A Festival of Irish Things

Kim and I went to the Milwaukee Irish Festival yesterday and had a lovely time of it. It was a Father’s Day present from her to me, and our main plan was to see Garron Noone (if you haven’t found him on social media you should fix that immediately because he’s funny) but he’s had some health issues and had to cancel. We knew this going in, so it wasn’t a surprise. Instead we spent the day meandering about what is usually the SummerFest grounds just seeing what there was to see.

It rained pretty much the entire time, for an added note of authenticity.

It is a bit strange if you think about it, these Heritage Festivals. Americans identify themselves by their heritage, much to the amusement of people who still live in those places (“You’re not Irish! You’re Irish-American!”) and having now actually traveled to all of the various countries from which my ancestors emigrated however long ago the great lesson I got is that I’m not from those countries. My ancestors were. I’m from Philadelphia. It made the crowds and the “Full Blooded Irish” t-shirts kind of odd.

Not that we didn’t appreciate some of the other t-shirts, mind you. Many of them were really clever.

It was a bit of a trick to get into the place, since the first entrance we found was for Volunteers Only and the second one told us that they were going to confiscate Kim’s favorite water bottle so I walked it back to the car to avoid that, but eventually we got in. We felt a bit sorry for the people working the gate, actually, since the venue was broadcasting the same bombastic announcement on a continuous loop for the entire four days of the festival. “Welcome to this place, such a friendly town! Here we have some rules, let us lay them down…” It’s a wonder they escaped with their sanity.

Most of the festival was dedicated to Irish music, though the bleed-over into Celtic in general (especially Scottish) is pretty wide at these things – there were a lot of highland pipers, for example, in addition to the Uillean pipes. I like Irish music, both its traditional forms and many modern acts as well, but the only Irish band I can name off the top of my head is the Pogues so looking at the schedule of acts was kind of useless for me. In the end I was content to walk around and see what there was to see without any particular agenda. We saw a lot of really good musicians that I enjoyed and one band who were also good musicians that I didn’t particularly care for but that’s life. They had a cheering crowd in front of them, so I’m willing to say it was a me problem and not a them problem.

The best act we saw was called SuperCéilí and they were more or less an Irish punk band, kind of. That’s as close a description as I’m going to get anyway. We’d ducked into a big tent to get out of a particular intensification of the rain and there were two guys up on stage – one with a bandonion and one with a guitar – and when the time came they launched into a high-energy, high-volume, high-speed hour of music without any breaks whatsoever, not even between songs. They just segued from one to the other, full blast, as the crowd jumped and danced and clapped out the beat and sang along as best we could. If you get a chance, you should definitely go see them. I suspect they’re a band you have to hear live if you want the full effect. Listening to an Irish punk version of The Lion Sleeps Tonight in a crowded festival tent with a moshing crowd singing at the top of their lungs as the rain falls steadily outside on a warm summer night is an experience, indeed it is.

The Festival also had genealogists available for free consultations and I figured “why not?” and signed up for one. I ended up learning a few things about my dad’s grandfather – a man whom I’d been convinced was created out of pixie dust and table scraps because he was nearly impossible to find in the records I’d been searching, so that was worth the visit itself. Apparently he and my great-grandmother got married in Delaware of all places, and on a date that I found both surprising and somehow consistent with that side of the family. I can’t tell you how sneakily proud of them I am for that. So now I have a whole new avenue of research I can follow, just in time for the semester to start.

We found a cèilidh in mid-stride and watched for a while. Apparently Irish cèilidhs are a bit different from the Scottish ones in that the dancers are arranged in circles rather than lines, but everyone seemed to be having a good time. I went to a Scottish cèilidh when I was in college and mostly I remember being slightly terrified of the exceedingly enthusiastic and wildly drunk six-foot-tall Scotswoman who appointed herself as my partner, but it was a good time nonetheless. This was a bit more sedate but the dancers seemed to be enjoying themselves and thus so did we.

One of my favorite places was the little store they’d set up to sell all things Irish, which to my delight included groceries – snacks and the like. I have reached a point in my life where I am deaccessioning things rather than buying more of them (though I did make a small exception at the book tent) so mostly what I end up spending money on these days is travel and food. I came away with a small collection of Irish chocolates, and once you have had pretty much any European chocolates – even just the stuff they sell in the grocery checkout lanes – you can’t go back to American chocolate. We really need to up our chocolate game in this country.

We managed to avoid most of the big storms while we were at the Festival, but getting home was a bit of a slog.  Our Little Town got hammered by storms while we were away and when we got back we found that Oliver’s tree in the front terrace had lost yet another limb, poor thing. At this rate it will just be a stump by December.

The Festival was fun, though, and perhaps we’ll go back next year. Sláinte!