Sunday afternoon I went to a fundraiser for Gaeltacht Minnesota, the local Irish language organization. This was a very pleasant event. It was at (naturally) a local Irish pub. The band Legacy played and I enjoyed them. They played a variety of songs, and also some dance music. The latter included a waltz and a polka. I was sorry mia_mcdavid could not come. There were also some Irish jigs and reels–not just performance stuff, but dances ordinary people can do. I would like to learn some of these, and I think I could–with 35 years experience in various kinds of folk dancing I have a fairly good idea of what I can and cannot do.

There was also a group of women singing in Irish. These were just students from Gaeltacht Minnesota’s classes, but I enjoyed it a lot. Irish singing is lovely. Later one of them sang a distinctly lewd song in both Irish and English. She alternated the languages verse by verse and by the third verse I was able to make some sense of the Irish chorus. Not the kind of material my high school and college language classes (German and Russian) used! Apparently the translation, complete with meter and rhyming, was done by local Irish speakers. Thoroughly warped minds–I need to do more with these folks.