A Celtic Journey

Huge fan of the Irish vocal group Celtic Woman. Wrote this in anticipation of seeing them this past St Patrick's Night in Wallingford, CT.

 

 

I have never loved any musical act, singularly or collectively, quite the way I have loved the female Irish vocal group, Celtic Woman. Though the faces and the voices have changed through the years, though have gone from a quintet to a quartet, from Irish folk tunes to Broadway show tunes, and though the world around me has flipped and shaken and turned upside down more than a time or two since, that love for them remains constant.

There are a handful of acts that I have loved longer, but that is mainly a function, obviously, of their longevity. The echoes of those “ancients” may be longer tenured, and their resume of memories a little fuller, but in my heart now, Celtic Woman stands alone. They have for about six years. I suspect they shall for as long as I draw breath.  It’s really that simple. No music, no voices, no collective sound has ever quite stirred my senses the way they have.  

I tell people that when I first “found” Celtic Woman (or, seemingly more precisely, they found me) it was if those voices, their music, while utterly gorgeous and irresistible in a corporeal sense, mined hitherto virgin veins in my psyche, my soul, and my spirit. These women, I said, do not sing simply to my heart and soul (which they’ve done with endlessly endearing charm and grace); these women sing, they speak, directly to my emotional DNA. They tapped something deep; they found (or led me to) parts of my own being I didn’t even know existed. Might sound a trifle silly, but I assure you, it is absolutely true

 

 

A little story:

 

A few February’s ago I had the transcendent privilege of trooping off to St. John’s Cemetery in Middletown, Connecticut, with some parishioners of the cemetery’s namesake Roman Catholic Church. We’d gathered, with the sexton at the helm, to clean the place up a bit, clear the brush, the brambles, the weeds, the trees"hack back the wilds that had taken root in some of the graveyard’s older, more remote reaches. 

 

Unfortunately, clean up day fell on a splendidly awful late-winter New England Saturday morning: cold and gray, still winter damp and dank, the whole of the ugly leafless world pushed around by a stinging breeze that sluiced and sliced as easily to my bones as it did through the “halos” of the ubiquitous Celtic Cross headstones staking the soupy ground. Given the snowmelt and the undulating contours of the cemetery, the lower-lying terrain was slushy, spongy, and swampy. Icy water puddled and pooled in intermittent ankle-deep mini-ponds, and try as I might to steer clear of them, my hiking boots filled with water more quickly than the Titanic did. 

 

I should have been miserable: I am not a morning person; I was under-rested and my eyes burned a little from lack of sleep; the exhalations following my jaw-snapping yawns curled around me like early-morning Dublin fog under a dull streetlight. I could have been miserable. But I wasn’t.

 

Celtic Woman had brought me there. They’d led me directly to and through the heavy oaken front doors of St John’s Church, a formidable, mid-19^th century brownstone citadel built by volunteer immigrant Irish laborers, famine refugees who not only troweled the mortar and laid the donated stone, but who cleaved and hacked it from the earth and hauled it from a quarry in Portland, a mile or two across the river. It was the first “Irish” church in Middletown. And more than anything, with its several-stories high steeple piercing the sky like a giant exclamation point, it said that the Irish had arrived.  And that they were staying.

 

I know all this because of Celtic Woman. They had stirred such fierce ancestral pride that I’d made it a point of tracing my Irish genealogy. And this is where that journey had led me. During the course of my sojourn, my search "my pilgrimage-- I found I had two sets of great-great-grandparents from Ireland who not only attended the church, but who were buried in its very cemetery (along with great-grandparents, great-aunts and uncles). And that explains why I, still a fairly fresh transplant from Michigan and not a parishioner of the church, labored so mightily in that February gloom. I had, in a sense, found home. A few months earlier I had physically come home. And now here I was, spiritually home.

 

And Celtic Woman had brought me there. Hard to describe the sublime feeling of contentment, of completeness, I felt not only in cleaning up my folks’ final resting place, but in finding them at all. The work was hard "despite the chill, I managed to sweat-drench through a T-shirt, a turtleneck and a sweatshirt. By the end of the morning, I sported slivered, blistered hands, a sore back -- every joint and muscle ached. But I was happy. I had found something there "a part of my past, a huge part of my personal history which I don’t think I would have found, or even have tried to find, had it not been for Celtic Woman. A family reunion four generations in the making, sure, but I like to think that wherever those people --my people!-- were, they know now that they’d been found, discovered, and in no facetious sense, loved anew. It should surprise no one who knows me that while I joyfully, menially labored that day, the voices, the music, of Celtic Woman played not only in my head (thanks to my IPOD and my ear buds), but throughout my entire being, bridging, if you will, a generational gap literally decades and centuries long. 

 

Yes, it is both that simple and that profound.

 

 

 

 

 

Another story:

 

Some fifteen months back, I suffered the gravest, the darkest trauma and tragedy of my existence: In early December 2010, my 22-year-old daughter Allison was brutally murdered in Philadelphia, PA. In the blackness of that bereavement, the utter cold and dark of that mourning, the almost surreal sense of pain, sorrow and grief, I made a point of attending ex-member Orlagh Fallon’s CD signing in Boston, and later, her concert in Rockport, MA.  I was hoping, mainly, to just escape myself for a few hours. I didn’t have any great notions or portent in terms of what the day might bring, but Orlagh was the last of the original members I hadn’t met and I wanted, if nothing else, to thank her for the joy and beauty she’d brought my way. In a suddenly quite sad and dark world, those two things seemed suddenly quite invaluable.

 

There are a handful of you who know what transpired in Boston; there are even a few who witnessed it. Orlagh Fallon, in terms in sheer graciousness and generosity, went well above and beyond the call of all duty.  Apparently, Orlagh had been informed of my tragedy and knew whom to look for, because when I  first approached her in the reception line following a brief concert, she immediately enfolded me in a gigantic hug.  She held my hands as we spoke, and, as I recall, her words were nothing but kind and compassionate, comforting and supportive.

 

I don’t know now exactly how long we spoke or exactly what we spoke of, and I’m not sure, given the circumstance, that I would say if even if I could remember (falling back on the privilege of privacy, I suppose), but it felt like a long time. Maybe it only felt that way for me, but it felt not so much as if time had stopped, but as if it’d slowed down a little (and given the events of the immediate past, that felt like a relief) and the most unreal part about it was its reality. As I mentioned, Orlagh was the last of the legendary Original Five I had yet to meet, and perhaps because of that, and her departure from Celtic Woman, her “legend” seemed to grow. And yet throughout our entire encounter all I was conscious of was Orlagh as a person; not as a “star,” not as a Celtic Woman, not as a personal legend, but as another human being. Orlagh saw to that (and somehow, I think that means a lot more to Orlagh than the trappings of “stardom”).

 

A not incidental side note: I had come to Boston to meet Orlagh: Mission Accomplished. I did have plans of driving on through to Brockport for that evening’s concert. Unfortunately, a few friends "fellow citizens of Celtic Woman Nation"informed me that the show was sold out. Oh well, I thought, that was disappointing, but I’d really only wanted to meet her and express my thanks and appreciation. Having done that, I considered the trip a success. I so much as told her so, expressed my disappointment at missing the show, but also congratulations for an apparently quite successful ticket sale.

 

Orlagh, however, would have none of it. She called her manager Rory over and directed him to find me a ticket for the show. It took some doing but, later, while I was just hanging around Rockport waiting for those aforementioned forum friends to arrive so we could do dinner, a call came from Rory. He’d found me a ticket. What’s more, it was “on the house.” During the show that followed, Orlagh graciously and poignantly dedicated the song “Distant Shore” to me (and, by extension, to my daughter). Anyone familiar with the song certainly realizes how appropriate it was (however sadly) for the occasion. I thought it was a grand, noble gesture.

  

My eyes still well up with tears when I think of it.

 

I would open my review of that show with a description of the town itself, noting that there might be nothing more desperately prosaic than a summer resort town locked in the death-grip of winter. Sun, surf and sand buried beneath a caul of gray so unwieldy I could almost taste it; feeling, as I strolled the empty sidewalks and streets, like just another foot-soldier in a street-walking, window-shopping army of lost and lonely ghosts tramping a rather aimless, pointless path to nowhere.

 

As dusk drifted more closely to evening, the cold water of the bay, whose tide whispered sheepishly, if somewhat mysteriously, as it made its way to the empty shores and beaches, turned as black as a bottomless well of ink (the kind poets of old dipped quill pens in to write odes and sonnets to loves too soon and too young lost and gone forever). Boats and buoys bobbed upon it with somnolent disinterest, the muffled slap of it as it collided with their wood and fiberglass hulls echoed by a few straggler gulls; they limited their commentary to a chorus of squabbling squawks before taking wing and vanishing into the death-mask granite gray of the cloud-scudded sky. The night air turned more sharply chilly and dank; if I had spoke (although there was no one to speak to) my breath would have plumed around me like the mist vampires used to show up in the old B&W Universal horror films of the 1930’s and 40’s. Night had fallen, winter had come. Both seemed endless and ageless.

 

One reason I wrote this is because this is how I felt, even as I sat at the back bay window of a (maybe too) quaint coffee shop, my drink growing cold, the darkness overwhelming everything, struggling to compose and transcribe a coherent thank you note to Orlagh for all she’d done so far: I felt cold, lost, and infinitely alone.

 

The other reason I started it this way was to draw as sharp as contrast as possible between the pre-show mood and the within-the-show mood. An evening in the dear lady’s living room could not have been more warm, more intimate, more welcoming than the evening she gave us from the stage of the Shalin Liu Performance Center, and her wonderful presence, the pleasing, eclectic range of music, and the overall sense of hominess and happiness she radiated with her voice and her smile made everything as right and cozy as a seat beside a fireplace on a snowy winter’s night.

 

I have regretfully, and perhaps ungallantly, shortchanged the lady by keeping the story pretty much to myself this whole time, but it seemed such a private and personal moment (despite the public venues), and the trip down that particular Memory Lane is an uneasy, uncomfortable and disquieting one, one which I, perhaps selfishly, have been loathe to make. I will say now that at one point in our conversation I told Orlagh that she was an angel sent straight from above. Although she laughed politely, I wasn’t (really) joking. And though she humbly begged to differ, I respectfully told the dear lady that, in this case, she and I would simply have to agree to disagree.

 

 There were no miracle cures, mind you. I didn’t expect one and I didn’t receive one. My heart and soul suffer to this day, and I assume they will for the rest of my days. But what there was an island of calm and comfort in what were, at the time, the most treacherous and tumultuous seas I’d ever tried to navigate. Thinking now, though, maybe I was wrong about something: Perhaps, she wasn’t so much an angel as simply a hero. After all, not all heroes run into burning buildings or put their lives on the line for the safety of our persons and our property. Some just stand with us in a moment of deepest, darkest despair. They don’t “fix’ it (they can’t), but they don’t run from it either.  There is another word for this type of person: it is “friend.” I would never presume to be Orlagh’s friend, but for that moment at least she felt like mine. And that’s almost as good.

 

My Point

 

With these elongated vignettes I am trying make the point that Celtic Woman (as for a lot of us here) is no mere “vocal group.” I don’t like to monkey around with language like “fanatical” or “obsessive” because I believe they stray into some dodgy territory. But I gladly, gleefully admit to being, at intervals, passionately, jealously, fiercely, maybe slavishly and even “all-consumedly” in “love” with the concept of Celtic Woman, with its mythos almost as much as its music. I willfully threw myself into the fantasy engendered by the simply gargantuan beauty of the “product” (for lack of a better word).

 

And why wouldn’t I? I told Chloe, first time I met her, that Celtic Woman was the most beautiful thing to happen to music in my lifetime (in several lifetimes, in fact).  The shimmering romanticism --the curtsies, the angelic and ethereal dresses and gowns, the glamorous, opulent set pieces --when coupled with beautiful arrangements of beautiful songs sung by beautiful women with beautiful voices was simply irresistible. Add to it the positive energy, that certain indefinable something, each woman brought to the show and, yeah, I was snagged, hook, line and sinker.

 

And, yes, they inspired a host of daydreams: idyllic hand-in-hand traipses down some boreen green somewhere with the Irish lass of my dreams, reveries of thatch-roofed cottages and turf fires burning like incense as some flamed-haired Maureen O’Hara clone stirs the stew (make mine Beef and Guinness, please!) and the sheep bleat out in the heathered hills --all these images and niceties inspired by stage lighting, smoke, mirrors and ball gowns, goo-gaws, spangles and bangles. And yet I remain ever cognizant of the fact that it is the monumental talents of the ladies which make it all work. That is real. And without it, there would be nothing. Nothing at all.

 

However, lately, like some (maybe a lot?) of old-timers I have become uneasy and alarmed by what seems like constant and cataclysmic personnel changes and upheavals. I am a man who values consistency and constancy, a sense and semblance of stability. “Real” life does not provide them in much abundance; lately, neither has Celtic Woman. Now, it is not my intention to argue the merits of one evolution over another; I don’t want to get into who is better than whom "we all have our favorites and each one is every bit as valid as the next. I don’t want to hurt feelings or step on toes. Likewise, off-stage politicking and backstage backstabbing, if it does go on, is none my concern either. I have only been concerned with what goes on stage. And that has been gorgeous, glorious almost beyond words.

 

 

And that, at last, leads us back to today, a few days before St. Patrick’s Day, a few days before I go up to St. John’s Cemetery and pay my respects to the Irish fore-bearers I would not have found without Celtic Woman. A few days, in fact, before I head down Route 15 for the Chevrolet Theater in Wallingford to see if this edition of “My Girls” can bring the magic like all the editions before them. I cannot say because I do not know. I know lots of people, even some fabled “old-timers,” have been quite pleased with the new show. That’s good. I’ve no doubt that it will beautiful. But we’re all different. We experience even the same events much and quite differently. Will it stir my heart and touch my soul as profoundly as past Celtic Woman shows? I guess we’ll see. All I can promise is to go in with an open mind and an open heart.  Lord knows, in times past, Celtic Woman has filled those places to overflowing with joy and beauty.

 

At the risk of sounding mildly sacrilegious (there places in Celtic Woman nation where we are not allowed to doubt), I’m eager to see if they still can.

 

I will gladly report my findings in Part II.