up like Rockettes. 

These days, I walk so slow, when I was downtown heading back to the Grant Park South Garage a woman wearing stiletto heels was able to pass by me – by a considerable distance. 

I said hello to the Switchback lads at intermission and bought a CD. A buddy picked up a brochure about the band’s fall excursion to Ireland.

Three of four of us did an Irish goodbye shortly after that. Hey, Shay had to meet his St. Patrick’s posse at Rosie’s  – the bar not the hair place – at 3 p.m.

Had pints, heard piping at Rosie’s

So Rosie’s it was. They had a bagpiper there, a guy who is to that instrument what Roseanne Barr is to the Star Spangled Banner.

He stood up on the bartop and had staff queue up AC/DC’s It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock and Roll) on the digital jukebox. He seemed to pipe-synch the pipe solo in that tune.

A bit later, a buddy of mine said she sort of recognized one of the numbers the poor piper tried to play. I thought about hiring him to scare squirrels away from my roof.

Praise Jesus and pour another Guinness, the set was mercifully short.

Darby O’Gill was playing on the wide screen above the fireplace. In high def, you can really see how bad teeth were back in those days.

Rosie’s usually has a game of some sorts on its sets. With the NCAA men’s basketball tournament approaching, I remembered that on St. Patrick’s Day in 1979, the DePaul Blue Demons beat UCLA to head to the Final Four for the last time in the Chicago school’s history. Bill Murray may have bragged about it on Saturday Night Live.

Loyola made it in 2018. Notre Dame hasn’t made the Final Four since 1978. The Irish women’s team has been there nine times, the last being 2018 when the squad won its second title.

I tried some Reuben eggrolls a friend ordered. Hmm. The Irish and the Chinese built the Transcontinental Railway in the 1860s. The Reuben has been around for about 100 years and has at least three origin stories, according to the internet. One tale is based in Omaha, of all places.

The sandwich and eggroll versions have corned beef, sauerkraut and Swiss cheese. It’s served with Thousand Island dressing – which first was known as Sophia’s Special Sauce . A Reuben can also come with a side of Russian dressing.

Geez. Food can be so WOKE!

Ate more corned beef and watched a Star Wars movie

Discombobulated by the first Daylight Saving Time holiday, we headed back to Tom’s for some more corned beef. Ok. DST started March 8. But still.

This first corned beef Tom prepared in the crockpot earlier during St. Patricks’s season turned out tender and good for sandwiches. The next one wound up in soup.

I had that while watching Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It’s an Irish movie, with many scenes filmed on Skellig Michael. 

I could barely walk along the Cliffs of Moher without getting vertigo. That’s French for being afraid Tom was going to push me down into the deep blue sea, to see if I was really a puffin. 

So, though pretty to see from a distance, Skellig Michael out there in the Atlantic is not on my bucket list of places to visit.

Started watching Dublin Murders

Keeping St. Patrick’s season alive, we’ve been watching Dublin Murders, a nostalgic look back at Ireland in the mid-2000s. The Celtic Tiger is the killer.

Or not.

Dublin Murders is pretty much the Celtic cousin of many Scandinavian detective shows – grumpy grizzled veterans, fresh faced rookie garda, some supernatural stuff  and psychologically scarred up-and-coming sleuths with drinking problems and sad sex lives. 

Conleth Hill, who played baldie eunuch Varys on Game of Thrones plays a boss in Dublin Murders. He has a full head of hair here. I assume all his character’s other body parts are intact, too.

Unlike Game of Thrones, my guess is there will never be any Dublin Murders tours of Ireland’s capital. This could have been made in Cleveland. Are there any mountains in Ohio?

Anyway, 25 or 6 to 4 words later, that’s been my St. Patrick’s season. Maybe I’ll put one of the remaining corned beef chunks in the air fryer sometime this week to relive the memories.

The post St. Patrick’s Season Recap w/ Danahey on the Loose appeared first on FREE CRAIC.

“The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” in concert is coming to The Auditorium in Chicago Friday, March 13 and Saturday, March 14.

It’s fitting that the performances happen the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day – and when all the downtown falderal takes place.

It’s been 25 years since the debut of director Peter Jackson’s film version of “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring”  – the first of his takes on J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic trilogy – hit cineplexes around the world. So you may have forgotten that there’s a Celtic connection to Howard Shore’s award-winning score.

In an interview conducted via email, Shore noted that Tolkien’s story points the compass North, South, East and West to depict the different cultures of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

“The story starts in the Shire, in the West, therefore you had the Celtic instruments – the tin whistle, Celtic harp, bodhran, hammered dulcimer and the fiddle,” Shore said.

As the story progresses and introduces more cultures, the palette expands to include them. Shore said he used instruments from the East – Japanese taiko drums, Chinese cymbals, Tibetan gongs, East Indian bowed lutes, the sarangi and the dilruba. For the North he used a hardanger, a Norwegian fiddle with sympathetic strings.

For the South, Shore’s employed African instruments. Shore knew those from working on director David Cronenberg’s movie that’s sort of based on William S. Burroughs’ life when Burroughs wrote his 1959 novel “Naked Lunch” (the book from which Steely Dan took its name).

“I learned how to write for the rhaita and the ney flute and African percussion,” Shore said.

Shore said that Celtic music is very old and ancient, dating back to the period from which writing and stories that may have influenced Tolkien, like the Finnish poem “Kalevala” and other works. So compositionally, using Celtic instruments felt very natural to the time and Tolkien’s tales.

Shore also suggested that Jackson contact Enya to see if she would be interested in putting together songs for “Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.” That led to the creation of the Oscar-nominated song, “May It Be” and “Aniron,” with Enya and her collaborator Roma Ryan.

“In ‘Fellowship,’ you start in the Shire. It was greener and more folk-oriented, and I thought of Enya. I love her voice, and I thought she would provide a perfect sound for this beautiful folk/Celtic world,” Shore said.

As such, the original score was recorded by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Enya recorded her vocals in Dublin and Shore recorded the LPO in London.

“The Lord of the Rings” is considered one of the most complex fantasy worlds ever written, and Shore took almost four years to write the score.

“I love the book(s). I related to Tolkien’s work in terms of nature very closely,” Shore said.

Back then, he was writing in an oak forest, watching the seasons change, restoring a 19th-century house and restoring its garden.

“I noticed that as the gardens improved, the sense of balance returned, my composition got better, and the music improved as well. I related to Tolkien in the sense that green and good was worth fighting for, and it was going to be a battle to save the goodness of the Earth,” he said.

As for The Auditorium performances. “The Lord of the Rings; The Fellowship of the Ring” will be shown on a 60-foot screen accompanied by 238 musicians, including a symphony orchestra, a chorus and soloists.

The production is presented by CAMI Music, and it follows more than 15 years of performances across the globe. It last played the Chicago area eight years ago at the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park.

Shore said he works with CAMI Music to bring the concerts to audiences, selecting the orchestra, choirs, soloists, conductor and to maintain the performances at the highest level.

“The live-to-projection concerts came out of the idea of hearing the music for the film in a continuous performance,” Shore said “As you are making films you are working in small areas of the film. But the live-to-projection was a way to hear the entire score played in one piece, and it came out of working on the complete recording releases. That’s when I thought about the live-to-projection concerts.”

Shore’s “Lord of the Rings” projects continue to this day. Most recently, he’s been working with renowned organist Anna Lapwood. She created a new piece, “The Lord of the Rings Organ Symphony, transcribing the original scores for the organ, Shore said.

Lapwood will premiere the work May 1 in Atlantic City, playing the world’s largest pipe organ at the Jim Whelan Boardwalk Hall.

As for why “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” still resonates today, Shore said even though it is a large, epic novel and film about war, at its heart, it’s really about saving everything that’s green and good.

“It’s the smaller relationships that resonate, like the Sam and Frodo relationship. And Frodo’s relationship with Gandalf, I thought that was really inspiring too. That’s really the heart of the story,” Shore said.

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In time for Valentine’s Day, Steppenwolf Theatre Company recently opened its run of August Strindberg’s “The Dance of Death.”

As the J Geils Band put it way back in 1980, love stinks. It’s a battlefield. In this case, it smells a bit Irish, too.

Written in 1900, Strindberg’s play involves Edgar, a rapidly aging, curmudgeonly, blowhard Swedish Army captain and his wife Alice, who is 15 years younger than he is and a one-time wannabe actress.

They live on a remote island in a lighthouse-like fortress that once served as a prison. As staged at the Steppenwolf, it is a foreboding, impressive set.

The terrifying two spend their days verbally lacerating each other in advance of their 25th wedding anniversary. Their familiarity breeds a vicious, boundless cycle of contempt.

Had they been around in the late 1970s, “Cruel to Be Kind”  would have been a favorite song. As is, the Captain dances around like a puppet to “Entry March of the Boyars” that Alice plays on the piano.

One day, Alice’s cousin Kurt comes to town to run the local quarantine office. Kurt and Alice had a thing for each other. More like lust than love.

Kurt’s a divorced dad whom the courts disallow from seeing his own kids. Edgar might have had something to do with that – and might have had something to do with Kurt’s wife.

Yeah. Love stinks like lutefisk here.

Edgar and Alice eviscerate each other with verbal lye. The hate is strong with these two. They don’t seem to like anybody else. And nobody seems to like them.

Poor Kurt gets caught up in their morass. Lechery lurks, then rears its ugly head. Deception begets deception.

There’s a lot of begetting going on here. A good amount of drinking. A touch of vampirism, even.

Of course, it wouldn’t be Swedish without talk about death and faith, or lack thereof.

Truth is beyond relative here. Much like what we’re seeing in way too many places these days, for these three – particularly Edgar and Alice –  reality is whatever fits their current schemes and narratives.

The couple loves to hate each other and thrives on vindictiveness. But for Kurt stopping by and maybe a ghost, misery is their only company.

They’re stuck with each other. They deserve each other.

If they were around in modern times, these two awful people would be internet influencers, star on a so-called reality TV show or be elected to higher office.

So if you’ve been through a bitter divorce or grew up in a house with bickering parents, this might bring on a bit of PTSD. Also, Bruce Springsteen has nothing to do with this show. You’re thinking of “Dancing in the Dark.”

But anyway.

While watching monsters may sound unpleasant, the way Steppenwolf stages “The Dance of Death,”  there are a lot of laughs.

To mix Swedish media, while it sure ain’t ABBA, “The Dance of Death” is not exactly like the stereotype of an Ingmar Bergman movie.

Nor is it like one of those moody Scandinavian crime dramas you can find on the streamers – the ones with an attractive young female detective and/or a grizzled, shaggy guy with a drinking problem. The murders most frequently happen in the woods, even ones set in a city.

In the Steppenwolf version of “The Dance With Death,” the dark comedy shines through.

Jeff Perry plays Edgar with high energy, cartoon character cruelty. While not as physical in her performance as Alice, Kathryn Erbe, makes a great cunning foil, cavorting about with a calculated callousness. Cliff Chamberlain’s performance is more subdued, at least until the prot/antgonists bring out the beast in him.

The Steppenwolf version uses a translation from award-winning Irish playwright Conor McPherson.

Two years ago, McPherson’s Bob Dylan musical, “Girl From the North Country,” played in Chicago. For that work – at the very least –  McPherson noted that Nobel Prize-winning Irish American playwright Eugene O’Neill was an influence.

“Unspoken resentments, hopes and dreams and thwarted ambitions start to reemerge and come to the surface. That creates a lot of drama. You’ll find that structure in a lot of successful plays,” McPherson said in 2024 of the musical.

In the acceptance speech O’Neill wrote for getting the Nobel, he noted his works owed much to the influence of Strindberg – an influence O’Neill said “runs clearly through more than a few of my plays and is plain for everyone to see.”

Bringing this back to Chicago, last year at this time, Steppenwolf staged another lurid look at love, Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love.” Shepard’s work involves a cowboy type and a woman who just happen to have the same dad. Their old man was a bigamist.

The couple fell for each other in high school and may or may not have known they were related when they foolishly fell in love. Dad haunts the couple as they meet up once more at a fleabag hotel somewhere in the southwest in the early 1980s.

Things go up in flames, literally and figuratively.

As I learned last year  per seeing that Steppenwolf production, one of the things that influenced Shepard to become a playwright was watching the 1962 film version of O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

O’Neill’s masterwork, first staged after his death, “explores themes of addiction, regret, familial dysfunction, and the inescapable influence of the past,” as the National Park Service website understates it. (O’Neill’s Tao House in Danville, CA is a National Historic Site.)

So credit the Irish for all this.

After all, these are current tips for Valentine’s Day dating, care of Ireland’s Garron Noone. Lest you forgot, Dublin is where they keep some of St. Valentine’s remains. And “The Dance of Death” runs through March 22, so you can see it in time for St. Patrick’s Day, too!

The post In ‘Dance of Death’ at Steppenwolf, love stinks appeared first on FREE CRAIC.

A smart Scot is part of “Jump In!”, the latest Disney on Ice Show which is currently playing in frozen Chicago.

“It’s a bit surreal,” said Rachel Hamilton of living her dream, touring the world skating since 2023 with Disney shows.

Glasgow-born Hamilton started skating when she was eight years old and was inspired by figure skating shows and televised competitions she’d seen.

“My brother took me to a local rink to try skating, and after I said, ‘I want to do that,’” she said.

She wound up training at the East Kilbride Ice Figure Skating Club, which led to competing in national and international events.

Hamilton, 25, put skating on pause for a bit to study and earn a first-class honors degree in Applied Biomedical Science from the University of the West of Scotland. After that, she thought she would give professional skating a shot.

The COVID-19 pandemic slowed a process that took about two years or so, Hamilton said. It involved sending emails and videos to Feld Entertainment, which produces the Disney on Ice shows.

Her persistence led to an in-person interview/tryout in  2023 in Leeds, and not too far from her family’s home. You can learn more about it in an interview (available on YouTube) Hamilton did with a radio station in Scotland.

Hamilton said she went into the audition- which coincided with a Disney on Ice tour stop – with a positive attitude.

“It was a great experience and showed me how the process worked,” she said.

Two months later, she signed a contract and hit the road. So far, she’s skated with Disney shows in the UK, other parts of Europe, South America and the Middle East. Last summer, she and other skaters trained and rehearsed at Feld Entertainment studios in Florida for the new and current production, “Jump In!”

The tour has been hitting rinks at stadiums across the United States since August.

As part of the ensemble, Hamilton said she’s playing various roles during the show. Those include a donkey, a bat and Snow White.

The donkey is among the skating toys taking part in “Hoedown Throwdown” from “Toy Story.” The bat is part of a colony in a glow-in-the-dark piece involving the vampire Matangi from “Moana 2.”

Snow White is one of the Disney princesses in a number that sees Ariel from “The Little Mermaid” and Rapunzel flying above the ice to perform gymnastics routines.

According to a press release, “Ariel soars above the ice to “Kiss the Girl,” and Rapunzel’s golden hair is brought to life by flowing aerial silks as she and Flynn Rider dazzle with a mesmerizing aerial routine.”

“This is my favorite part of the show. It’s high energy and fun,” Hamilton said.

All told, “Jump In!” features more than 50 characters, as Mickey Mouse and friends welcome the audience to explore Disney stories through a Magical MousePad.

Characters include Anxiety alongside Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger, and Fear from “Inside Out 2″ and billion dollar superstar Stitch.  Tunes include “Let It Go” from Frozen, “Try Everything” from “Zootopia,” “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” from “Encanto” – which Hamliton said is her favorite Disney movie –  “Get Lost” from “Moana 2” and others familiar to anyone with little kids, Disney+ and DVD players.

“Jump In” plays Jan. 22 through Jan. 25, then Feb. 5 through Feb. 8 at Allstate Arena in Rosemont, then Feb. 12 through Feb. 15 at the United Center in Chicago.

For tickets and more information, go to www.disneyonice.com/jump-in/rosemont-il-allstate-arena

and www.disneyonice.com/jump-in/chicago-il-united-center.

As a trivial side note, Scotland is home to Lewis Gibson, who ice dances with Lilah Fear for Great Britain. They will be taking part in the upcoming Winter Olympics in Italy. Scottish ice dancers Sinead and John Kerr took part in the 2006 and 2010 Winter Olympics.

Scotland and Wales are also home to the quarries where they get granite to make curling stones.

As for Hamilton, this will be her first visit to the Chicago area. She’s looking forward to visiting the city’s sites and eating its fabled foods. I warned her about Malort and away from deep dish in favor of tavern style, explained Italian beef and Chicago style hot dogs to her and told her about Maria’s, a nice Mexican place in Rosemont.

She probably needs the calories for all the skating she’s doing – and to keep warm during the arctic blast.

The post A Scot with Disney on Ice and Danahey on the Loose appeared first on FREE CRAIC.

Bear weather?

I guess cold doesn’t really bother rams, at least ones from Los Angeles. As the kids text, IYKYK.

I never really understood how the phrase “bear weather” applies to an NFL team handling cold weather, anyway. Aside from polar bears, most bears sleep through a good portion of the winter.

“Some scientists prefer to call it the season of lethargy,” is how the Bear Vault website puts it.

“While (bears) are inactive, they enter into a deeper than normal sleep that allows them to conserve energy and survive the winter,” is what the National Forest Foundation says.

I can relate. Here in the Chicago area, this winter we all can, given it’s been more of an old school winter than the mild excuses we’ve had for winters the past few years.

Take for example, Thanksgiving weekend. That Saturday we had a record-setting snowfall. It prevented best fest buddy Tom and me from trekking to Chicago TARDIS, the Doctor Who convention in Lombard. That day’s special guest was actor Christopher Eccleston, who played the ninth incarnation of the time-traveling Time Lord.

While we did hit the sci-fi fest Friday, not having a time-traveling device of our own, a drive south to the event Saturday might have been a little too much for my old car to bear. More like, how long the drive would have taken would have been a bit much for my patience to bear.

So we watched old Doctor Who episodes at Tom’s house. I probably fell asleep.

Flash forward to Christmas Eve. A combination of pre-holiday eating and drinking and the norovirus making its rounds left me homebound.

Whatever the cause, the results were the same as if I had chugged the prep drink for a colonoscopy. When I wasn’t  resting, I was pooping. But hey. I lost weight. Not many people do that during December, right?

My next bear-like, unintentional hibernation happened just after the new year started. I hurt my ankle to the point I slightly rearranged furniture so that I could hold onto it as I hobbled about my house. Having no cane or walker, I also moved about by using an old mop.

Tom lent me a walking stick. Walking sticks come to a point, which make them great for walking on lawns, maybe on deep shag carpeting and for poking somebody in the eye.

Luckily, another buddy had a metal cane for me to use. Luckily, my wiring is up to code and lightning this time of year here in Illinois is very rare.

As the pain remained close to unbearable, I wound up going to the doctor. She gave me some medicine. The hobbling lasted for about a week-and-a-half.

At this point I was beginning to feel like the third wheel in my own life, or the spare tire. Not one of those big, cool spares like on the back of Jeep, but the little one hidden under all the crap you keep in the trunk.

Helping me break my hibernation habit, though, is that Tom’s granddaughter plays for her school’s fifth grade basketball team. My semi-retired schedule allows me to attend her games, which have been a hoot.

I don’t mean that in a mean way. Attending merely reminds me of how awkward we all are/were at that age.

So far, there’ s only been one jackass parent, and that was before an away game. He was heading into the school talking really loudly on his phone,  blathering on about 10 to 12 hour work days. It was so of the town where this happened, which is to say, Barrington.

The phone gave me an idea, though. To make a basketball game more relevant to fifth graders, they should be allowed to use them while they are playing. Scoreboards should feature emojis, memes, the current abbreviations and vernacular.

To that point, Tom’s granddaughter dons the number 67. Good for her for trying to be funny – even if nobody really understands what the “word of the year” means. Then again, what does anything really mean these days, anyway?

Anyway, the other idea I had from watching the girls play is that the rules they have for their games would make good rules for a league for old guys like me.

That is, as long as you dribble a bit, you can travel as much as you want. This would be a sort of modified NBA rule, come to think of it.

Passing would be encouraged, but mostly optional. Fouls would only occasionally be called – like when a bigger person pummels into another big player.

You’d be assigned to sort of guard one player and one player only. At the start of each quarter, the ref makes you turn around so you can see that player’s name and number – and vice versa. This would be a good memory exercise for people my age, too.

There would be two games of four, 9-minute periods, played back-to-back. Or maybe one game of six periods, which seemed to be the case at one of the schools.

Teams would have 20 members. Each group of five would rotate into the game every four-and-a-half minutes. No full-court pressing would be allowed. These rules would be to help prevent heart attacks.

Free throws would be kept to a minimum. The clock would rarely stop.

Matching t-shirts would be required, but leg gear could include jeans, cargo pants, sweats, shorts and even skorts.

Everybody would get a chance to play, because it’s just for fun and exercise anyway. And everybody would have a cool water bottle, a backpack and snacks.

If I could figure out a way to incorporate pickleball into my idea, I would really be onto something.

Past kids’ basketball, during these times of torpor, there have been trips to the gym and one visit to Costco. And I’ve watched way too much football, mostly at home by myself – so I can change the channel during commercial breaks or boring parts of games.

I headed over to Tom’s to watch the Bears play the Rams, though. If I were superstitious, I would say it was me changing my solo viewing habit is why the Bears lost.

Which reminds me in a sideways way. What must it be like to try to watch the game at Soldier Field sitting in your $600 + seat behind the big dude who wears a bear’s head on top of his head? He seems like a nice guy, but still.

Alas, with the loss I’ll have to save these story pitches until next season.

• Find a pet spa that paints dog nails the same colors that Caleb Williams uses. All the better if one of the dogs getting their nails done is a three-legged amputee.
• Find a blind twin brother and sister combo who have made Bears-themed creations with Lego, including a 6-foot tall bear and a mockup of a proposed new stadium.
• Have AI write songs in various genres about the Bears.
• Find a group of elderly folks knitting Bears-themed blankets for homeless veterans.
• Interview experts for tips on Bears-themed body painting and body jewelry.

Either way, the Seattle Seahawks look like the team to beat and head to the Super Bowl. Seattle can embarrass the Rams with this video from 1986. It’s a Village People-like ditty called Ram It.

I probably will be watching some of that game this coming Sunday night. As I cut way back on streamers, there’s nothing good on TV then. Plus, football can lead to hibernation and dreams of warmer weather. I’d settle for March, even.

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