The Grand Irish Session

 

Today was another great day at Irish Fest Summer School. We worked on ornamenting jigs in the fiddle class, but I did feel bad because one woman who had been struggling to keep up just left in the middle of class. There was leftover pizza in the church where we were meeting, and they told us to help ourselves, so I had a slice. I knew a lot of the tunes at the lunchtime session and quickly picked up the ones I didn't know. Then the two ladies I ate lunch with yesterday actually came to find me, so we walked to a nearby restaurant and sat outside. I just had a bowl of wild rice clam chowder. In my Irish class, we debated whether men should be allowed to wear skirts and whether children under sixteen should be allowed to own smart phones, then we did an improv scene about buying a boat, and then we asked each other hypothetical questions to practice the conditional tense. My Irish teacher, the red-headed flute player, and I had dinner at a sushi restaurant, but we were too full to try the exotic cheesecakes they have for desserts.

The big event today was the Grand Irish Session. Apparently there was a session last night at a tavern called O'Donahue's, but it must have started at ten because the faculty concert went till 9:30. Today the session allegedly started at seven, but when we got there at about half past, there were a handful of our fellow students, so we had a sort of slow session. A couple of children joined us, a boy who was really good on the bodhran and a girl playing the fiddle. She suggested "Drowsy Maggie," and I started to play it, but nobody joined in because just then the really great fiddler from Ireland arrived. He started playing it at a breakneck speed that I could not keep up with, and the rest of the night was like that: lots of tunes I didn't know, but too fast for me to figure them out on the fly, and even the ones I did know, I could barely keep up. At one point I dumped the contents of my purse on the floor by accident, and the professional musician sitting next to me (who is actually from Italy) leaped in to help me. The real musicians are very nice and have no airs about them, but boy are they a level above me! I finally gave up on faking it and just listened. There were some dancers too. Just about the time Famie and I decided to call it a night, so did the real Irish fiddler, and then things quickly ended. Still, what a group, with flutes, whistles, fiddles, mandolins, banjos, guitars, and two hammer dulcimers. It was an incredible sound.

Famous Hat