Every year on March 17, the Irish and the Irish-at-heart across the globe observe St. Patrick’s Day. What began as a religious feast day for the patron saint of Ireland has become an international festival celebrating Irish culture with parades, dancing, special foods and a whole lot of green.
When I was a child, my dad, a Scottish person, had me wear orange to school, as a minor form of protest. All that did was have the kids make fun of me even more than usual.
As my own form of protest, I later married an Irish Roman Catholic, but that’s a topic for another post.
Quite a while later, a friend of my husband’s friends lent him a copy of something called “Riverdance”. I took one look and figured I would never be interested in some kind of Irish dancing. WRONG!
It turned out I loved Riverdance and we have seen the video, I have my own DVDs, we have seen it at Wolftrap whenever it’s been here, I have 2 copies of piano transcriptions, own the Tshirt…
One weekend, we even saw it twice.
We had seen it at Wolftrap on a Friday night. Our son came home on a Saturday and we were telling him about it. We went directly from the train station back to Wolftrap.
As luck would have it, there was a bus driver there who had brought a bunch of people on a tour from a retirement home. Three people hadn’t come and he had 3 tickets to get rid of, right in the front section.
Were we lucky, or what?
How Riverdance got its start. On April 30th 1994 something happened during the interval of the Eurovision Song Contest that was to lead to the creation of one of the most successful stage shows of all time and introduce the wider world to Irish dance and music. As votes were being counted around Europe, in Dublin in the Point Theatre (now the O2), RIVERDANCE burst onto the stage and took the audience by complete surprise. From the haunting vocals of anúna, the graceful elegance of Jean Butler, the explosive arrival of Michael Flatley and culminating in a long line of Irish dancers beating the stage in perfect heart-stopping harmony – a whole new genre of entertainment was born and nearly 25 years later – Riverdance still astonishes globally.
One of my favorite dances:
And another favorite:
And, of course, that finale!
Just for fun, there was a flashmob, bringing us back to St. Patrick’s Day…
Needless to say, I was quite sorry to see that Riverdance is not coming anywhere near us this year.
