St. Patrick’s Day
Meandering Thoughts on Other People’s Holidays, Particularly This One
In 2008 and 2009, I did a bunch of Irish plays back to back. The Lieutenant of Inishmore by Martin McDonagh is not a play I would actually wish on anyone (I struggle with satire), but I learned a whole lot, despite the fact that part of my job involved dumping out a Tupperware tote of fake blood that reeked of peanut butter into a trough every night and having to wear a Carhartt jumpsuit over my clothes so they wouldn’t be ruined by said blood. Completely different, George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan changed the course of my life by introducing me to language plays and a group of collaborators who would be the backdrop of my professional and personal life for the next decade. Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, lyrical and heartbreaking, made me fall madly, deeply, and forever in love with the idea of the wildness of Western Ireland. It was the first show I stage managed in college, and it was work that I felt like I could own and be deeply proud of on my own and as a member of our creative team.
While of course I can’t separate my own experiences of these productions from my feelings about the scripts themselves, whatever combination of language and creative process and human connection that has stuck with me through nearly two decades cemented a deep enchantment with Ireland. I was decently primed for this development - my mom loved Celtic Woman during their initial US heyday. One of my favorite books in a favorite childhood series was So Far From Home: The Diary of Mary Driscoll, An Irish Mill Girl. My favorite band was Yellowcard, which, I’ve since realized, is because of the foundational fiddle that differentiates it from every other early aughts alt-rock band that I loved almost as much. I had sheep growing up that I loved, particularly one named Sarah. I was ready for McDonagh’s cutting wit, Shaw’s expansive “tragedy without a villain,” Friel’s juxtaposition of joy and sorrow.
Also in 2008, shortly after the first Irish play, I got sick. For months on end, every time I ate, I felt nauseous. No one could figure out why. I hate being sick, I hate missing class or work, and I hate having my mind’s plans disrupted by my body (though I’m less intense about that now than I used to be). While it would be a decade before I could explain any of this, this year was (in addition to the concrete emergence of an anxiety disorder I’d probably had since I was tiny) likely a physical manifestation of the deep uncertainty that I felt as a young adult during a financial crisis, and more immediately as someone who had figured out that I was in the wrong major. I wasn’t going to be a stage manager long term; I wanted to be a teacher - I wasn’t making that choice, but I did know what I wanted, and actions so divorced from desire were scary.
I was the sickest during Saint Joan. I got out of bed that winter for Shaw’s words, the fact that I could sometimes do something useful for our Saint Joan (whose last name was deeply Irish), and the knowledge that, very occasionally I would feel better when I was focused on DOING things for the show. By the time Dancing at Lughnasa had started rehearsals a couple of months later, I was not feeling better, but I was getting better at working through feeling awful (not that we should do that, but it seemed the only option), and I was more actively working to counteract the awful feeling. During this time, my directive from healthcare professionals was “literally eat anything” which justified a daily Starbucks swirl pound cake (which I can still barely look at now) and a strawberry smoothie before rehearsal. The fact that all I was buying grocery-wise was crackers and apple juice made this financially feasible, and the ritual of doing something, ANYTHING, that felt normal seemed to justify the expense. Little by little, I was learning that I could work even when conditions weren’t perfect, could be supportive even when I felt horrible, could care for a show and a cast and myself at the same time.
I went to Ireland the following fall. I was feeling better, but still not 100%; I had to be really careful about what and when I ate, and lived in fear of being sick in a country where I didn’t understand the healthcare system. It was a priority to see Dublin, and it was a priority to travel alone in Europe during my semester abroad in Vienna. I took a three-day solo trip to Dublin. I have never been so enchanted by anywhere in my entire life. It wasn’t Donegal, and it was mostly tourist sites, and I got lost a bunch, and I was ENTHRALLED. My first memory is of getting off the bus from the airport and trying to find my hostel and having a woman with a baby carriage stop me on a bridge and say, in exactly the voice you’d expect her to have, “You look lost, love. How can I help?” My American accent didn’t inspire contempt, as it had in other places (these were still the very early Obama years, in the midst of the fight over the Affordable Care Act, so I got a lot of eye rolls, especially when trying to deal with anything medical). I took a train through a tiny portion of the most verdant seaside greenery I’d ever seen to see a play about the battle of generations through the lens of school, which the Guardian explained, “You need to be Irish to understand all the resonances of McCabe's hectic, kaleidoscopic play.” I missed a lot, but the emotional resonance was palpable, particularities obscured by my Americanness or not. I ended up taking an unmarked cab back to the airport at 4:00am because it seemed the safer option of that, or waiting on a streetcorner for an additional unknown number of minutes. At about the moment I was sure I was being kidnapped, the driver starting singing, softly and lyrically, and I decided that, if that was the case, so be it (it wasn’t - another American couple got in mere moments later and we all got to the airport just fine). I came back to Vienna different than I’d left.
The next spring, my first St. Patrick’s Day since The Year of the Irish Plays, I did the WHOLE thing: bought a giant pot to learn to make corned beef (marginally successful, and my only attempt, as it turned out that 2010 would be my last St. Patrick’s Day as a non-vegetarian), made colcannon even though it sounded disgusting (verdict: some recipes are better than others, the less flashy generally the better), and figured out soda bread. I generally hate cooking, and only do it for parties or big holidays, of which I’ve decided St. Patrick’s Day constitutes for my household. My celebration is both as traditional as I can figure out how to do (given that “St. Patrick’s Day” in the U.S. is largely an Americanization), eschewing parades and green beer and leaning in favor of soda bread without caraway, though I do often make caraway scones, too. But I’m not too precious about certain elements: I eat Lucky Charms for breakfast and cupcakes with Bailey’s, Jameson whiskey, and Guinness (which I refuse to call by the name of the drink that includes all three, because once you know what an “Irish carbomb” is from people who lived through the Troubles, you won’t be able to use that language to describe a drink or a dessert, either).
St. Patrick’s Day celebrates the coming of Christianity to Ireland (the snakes, it seems, are mostly metaphorical, though I’m more curious enthusiast than historical scholar). It’s an odd holiday for me to celebrate. I’m a born skeptic when it comes to organized religion, and don’t even come by that natural, as I don’t have much of a formal religious education to react to. I don’t have Irish ancestry that I can trace. The history I do know is German (maternal great great grandparents) and English (Rebecca Nurse is my 8th great aunt, I think). The knowledge that I have about the English part comes from my genealogist grandmother, of whom my favorite picture was taken in a cemetery, which she liked to visit for fun. I was deeply excited to discover in high school that there might be some common line between me and this character that I was reading about in The Crucible, the woman who refused to bear false witness to free herself from a crime she did not commit. It seemed almost incomprehensibly noble and devastating (and, of course, it was); it would be a while before I would understand Salem, and not just the witch trial part, to be part of religious extremism (not just “freedom” as it was taught in my history classes) or of colonial violence.
And yet, that grounded, defiant spirit present in Nurse is what I also love about the Irish characters and humans that I know. It underpins the “joyful relentlessness” that I love so much in in people that I admire, Irish or not: Shaw’s Saint Joan (French, but through the words of an Irish writer: “My heart is full of courage not of anger”), my grandmother, my students who are constantly in trouble for being right and keep being right and delighted about it, my Title 1 colleagues who can hold the possibility and exhaustion and commitment and deeply inequitable realities of our work all at once, my yoga teacher who is constantly reminding us that, as we expand our capacity for suffering in these dark times, we must also expand our capacity for joy.
It seems an Irish trait to be exceptionally good at living with contradictions. The clash of Catholicism and paganism, so clearly depicted in Dancing at Lughnasa, is prevalent. Here is an island that has been devastated time and time again - by colonial violence, by weather, by famine, by emigration, by scandal, by religious and cultural violence (that of course also stems from colonial violence). And it is the island of jigs and reels, of leprechaun lore, of the greenest foliage and fluffiest sheep. Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa is not a happy play by any measure, but there are moments of pure joy within it. The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a satire that uses truly absurd and gruesome violence to present a scathing critique of the violence that terrorized the country within my own lifetime. I think I, however subconsciously, connected with these plays when I was sick and struggling and deeply uncertain because of this idea of contradiction. That it could all be true at the same time - I could be physically miserable and energetically invigorated simultaneously. I could be sick AND not defined by it. I could be uncertain about my career and keep moving forward all at once.
On my second trip to Ireland, in 2023, a boat captain asked if we were visiting Ireland because we had Irish heritage. I hated having to be honest. I told him about the three Irish plays and the way my body reacts to fiddle music and how I have mixed feelings about celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. He explained something about the way Ireland and the U.S. are inextricably linked by immigration. Born in Ireland, he had spent a lot of his life in Boston, moving back to work in the tourism industry within the past decade. He explained the timeline for when Irish-Americans whose ancestors had emigrated during the great famine started visiting Ireland and, as he put it, “buying Waterford crystal and looking at cemeteries,” and the positive impact that this re-connection had on the Irish economy, which had struggled to recover after the famine. These were pieces that made sense, given my understanding of the challenges from Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, but hearing them from an Irish person, on an Irish boat, on an Irish lake helped everything click into place. He also said something that has stuck with me: “We welcome you, whether your people are from here or not. Please keep coming.”
And that has, for me, been my experience with Ireland: you’re welcome here.
It was there in that boat driver, in the woman with the baby carriage, in the yoga teacher and class who invited me to coffee after getting me to do wheel pose for the first time in a decade after a rough travel day and no sleep, the tour guide who tried to get me to sing “Wild Mountain Thyme” with him even though I have a strict policy against singing in public. It seems that they all, in their ways, are saying: things may not be perfect, but we will get you unstuck and unlost to the best of our ability, and we will do it with music and dancing and curiosity and joy.
And it’s that spirit of welcome that keeps me coming back to St. Patrick’s Day. My relationship to it is complex at best and problematic at times, certainly, to have adopted a holiday that isn’t mine, historically, culturally, or religiously. The past few years, I’ve been working to better understand and stay in touch with seasonal celebrations (of which St. Patrick’s Day is also one, falling very close to the spring equinox). While I am, based on my own ancestry, more comfortable embracing the land-based traditions of Europe than I am of other areas of the globe, I still want to be careful. Whatever the roots of this day, Christian or pagan or likely a mix of both, it holds cultural significance for people from a country I’m enchanted by and still learning about in equal measure. I’m continuing to do my best to honor this reality by learning new Irish recipes each year, reading Irish writers, listening to new Irish music, and countering harmful stereotypes about Irish people when I hear them. It’s not perfect, but it comes from a place of respect, genuine curiosity, and joy.
And in this American and global moment: joy is revolutionary. Joy says that we can see a day that doesn’t look like this one, that there is hope that things can and will get better, though the path there will be rocky.
As George Bernard Shaw said, of Saint Joan albeit through the mouth of her executioner: “the courage of faith, even though it be a false faith, will always outstay the courage of wrath.” Faith in the future right now can feel false, but I do believe it to be the only thing that will see us through. Keep getting out of bed, keep welcoming people into your spaces, keep finding the moments of light.
I’d love to hear how you’re celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, your thoughts on other people’s holidays, or ways that you’re finding and spreading joy in the darkness.
Some of my favorite Irish Things:
Seven Steeples by Sara Baume
We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Seamus O’Reilly
The Slow Road North by Rosie Schapp
Translations by Brian Friel
Dubliners by James Joyce
Altan. WeBanjo3. Celtic Fiddle Festival. Cherish the Ladies.
On the connection between Ireland and America: “Isle of Hope, Isle of Tears” and also anything else with a tin whistle.
On My Current List:
This list of contemporary Irish novels.
This podcast.
Brooklyn and its sequel.
What I’m Cooking for St. Patrick’s Day:
For Today: Potato Soup. Sauteed Cabbage. Irish Brown Bread. Soda Bread.
For a slightly bigger celebration on Saturday: Mini-shepherd’s pies (vegetarian w/ lentils and mushrooms in place of beef or lamb). Skewers (also with vegetarian sausage, although do what you want). Potato Bites (with fake corned beef…we’ll see how that goes). Soda Bread Muffins (yes, with non-traditional currants, but I don’t do this unless I’m also making regular soda bread). Triple-liquor cupcakes (better names for this, please!).
I’d love to see you at class later this month! These ideas of living with and through contradictions, of joy in the face of sorrow, will continue to make an appearance.
