Sarah Fearon sang “That’s Life” with ukulele accompaniment.
Salon Diary / By Maureen Hossbacher
Sarah Fearon launched the digital salon by harkening again to the times after we gathered at favourite watering holes. Her essay recalled her stint as a “beverage engineer” within the mid-‘90s on the Highlife bar. She adopted it with a rendition of the track “That’s Life,” with ukulele accompaniment, personifying IAW&A’s embrace of inventive threat taking. Publish pandemic, when Sarah subsequent faces a comedy membership viewers, her jokes could have musical accompaniment! A member of the Friars Membership and of the IAW&A Board, her comedy has been featured on the phases of Gotham Comedy Membership, Stand Up New York, Carolines and The Metropolitan Room.
Subsequent, John Kwok learn a a considerably harrowing futuristic story, “Down in Flames,” involving two Taylor Swift lookalikes, one a robotic, and an abusive younger hipster who’s taught a painful lesson by the latter. A prize-winning pupil of Frank McCourt at Stuyvesant Excessive Faculty, John is an evolutionary biologist and photographer.
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Frequent presenter Thom Molyneaux carried out alternatives from a one-man present he’s creating primarily based on monologues he’s encountered in his lengthy profession as an actor, director, and instructor. Tonight he did the best opening monologue ever, from “Henry the Fifth,” the place Shakespeare teaches the viewers find out how to watch his play. Thom adopted that with the opening and shutting monologues from “The Glass Menagerie,” the place Tennessee Williams introduces his new type of theatre, a theatre of “poetic reminiscence. ”
Tennessee Williams pictured in 1965 on the twentieth anniversary celebration of the premiere of “The Glass Menagerie.”
Poet Anthony Roberts shared 5 poems from his new guide, “The Clearing Barrel” (Jade Press): “Preakness 1995,” “ A Sudden Departure,” “Topography,” “For Joe,” and “Grandfather.“ A veteran of Baltimore and Afghanistan, Roberts teaches at Fairleigh Dickinson College and that is his 2nd assortment of poetry. Signed copies might be pre-ordered by means of his web site www.varangiwriting.com and the guide itself will probably be launched on March 16.
First time presenter, Lori Cassels, a playwright and songwriter initially from New York Metropolis, joined the zoom from California to enliven the proceedings with two authentic songs about her grandmothers. “Katie With the Smiling Eyes” hailed from Sligo, and Margaret, the topic of “Legacies,” from Leitrim. Cassels was chosen as a Fellow at Eugene O’Neill’s Tao Home final December and has accomplished the primary draft of a play about Oona O’Neill. You’ll be able to contact her at [email protected] for her CD, “Tear of the Clouds.”
Oona O’Neill in {a photograph} taken in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1943.
“I Have My Mom’s Voice” was one of many six poems Marcia Loughran learn from her prize-winning chapbook, “My Mom By no means Died Earlier than.” Marcia’s is a well-recognized voice at IAW&A salons, all the time positive to beguile and amuse. Her new chapbook and her first, “Nonetheless Life With Climate,” additionally a prize winner, can be found on her web site: www.marciabloughran.com.
Making her salon debut, Cork actress, author, director and costume designer Miriam Kelleher introduced an excerpt from a one-woman present she is creating. “My Thoughts” is a darkish comedy that particulars the deterioration of Sarah Sop’s relationships and her ignorance of her psychological sickness. Kelleher unveiled her performing chops by delivering a riveting monologue during which Sarah unburdens herself to her twin sister who she believes to be sitting beside her however who doesn’t in truth exist.
The irrepressible John McDonagh, author, raconteur and 40-year yellow cab driver was readily available to debate his memoir in improvement which tells the story of how he went from spinning cabbie yarns sitting on a bar stool in Rocky Sullivan’s on Lexington Avenue to standing on a stage on the Irish Repertory Theatre on twenty second road, the place his one-man present, “Off the Meter, On the File,” had a month-long prolonged run.
Malachy McCourt, founding father of Irish American Writers & Artists, Inc. and Cheerleader-in-Chief, closed the night by praising the salons as “a literary financial institution vault of treasures.” Musing on current subversive shenanigans on the Capital, he learn an excerpt from the memoir of New York politician George Washington Plunkitt proposing the thought of New York Metropolis seceding from New York State. Plunkitt was a Tammany period state senator well-known for saying he practiced “sincere graft,” (an oxymoron maybe that period’s equal of “different: details”). Malachy, as typical, closed with a track, this time a jaunty verse from “Crúiscín Lán.”
