Celtic Woman was wonderful. Even though the stage was really too small, especially for the fiddling Irish Jigger (Irish Jigging fiddler?), the voices were superb. I was amazed to discover (via the $20 program) that Chloe is only 17. One of the women was about 7 months pregnant, but she still danced gracefully and sang like an angel. I've heard that hormone changes affect a woman's voice, and that's why post-menopausal women often "lose their voices" (and retire, like the late Beverly Sills). I don't know if pregnancy-related hormonal changes affect voices, but if this woman's voice was affected, either I'm too tone-deaf to notice or it affected her positively. My beloved spouse enjoyed the evening, as well, and could be seen dabbing at his eyes after a couple of the numbers--"Danny Boy," especially.
The women were backed up with a small band that included two massive drum set-ups and two amazing drummers--muscular men in tank tops who seemed somehow more savage and primal than one would expect when performing on stage with lovely women in satin ballgowns. There were guitars and flutes and other instruments that I couldn't really see very well. And of course, one of the Celtic Women is a harpist. The fiddler dances as she fiddles; the harpist sings as she plucks the harp strings. Major talent, as well as great motor skills. I always admire people who can multi-task, given my own tunnel vision.
I must admit, though, that the most interesting women of the evening were those seated in close proximity to us. When we first arrived (almost an hour early!), a mother and her three daughters and two older women (grandmothers?) were seated a couple of rows down from us. The three little girls--two blondes and one brunette--were dressed identically in chocolate velvet A-line dresses with ties that ended in huge fur pom-poms. The two older women, both heavy-set and white-haired, bookcased the group, probably to contain the energy of the children. The older daughter (maybe ten?) sat quietly, but the two younger ones (probably eight and six) constantly moved around and talked. They even tap-danced. At one point prior to the show's beginning, the mother took the youngest daughter to the bathroom. When they returned, the little girl looked miffed. We could easily understand why when the mother said, "She fell in the toilet. She got flushed."
The couple who sat to my left--a husband and wife--were both somewhat heavy-set. The wife, in the seat next to me, looked like a normal suburban housewife, but once the show began, I realized that she had mistakenly gotten tickets for Celtic Woman instead of the country-music show held the night before. At the end of each number--including the prayers--she whooped like a rodeo cowboy. I think she would have whistled if she could have. Lacking the ability to produce ear-splitting whistles, she opted for ear-splitting whooping. The husband produced relatively no noise. This was a woman's night, after all. We American women were being entertained by half a dozen lovely and sophisticated Irish women, and so some of us had to show our class by acting like drunks in a seedy tavern. My aching right ear was grateful that it was on the other side of my head away from the woman.
The most fascinating woman of the night--and I'm quite sure she would concur--was the woman who sat directly in front of me. She and her spouse (who practically reeked "I'm a cop" with his broad shoulders and buzz haircut) arrived late--of course. Both of them were large people, and so this meant disrupting the row in order to shove their way in. (Apparently they had no qualms about shoving their bottoms into people's faces.) This woman was about 5' 10", maybe taller, and was built rather like a barrel--no shape whatsoever except round. She was wearing a sleeveless knit tube dress that had a gnawed-looking little hole at the back. When they arrived, she was also wearing a sheer black shawl wrap that she put on and took off repeatedly. In fact, this woman was worse than the little girls. They sat quietly during the show. She moved nonstop. When she wasn't running her hands all over her husband, she was pleating and folding and taking her wrap on and off. All of those activities filled in the gaps for her most constant activity--playing with her hair.
I cannot quite describe this hairstyle. Women just don't wear their hair like this anymore, at least not since the Victorian era. Her hair was mid-back, straight, thin and fine, and ebony black. I'm sure she'd been told it was beautiful on more than one occasion, and indeed it probably was beautiful had she just simply washed it and dried it and let it hang normally about her face and shoulders. Instead, she must have taken some time to carefully arrange about four long spit-curls on either side of her face. (By the end of the evening, thanks to her constant touching and smoothing and pulling, her spit curls were just spit strands that hung limply.) The hair on top of her head that had not been coaxed into the spit curls was twisted and corkscrewed and held in place on her crown with a dozen or so black bobby-pins. The hair that hung down on the back of her head was not allowed to hang down. Instead, she had pulled it into a side ponytail that draped her right shoulder. The ponytail was braided at first and held together with a giant plastic flower on a rubber band. By the end of the evening, she had variously unbraided it, repositioned it, brushed it straight down, retied it, and did everything but pull it over her face, which (here comes the cat! meow!) would have thoroughly improved her looks.
Having had sisters and nieces and having once been a teenager myself, I know a little something about overly fussy hairstyles. (I once emulated our librarian, Miss Bass, with a ponytail that had some of my hair wrapped at the base of the ponytail, so that it looked like a hair scrunchy. My mother lost no time in telling me that the look did not flatter.) It's one thing to try out such styles if you are a teenager, if you are a famous stick-thin model, or if you are simply out of touch with reality. This woman was no teenager, and the only stick she resembled was a stick of firewood. Thus, she was either seriously out of touch with reality or she didn't care that she looked about as strange as someone could get. I hope for her sake that she just didn't care. It's hard to imagine that she had no clue how she looked. She might have been able to pull it off if she'd had the right face--one of those forever-young baby faces that suggest a spritely spirit. But her face looked like it was twenty years older than her body. When the couple first arrived, I put them in their mid- to late-thirties, but after a close-up of her face, I couldn't help wondering if she weren't really nearly her mid-fifties. Mama would have called it a "rode hard and put up wet" kind of face--but to me, the face spoke of this woman's personality. It was hard, cold, mean, and rough.
Like many dark-haired women, this woman had a fine dark mustache. She had thick black, almost manly eyebrows. Her skin was pitted and rough, like it was in need of a good sanding. (It suddenly occurs to me that she might have been a man in drag. If so, that would explain a lot.)
Except the hands. She had large hands, but they were definitely womanly. They didn't look like they ever saw dishwater or work of any kind other than hair-fussing. She wore several rings, and her nails were manicured and pointed. I first noticed her hands because of the way she ate her large pretzel. It was one of those huge dinner-plate sized salt-encrusted things that one finds at virtually all concession stands. She would reach down into the plastic bag it was in and pinch off a tiny bit and roll it about for a moment before pulling it out to pop in her mouth. The husband didn't eat any of it, nor did she offer any of it to him, even though he offered her sips from his drink.
Of course by now, all my loyal readers are wondering when I watched the show I'd paid $65 per ticket to watch. Believe me, Celtic Woman certainly could hold anyone's interest. And I feel that I got my ogling money's worth, and certainly my ears were happy. (Except when the woman on my left whooped like a banshee.) But I'm never one to ignore the other shows that go on around me, and when they're free, that's even better. People-watching is certainly cheap entertainment (and I mean that as a dig to my gossipy self).
I ought to be ashamed. But I'm not. Dr. S.
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