ARTISTS WITHOUT WALLS’ MEMBERS “ON THE TOWN”: WEEK of MARCH 9, 2014

By on March 9, 2014
This entry is filed under ARTISTS WITHOUT WALLS, FILM, IRELAND, MUSIC, NEW YORK CITY, THEATER, Uncategorized, WRITING and tagged , , , , , , .

mega 23x16_Pearl_Berg_am_liam-font2 80kbBrendan Connellan’s DEATH, PLEASE!, which is directed and produced by Brendan, is opening on Tuesday, March 11th at Theatre Row, 410 West 42nd St., NYC. There will be six shows running through Sunday, March 16th. Evening shows on Tuesday at 7, Wed-Sat at 8. Afternoon matinees Wed and Sat at 2 and Sunday at 3. The cast (in alphabetical order) are Alessia Sushko, Amit Gupta, Brendan Connellan, and another AWoW member, John Moran. No intermission. 70 minutes

 

For AWOW, instead of the $21.25 cost via Telecharge, go to www.broadwayoffers.com the ticket price is $17.25 with a lower service fee! Use the code TRAWOW.

 

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Screen Shot 2014-03-08 at 2.01.31 PMPeter Quinn, Honor Molloy  and others will be discussing “Dagger” John Hughes and the Rise of Irish New York at the Museum of the City of New York, 1220-1227 Fifth Avenue, Thursday, March 13pm, 6:30pm. Free for museum members, $12 students/seniors, $16 general public. 

 

 

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March 12 Flyer 2

 

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Eamon Loingsigh‘s new book “Light of the Diddicoy” will be released at Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker St. in NYC’s Greenwich Village on March 12, 6pm. It’s a free event and books will be available. 

 

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557589_10151295517547308_1310266587_nJoin IFNY, The Irish Film Board and Under the Milky Way for a screening of the critically acclaimed film Good Vibrations in celebration of the iTunes release of four Irish films this March. Where: Wythe Hotel Screening Room, Wythe Hotel, 80 Wythe Avenue, Brooklyn. When: Friday, March 14th @ 7:30 pm. Tickets: $10.00 (available for purchase online http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/594198)

 

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maxresdefault-2Artists Without Walls will be presenting the University College Dublin Choral Scholars in a fund raising event called Sailing Away: Songs of Farewell, a program filled with songs of love, loss, parting, immigration and the sea at St. Peter’s Church Chelsea, 346 West 20th St., New York City, Saturday, March 15th, 7:30pm. 

 Listen to “Parting Glass” 

 

Special guest, historian/author Peter Quinn, will share stories of his family’s immigrant experience.  “Peter Quinn is a poet and an historian and one of our finest storytellers,” said National Book Award winner Colum McCann.   Click here for tickets $20

 

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1779117_10151987791284013_992647065_nHonor Finnegan will be performing in a tribute to Patty Griffin at Rockwood Music Hall, 196 Allen Street, NYC, on Saturday, March 15, 8pm. 

HOW TO GET INTO HEAVEN by CHARLES R. HALE

By on March 8, 2014
This entry is filed under FAMILY HISTORY, HUMANITY, HUMOR, MEMOIR, STORYTELLING, WRITING and tagged , , , , , . | 10 Comments

Those of us who were brought up Catholic had to abide by myriad rules related to almost every event in our lives. Keeping track of sins and their categorization–original, venial and mortal–was daunting; however, I’ve noticed that things have changed. Now, some sins that were mortal, aren’t; original sin has a different interpretation, and I wonder, are there still venial sins? I don’t hear much about those anymore. And I think Purgatory, Limbo and Hell have closed shop. Where did all those folks who were doomed to live on the edge of the underworld go, those doomed to an afterlife spent waiting for redemption that might or might not come or worse, a life of abject misery with no chance of parole? Did everyone get a free “Get Out of Jail” card and proceed directly to heaven?  I used to think about this a lot when I was a boy.

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HOW TO GET INTO HEAVEN

By Charles R. Hale

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securedownload-25When I was a young I worried about who was going to heaven, who might be facing a stint in purgatory, and who’d be going south for the duration.  As for my own fate, I’d traipse down to Our Lady of the Snows on Saturday for my weekly spiritual ablution and say a pile of prayers after admitting that I lusted for a friend’s eleven-year old sister.   Even if I was incapable of consummating those lustful thoughts it didn’t matter: wicked thoughts counted as sins.

 

On Sundays I’d go to the 9:00 Mass.  I actually loved Father Stuart’s “Go out and convert someone” sermon–it was my first power rush–but one day I became quite concerned when he said, “The Lord wants you to renew your Covenant with him every week.  It’s a mortal sin if you don’t.”  I felt faint.  I immediately thought about my mother. My mother wasn’t concerned with missing Mass.  What if something happened to her, I thought.   Would my mother be going to…. The thought of it was too much to bear.

 

before-the-fall1I started to envision scenarios in which I’d negotiate with St. Peter.  I imagined myself kneeling in front of him with my Little Prayer Book, mother-of-pearl rosary beads, and my mother’s First Holy Communion picture.  I’d plea bargain her way into heaven if it was the last thing I did.

 

“St. Peter, I know that missing Mass is a mortal sin, however, I also know that a mortal sin must be premeditated; there must be a willful violation, and there must be intent.  None of these legal terms characterizes my mother’s actions. Thus in my mind, her indiscretion could be classified as venial sin, a “religious misdemeanor.”

 

St. Peter stared straight at me with the first WTF look I can ever remember.  Finally he spoke, “My Son, I believe your mother has committed prior indiscretions, which preclude her entrance into heaven.”

 

“That can’t be St. Peter.  No way.  Not ‘my’ mother.”

 

mom“Have you seen the inscription in her high school yearbook, ‘Cute and clever, naughty never, well hardly ever.’  You do understand what “hardly ever” means, Son?” St. Peter said with a knowing wink.

 

“St. Peter, please, forgive her, her indiscretions.”

 

“You can console yourself with the reflection that it is God’s holy will,” St. Peter said.

 

“But this is my mother, St. Peter.  I’ll do anything. I’ll say a thousand Hail Mary’s , I’ll convert someone, everyone I meet.  It’ll be a Crusade.”

 

St. Peter kept shaking his head, he made the sign of the cross and bowed his head.

 

“I’ll do the Stations of the Cross on my knees, St. Peter. I’ll honor God’s word and I’ll throw in two seats, front row, the Yankees/Sox game.”

 

“Up front? Okay, four up front, she gets ten years in purgatory, no limbo, straight to heaven, deal?”

 

“Deal! (Hmm, I wonder if I can make a career out of this?) Thanks, St. Peter.  Maybe we can do this again.  There’s more where those came from. (I think I’m onto something here.)”

 

 

 

CROSSING IRELAND: SPIDEIL ROAD, GALWAY BAY by ANGELA ALAIMO O’DONNELL

By on March 7, 2014
This entry is filed under Uncategorized and tagged , , , .

The fourth poem in Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s series, “Crossing Ireland.” The next poem in the series will appear on Monday, March 10. Here’s the link to the essay that began the series “Crossing Ireland”   

More about Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

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SPIDEIL ROAD, GALWAY BAY

 

My head so full of earth, words won’t hold it,

English syllables never shaped to these contours,

its wind-etched rock and wide sky fit for rune.

 

There is a solemn strangeness to this place,

a weathered air that holds its past

sorrows as if they were not past.

 

I can not count the beauty of towns,

the grace of wilder spaces

and guide them into easy lines.

 

Like the narrow lanes that map

this well-walked ground, my mind

moves along margins

urgent for the center,

the hidden heart I long to enter.

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VERA HOAR’S PHOTOS from ARTISTS WITHOUT WALLS’ SHOWCASE at THE CELL THEATRE

By on March 7, 2014
This entry is filed under ARTISTS W/0 WALLS PHOTOS, ARTISTS WITHOUT WALLS, IRELAND, MUSIC, NEW YORK CITY, THEATER, WRITING and tagged , , .

Vera Hoar’s photos from Tuesday’s Artists Without Walls’ Showcase at The Cell Theatre. Names appear above the photos.

 

Connie Roberts, Tom Myles and Joe McElligott

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Honor Finnegan

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Erin Layton

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Karl Scully

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Jack O’Connell and Joe Goodrich

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Bernard Smith

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The Cajuns

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Charles R.Hale, Kathleen Walsh D’Arcy and Brendan Fay

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The Smiling Faces of AWoW

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CROSSING IRELAND: TIGH MHOLLY by ANGELA ALAIMO O’DONNELL

By on March 6, 2014
This entry is filed under ARTISTS WITHOUT WALLS, IRELAND, Uncategorized, WRITING and tagged , , , . | 2 Comments

The third of twelve poems from Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s suite of poems, “Crossing Ireland.” More about Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

 

TIGH MHOLLY

 

Yer makin’ the Yanks’ Tour, are ye?

Peadar said, Cian smiling behind the bar

pouring 4 pints for his new American friends,

 

our 100-mile drive from Kerry to here

amusing to a man for whom the next

county is another country away.

 

He told us the history of the pub,

the clock that stopped at Mholly’s daughter’s birth

a century gone, ticked past the time

 

while he walked us from stone room to stone room

naming the faces in the Stations on the walls,

a Celtic Virgil leading a mis-guided tour.

 

All the while we drank the famous Guinness

drawn from Mholly’s lines laid long ago

making it the best on the Spidéil Road,

 

while we argued poetry, Barack O’Bama,

the slant of the light on Conemara cliffs,

no new thing fine as the old.

 

What he knew he knew sure as his own hand

and wouldn’t take no for an answer:

Heaney was a hack, Donegal men dishonest,

 

and An Clochán as far as you’ll need to go

should you need to leave home for awhile

and you know you’ll be needing to come back.

c103_a_ries_cliffs_of_moher_car

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AMAZING TALENT READY to PERFORM TONIGHT: AWoW’s SHOWCASE at THE CELL THEATRE

By on March 5, 2014
This entry is filed under ARTISTS WITHOUT WALLS, IRELAND, MUSIC, NEW YORK CITY, STORYTELLING, THEATER, Uncategorized, WRITING and tagged , , , , , , , , , . | 1 Comment

Karl Scully

Karl Scully

Tonight promises to be an incredible Artists Without Walls’ Showcase at The Cell Theatre. A few performers were not available due to the change in date from Monday night to tonight but we have been able to schedule some wonderful replacements.  Karl Scully, born in Ireland and brought up internationally, was for six years a member of the famous international group The Irish Tenors and performed with them as a soloist in over a hundred venues in Europe and the USA as well as hosting the 10 part TV show The Irish Tenors and Friends. As a soloist, Karl has performed in hundreds of venues all over the world including Carnegie Hall and the Avery Fischer Hall, Lincoln Centre New York; Wolftrap Mainstage, Virginia; Teatro Carlo Felice, Genoa, Italy; and The National Concert Hall, Ireland. He also starred as Count John McCormack in the cinematic film Nora starring Ewan McGregor. His operatic roles include: Don José in “Carmen” by Bizet; Pinkerton in “Madama Butterfly”; The Duke in “Rigoletto” and many other leading tenor roles.  You wont want to miss this great talent. 

 

The Cajuns

The Cajuns

We often say we have the best intermission in town…well grab yourself a drink, and get ready for the sounds of old-time Louisiana style porch music…practical comfortable and simple in design; songs with nostalgic finishing touches that provide a comfortable respite and opportunity to dance during AWoW’s intermission. Come hear and dance to the Cajun Trio of Julie Winterbottom, accordion, Deborah Monlux, fiddle and Michel Henry, guitar.   

 

Erin Layton

Erin Layton

And the rest of the lineup?  Simply great. Erin Layton will be performing a scene from her one woman play, Magdalen, a play about finding one’s voice in the void. The void being the place where identity and beauty and language are stripped away. This void is what the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland were to the young girls and women who labored in the commercial workhouses operated by religious orders of nuns in Ireland from the 19th – 20th century. Erin’s Magdalen won the Best Documentary Script at the Fourth Annual United Sol0 Festival Awards Ceremony. 

 

Honor Finnegan

Honor Finnegan

We’re lucky to have another fabulous last minute replacement, award winning songwriter and singer Honor Finnegan. Honor, a frequent and popular performer at AWoW’s events, will be premiering her song “Swimming,” which will fit in perfectly with Erin Layton’s Magdalen. Come hear why.

 

Ann Klein

Ann Klein

Guitarist Ann Klein has toured in Europe consistently for 10 years, played house concerts in the US and has written music for a number of documentaries. As a guitarist, Ann was a featured soloist with Ani DiFranco on several shows; she has had the honor of playing, writing and recording with Kate Pierson of the B-52s, Joan Osborne, Dana Fuchs, Darden Smith, PM Dawn, Randall Woolf & Maurice Sendak (for a ballet of “Where the Wild Things Are”), Keri Noble,  Of Ann, Billboard magazine said, “.…a dynamo guitarist and writer.”

 

Joseph Goodrich

Joseph Goodrich

Joseph Goodrich is an award-winning playwright and the editor of Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of Ellery Queen, 1947-1950.  His nonfiction appears frequently in Mystery Scene Magazine.Tonight the masterful actor Jack O’Connell is going to read the opening pages of Joe’s short story “Ghost of Brooklyn Past”.

 

Jack O'Connell

Jack O’Connell

 

 

 

Rounding out the evening will be another outstanding talent, singer, Bernard Smith. Bernard hales from Dublin, Ireland and arrived in NYC in the summer of 1996. He in an actor who has inhabited various characters on numerous stages throughout New York and he has been singing songs and playing his 

Bernard Smith

Bernard Smith

guitar ever since he arrived.  Maybe he’ll do his great version of “Georgia.”  And maybe there’ll be a few more surprises as well..perhaps a great poem or two or a short film clip, anything’s possible. This will be a great evening. Join us at The Cell, 338 W 23rd St. NYC, 7pm. This a free event courtesy of Artists Without Walls. 

 

CROSSING IRELAND: COUNTY KERRY by ANGELA ALAIMO O’DONNELL

By on March 5, 2014
This entry is filed under ARTISTS WITHOUT WALLS, IRELAND, WRITING and tagged , , , .

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell has had a few flirtations with the notion of “Being Irish.” Given that March seems to belong to the Irish, she has written a  brief essay, along with a suite of poems called “Crossing Irish.” This is the second of twelve poems. More about Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

 

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COUNTY KERRY

in the shadow of MacGillycuddy Reeks 

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Unreal, the way we walk among them

full of our bangers and eggs,

clad in our smart mackintoshes

and good boots, safe from the rain

that pierces them like bullets from a dark god.

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There is death out here in the beauty.

A hunger remembered in the earth.

The mountain rises slant, like mercy.

The slow slope of light eases the grace

under all the suffering and sorrow,

beyond the dark-ringed eyes of the haunted

whose hunger can know no end.

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We call it drama, romance, history.

We trespass on their mystery.

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CROSSING IRISH: WANTING TO BE IRISH by ANGELA ALAIMO O’DONNELL

By on March 4, 2014
This entry is filed under ARTISTS W/0 WALLS PHOTOS, FAMILY HISTORY, GENEALOGY, IRELAND and tagged , , , . | 3 Comments

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell is a poet and professor at Fordham University in New York City where she teaches English, Creative Writing, and American Catholic Studies. Her most recent book of poems, Waking My Mother,  a collection of elegies focused on the relationships between mothers and daughters. has been published by Word Press in Fall 2013.  Her previous book, Saint Sinatra & Other Poems (May 2011), was been nominated for the Arlin G. Meyer Prize in Imaginative Writing.

 

Angela has had a few flirtations with the notion of “Being Irish.” Given that March seems to belong to the Irish, she has written a brief essay, along with a suite of poems she wrote called “Crossing Irish.”  The poems are devoted to the theme of wanting to be Irish.

 

Today we are presenting Angela’s essay and the first of twelve poems. The rest of Angela’s poems will be posted in the days leading up to St Patrick’s Day. 
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CROSSING IRISH

         By Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

 

Brennan and Angela O'Donnell

Brennan and Angela O’Donnell

           As a child, I never wanted to be Irish.  This was a convenient circumstance, since I wasn’t. (My Irish name is my husband’s gift to this Sicilian girl.) 

 

            Then I grew up and fell in love with poetry—English poetry first, then American poetry, and then, finally, fully, fatally, I fell in love with Irish poetry.  The yearning of Yeats, the wicked wit of Kavanagh, the heart and heft of Heaney—all of them spoke to me, or rather, sang to me, in voices that were at once distinctly their own and also the collective voice of their common clan.  It was then that I wanted in.

 

Angela in Sligo

Angela in Sligo

            This itch to be Irish only got worse when I visited Ireland for the first time.  Once our plane set down on Shannon’s tarmac (holy ground), once we got in our rental car and started driving across the glorious West of Ireland, I recognized the landscape as though it were my own.  Irish poetry—with its deep rooting in the past, its mists of memory, its hard love of the hard land—had claimed me, planted in me the bizarre belief that I belonged to Ireland.  I felt a sense of homecoming I’ve felt in only one other place in the world—Sicily, my true ancestral island from which my grandparents emigrated 100 years ago.  

 

           

The Ring of Kerry

The Ring of Kerry

Though Ireland & Sicily might seem to have little in common—one ruled by rain, the other sun—they share much:  a rich history of miraculous happenings; a penchant for saint-making; a fierce pride in their separateness, their exiled state;  a wild & wonderful language that makes ordinary English and Italian sound strait-jacketed, tied-up, and tame.

           

As a child, I never wanted to be Irish.  Now, as an adult, I do (oh, I do).

 

            Happily, as a poet, I’ve found a way to claim this invented identity—or, at least, to imagine it—through poetry.  The poems that follow belong to a series called, “Crossing Irish,” a suite of poems I wrote five years ago during another visit to that Island of the Blessed.  For all of you Irish readers out there, I hope this Italian-American wannabe’s work might not seem presumptuous.  For all of you non-Irish readers who are also lovers of Ireland—well, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

 

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ON NOT BELONGING TO IRELAND

 

Our Aer Lingus flies through Irish skies,

and I know I’m not at home

well before my feet touch the Tarmac.

 

Filing into Shannon, we take our places

in the long line of Irish ex-pats

whose cousins left as hopeful as they arrive.

 

Here I am clear extra, exotic

by Irish measure, if not New York’s,

my dark hair and olive hands a sign.

 

You don’t look Catholic, says the ex-priest

who left Queens and his cassock behind

for this spot at Hughes’ bar, An Spidéil.

 

Italian—or Jew—what’s the difference?

says the glint in his Irish eye.

Nothing of you begins here, where we do—

 

his American accent stronger than mine,

me with my traitorous poet’s ear

who loves all music better than my own.

 

At two weeks’ end, I’ll speak with a lilt,

the song of the Island sown in my dreams,

my foreign heart more native than she seems.

 

 

 

ARTISTS WITHOUT WALLS’ MEMBERS “ON THE TOWN”: WEEK OF 3/2/2014

By on March 2, 2014
This entry is filed under ARTISTS W/0 WALLS PHOTOS, FILM, MUSIC, NEW YORK CITY, THEATER, Uncategorized, WRITING and tagged , , , , , .

 

Honor Finnegan

Honor Finnegan

Singer/songwriter Honor Finnegan is performing at the Bronxville Women’s Club, 135 Midland Ave in Westchester, today Sunday at 12 noon. Tickets $20 members, $25 non-members, ages 6-12, $10, five and under, free. 

 

 

 

 

 

Mary Lou Quinlan

Mary Lou Quinlan

Mary Lou Quinlan will be performing her solo work, The God Box, A Daughter’s Story, adapted from her New York bestselling book, Cherry Lane Theater on March 3rd at 7PM.  Mary Lou will donate all ticket proceeds to Gilda’s Club NYC, the free cancer support center in the West Village. Come out to this story of mothers and daughters. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll want to call your mother. For tickets www.gildasclubnyc.org

 

 

1931922_10202015967733620_1819820316_nArtists Without Walls’ Showcase at The Cell Theater, 338 W 23rd St., New York, Wednesday 3/5 7pm.

 

 

 

 

 

Tara O'Grady

Tara O’Grady

Tara O’Grady  performs the iconic song “Danny Boy” in the U.S. premiere of the documentary film Danny Boy – The Ballad that Bewitched the World at Tribeca Cinemas, 54 Varick Street on Thursday, March 6. Showtime7:30. After party with Tara’s jazz trio performing. 

Advance tickets $20. Tickets at the door $25

 
 
Father_Who_Poster_small-2Colin Broderick’s dark Irish comedy Father Who, opens on Wednesday, February 26 and runs through March 9 at Theatre 80 on St. Marks Place.  Tickets can be purchased by calling OvationTix 866 811 4111.

ARTISTS WITHOUT WALLS’ SHOWCASE: DATE CHANGE

By on March 1, 2014
This entry is filed under ARTISTS WITHOUT WALLS, MUSIC, NEW YORK CITY, THEATER, WRITING and tagged , , .

The date for the upcoming Artists Without Walls’ Showcase has been changed from Monday 3/3 to Wednesday 3/5. Same place–The Cell Theatre, 338 W 23rd St, NYC–and same time–7pm. Hope to see you there. 

 

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