May 3, 2005
The Oirish Witches
My friend Donal, a native Dubliner with a gregarious (sometime annoyingly so) personality and a great love for things technical has a phrase he uses to describe Americans who try to act Irish: "Irish with an 'O'." It refers to the awkward, Hollywood pronouciation of the long "I" sound, "oi", and the fact that most Americans pronounce it wrong, and really have no idea what Irish really means. I'm proud to say that he told me one that I was one of the few Americans he's met that "get it": I don't wear green to celebrate my irish-ness, I don't wear a kilt on St. Patrick's day, and I never, ever mention leprechauns in conversation.
This is all just exposition...
Written into the plot of the movie were two female characters, both Irish, one a born mage and the other a technical mage. It doesn't matter which was which since, as annoyances go, they were pretty much interchangeable. And while it is admittedly unfair to judge someone by appearances alone, you couldn't help but join the looks to the personalities and say to yourself, "Ah. No wonder."
We'll call them W1 and W2.
Forty-ish, W1 had that underfed, over-mascara'd look that is all the vogue in trailer parks all over our nation. Tight jeans, sweatshirt over a close fitting T, black beret with the little string-y thing on top, and platinum blonde hair with dark roots. She spoke little to the other members of the cast except to condescend. She had eyes only for PD.
W2 is harder to quantify and the subject of today's story (W1 gets her own, later). An uneasy mixture of Margaret Hamilton, Billy Burke (15 years after the bubble ascended out of the Emerald City), and the Mayor of Munchkin City. Electric red hair, maybe not pushing 60 but definitely pulling 45 with a really long rope, short-ish. She was also obsessed with Leprechauns, which is the worst Oirish bit of BS as far as native Dubliners are concerned.
The real danger was this. When she spoke it was always at nearly ninety decibels, and she needed only one inducement to speak: someone within range, listening or not.
I engaged her in conversation the evening we met, because she seemed like an interesting person, and because I didn't know about all the rest. The subject of coffee came up, and she name-dropped Bewleys. The one on Grafton Street, or St. Christophers? I asked, feeling her out to see if she really knew what she was talking about. (There is no St. Christophers that I'm aware of in Dublin) Ohhhh, she said in a singsongy "Oirish" tone, the two story one there on Grafton Street. Earned some points there - that's the place. They're closing it, I told her, Starbucks has come to the British Isles. We talked about that for a while.
What I hadn't seen before this was Murphy's look of warning: Bill, do not engage! Do you read me? Do not engage!
You see, once started, a conversation with her became this unbelievably large gelatinous cube, sliding unstoppably along, unheeding and unfeeling of the creatures being crushed under the onslaught and dying in the stickiness of it. Several times I tried to extract myself from the conversation, but the tendrils of - no, not conversation exactly, since by definition a conversation requires the participation of more than one individual, which in her case is entirely unecessary - talk, then, would extend outward, grab me by the ears and drag me back in.
Thank God PD intervened with some questions for me. I stood, held my finger in front of her nose in a "hold on" gesture, and excused myself. What I remember seeing was the electricity switched off on an automaton: the tape ran down, the sound faded and died away, the eyes unfocused and the light went out, the machinery returned to center.
Waiting for the next Tarantella Dancer to begin the music, no doubt.
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