St Patrick's Day 2008

Quite a St Patrick's day this year. I went to our session pub expecting to have a session and ended up entertaining. For a while anyway. We had a couple guys from Arkansas who were in for spring break join us. Great fun.


Around 10 PM we moved inside where we could hear each other at least, and carried on with the session we expected to have.

It wasn't until after 1 AM that we left the pub to drive home.

Wow, what a weekend.

The weekend started out pretty mundane - mowing the grass. By by Saturday evening three of us were playing a gig at a house party, an Irish birthday party. Great fun. Great food. Can't beat it. Then from 10 until 2:30 we had practice for a new band we're getting together. As soon as that broke up, three of us headed 40 minutes north to a session that was already in progress at the Celtic Ray in Punta Gorda. I didn't leave there until 7 PM.

What a blast that session was. Awesome craic. A couple new faces, and a number of new tunes and some songs for the folks in the pub. It was one of those "play and sing with fearless abandon" times that nobody cares how you sound, just so you try. One old woman, who could have been 85, impressed the heck out of the whole place. She came teetering over with her cane, shaking from what I would say was Parkinson's Disease from her shakes. She sat down in a chair vacated by the bodhran player as one of the fiddlers was playing a nice slow tune solo. Mary was having trouble keeping the beat at that slow pace, and asked for something faster. We launched into a couple reels and she was pretty good. The place broke out in applause, and we did a couple more. When Mary stood up to return to her table the applause was deafening.

I hope you get to be part of something like that someday.