March 17, 2015

St. Patricks Day: Whiskey & 'Darby O'Gill and the Little People'

WATKINS GLEN, New York - St. Patrick's Day is usually a day of, well, celebration and little work..

But most of the morning (and now afternoon) ended up with organizing some short stories for a book/collection Adm. Fox has been itching for me to put together. (I did promise her I would do this, oh, a year ago!) And that led me to reworking a novel-in-progress (tentatively titled Jack's Boat) for a couple of hours. I started writing Jack's Boat, oh, so long ago I won't mention it here.

By the way, the Jack in Jack's Boat has no connection to Jack Stafford of The Fracking War or Fracking Justice.

But in a few hours I am heading to that hotspot of wild party activity - downtown Watkins Glen - for a drink or three. Then I will head back home to watch Darby O'Gill and the Little People. It's kind of a tradition.

I'm sure I saw it in the theatre when I was 11 or 12 years old. And I had been bombarded with Irish stories and Irish lore by my grandmothers. One grandmother always insisted that some of her relatives still in Ireland had some of the little people living right under their cottages in County Cork.



If you haven't ever seen this 1959 Disney movie, you should take a peek at it. It has leprechauns, pots of gold, rainbows, whiskey, a pretty Irish lass - and even Sean Connery.

Yes that Sean Connery. And he is singing. I'm not kidding. Singing.

The film also features an Irish ghost called a 'banshee.' If you heard the wind howling in an especially evil way today, that might have been a banshee warming up to warn of a death tonight.


A banshee wailing
I had nightmares as a kid after watching the banshee in the movie, though the cleaned-up Disney banshee wasn't nearly as scary as the image I'm posting to the left.

Hope it doesn't give anyone a fright.

I had been thinking about stopping by the Democratic Party's corned beef and cabbage party downtown tonight, but because I don't eat beef anymore, just cabbage seems a little, well, plain. And it's doubtful they will have any whiskey on hand to wash the cabbage down.

Happy St. Pat's Day to all!