It’s a rainy Friday, a WFH day for me, and I’m still in my pajama pants, though I am wearing a respectable business casual sweater and could pass muster as a working professional from the neck up, if an unplanned teleconference forces me to show myself. I was going to change out of the pajama pants but it’s almost three o’clock now and I have no plans to leave the house unless it’s on fire so I think I’m dressed (or half-dressed) for the day.
The thing is that I’m tired because I was out until after midnight last night, a rare occurrence for me on a Thursday night. The AFI Silver is hosting an Irish film festival and last night’s feature was “Nothing Compares,” the Sinead O’Connor documentary. I suppose I could have rented it but an Irish film festival seemed a better venue than my couch. An opportunity to see it with my people, so to speak.
The evening did not disappoint, although full disclosure, I did fall asleep for a bit in the rather long interval between our dinner at the Limerick Pub in Wheaton and the 9:45 movie time. We arrived at the AFI at 9 o’clock, to an almost empty lobby. The box office person told us that the early screening was running late and that our show wouldn’t start until 10, leaving us with an hour to sit and wait. An hour at 9 PM, which is when I always hit the wall, especially after a hamburger and 1.5 Smithwicks. And we were sitting there in the nearly deserted lobby, on a pair of comfortably cushioned movie theater chairs, and there was nothing stopping me from closing my eyes for a few minutes, and so I did. My husband sat next to me, scrolling through his news feed. He might have napped for a few minutes, too. I don’t know because I was fast asleep, sitting right in the middle of a movie theater lobby in downtown Silver Spring.
And then another movie let out and all of a sudden the lobby was a whirlwind of Irish film festival energy, and the ushers and concession stand employees were strolling amid the crowds handing out pints of Guinness in plastic cups.
My husband, who is not a documentary film fan nor a particular admirer of Sinead, was very impressed with the free Guinness, although “free” is a pretty loose term considering that the movie tickets cost $22 each. I thought for a moment, as I held my free plastic pint cup of Guinness, which I don’t especially like, that maybe as lower middle-income parents of college students, we might have been wiser to just stream the movie at home. But sometimes you need to get out.
I’m a very very very introverted person but that doesn’t mean that I don’t love people. I love being out among people. I have to plan ahead and muster my energy and maybe take a nap in public just before the people descend upon me but with enough preparation, I can really enjoy a crowd. I was wide awake as soon as the people filled the lobby, the people leaving the early showing and the people arriving all at once for the later showing, all of them excited to be out on a Thursday, dressed in jeans and sweaters and skirts and t-shirts, some in Irish sweaters. It was cold, so there were lots of interesting jackets. Women outnumbered men by 2 to 1 or so (not every man is as good a sport as my husband) and so there were also lots of interesting handbags. People were laughing and talking and hoisting their “free” pints of Guinness. There was lots of energy. It was something of a scene.
The movie was excellent. I read Rememberings last year, and most of the events depicted in the movie were covered in the book (including the now-infamous SNL performance, though why infamous I don’t know because what did they think that Sinead O’Connor was going to do, just stand and look pretty and sing her little song and go home?), although not the reverse. The movie didn’t get into Sinead’s difficult professional relationship with Prince, except for an ending credit explaining that Prince’s estate refused to allow the filmmakers to use the song for which the movie was named. But that’s not my favorite Sinead song anyway, and there were lots of clips of performances during her early stardom, when her extraordinary voice was at its best. She really is one of the greatest female singers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Definitely worth leaving the house on a cold Thursday night in March.
*****
And Sinead is not the only rebellious Irishwoman on my radar this week. I’m reading Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls trilogy and although I can see its literary merit and can understand why it has become a modern Irish classic, I also cannot wait to be done with it and will not miss Caithleen and Baba, not one bit. Or rather, I won’t miss the mid-20th century Irish misogyny that shaped these two hot messes in female human form.
Caithleen (Kate) Brady and Brigid (Baba) Brennan, although they both live well outside the very restrictive circa 1955 Irish Catholic social norms, do not enjoy their rebellion. Kate, in fact, is not rebellious at all; she’s just a book-smart and street-stupid girl with no emotional self-control who falls for the wrong man and proceeds to make her life miserable over him, and his as well (spoiler alert - he deserves it). Kate’s lifelong friend Baba is the spoiled daughter of a prosperous Irish country veterinarian. Baba is hilariously funny, as mean as a snake, and completely without morals of any kind. She is almost nihilistic in her lack of normal human sympathy and her boredom with everything and everyone. Baba is also married to a terrible man with whom she lives a miserable loveless existence.
The trilogy was apparently extremely controversial in Ireland when it was published, and it’s still shocking in places. But the most shocking thing about it is that it’s not just a whole novel, it’s three whole novels, about two characters who are so unlikable that they can’t even stand themselves. I kept reading until the end because I generally do that, and because the trilogy has enough page-turning need-to-know-what-happens-next appeal that I wanted to keep going. But I will not miss these books or these characters at all, and I can’t wait to not read another Edna O’Brien book, pretty much ever again.
I didn’t plan for this to publish on International Women’s Day but here it is, a serendipitous coincidence in which I finish a post on the perfect day to publish it. St. Patrick’s Day might be just as appropriate but if you have seen “Nothing Compares,” or if you’ve read The Country Girls and its sequels, you won’t feel much like celebrating Irish culture, especially if you don’t have a Y chromosome.
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