Let’s Try This Again

Back in late 2017 I decided it would be a good idea to start a blog, and so I did – you’re reading it 🙂 Then I put about four posts up on it and promptly shelved it. I figure it is now time to resurrect it, because if one aspires to being a writer, then one should – well – write. So the plan now is to TRY to write something, even if it’s just inane drivel, every day without fail.

So just in case I still have any followers on this blog (I think I had managed to attract about 4) who may be interested in what’s been happening the last two years plus, here’s a recap. My freelance writing work dried up mid last year, but thankfully the music gigs are continuing, in fact getting busier (touch wood). In addition to playing Friday & Sunday evenings at McGettigan’s, Clarke Quay, I now host an acoustic Open Mic night on Mondays at Al Capone’s at Far East Shopping Centre on Orchard Road. That’s a lot of fun, and it’s a perfect venue for such an evening, with a superb sound system, very favourably priced drinks, and the boss is a musician himself (and a damn good one at that). I’m also appearing regularly at my old stomping ground Molly Malone’s on Circular Road on alternate Tuesdays and Wednesdays. (1st & 3rd Wednesday of every month, and 2nd & 4th Tuesdays).

I had the opportunity to play a gig on U.K. soil for the first time last year, when I shuttled over to Newcastle to play at my friend’s 50th birthday party.  He’s a  chef and the deal was, I would go there and do a gig for his party, as long as he came out here in October to cook for my wife’s birthday party – and he did! 🙂

On top of that, after many years of resisting the urgings of others, I’ve started teaching private acoustic guitar lessons. If that piques your interest, by all means get in touch. Specifically, I am aiming my lessons at adults (mostly – I do currently have one 11 year old student and he’s a lot of fun)  who have always wanted to learn to play but never got around to it. In many cases, people have come to me and said they did start to learn but gave up because they were put off by a lot of music theory, scales, modes etc that they were getting from their teachers. All of that stuff is fine, indeed necessary if you want to become the next Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton, but most of the folks I spoke to said they just want to learn the basic chords and strumming techniques required to be able to play a few songs at parties etc. Which is just as well, as I have no formal musical training and my own knowledge of theory etc is limited, but I can teach you enough to become a competent strumming singer.

Starting in mid 2018, I made a return to the world of amateur theatre, something which I had long aspired to.  I had my first taste of stage acting way back in 1987 when I was in college. It was a play called “The Black Pool” by Jim Nolan. Two of my fellow cast members from that one are now professional actors with impressive stage and screen credentials behind them. For myself, that was the first and last play I did until a bunch of us got together in 2012 to put on a production of John B. Keane’s “Many Young Men of Twenty”, where I played the village drunk “Danger” Mullally. Then I stopped again, mainly because the nature of my job at the time  meant I couldn’t commit the required time to rehearsals. But in June of 2018, I was no longer as constrained by work and so I jumped at the chance to play Jimmy Jack Cassie, aka “The Infant Prodigy” in  Brian Friel’s terrific “Translations”. That led me to  the wonderful folks at the Stage Club with whom I got to play Detective Inspector Jackson of the Wandsworth Met in a staged reading of Kirsten Trott’s debut  “Rank Outsiders”. That was a lot of fun and led to two more plays with the Club. In February 2019 we did the hilarious farce “Cash On Delivery” by Michael Cooney, where I played the hapless Uncle George, getting whacked by doors and spending much of the second half of the play “unconscious” and getting dragged across the stage and unceremoniously dumped into a window seat.  That was followed in June 2019 by the most challenging role I had taken on yet (in terms of time spent on stage and lines to learn) – Johnnypateen Mike, the village gossip, in “The Cripple of Inishmaan” by Martin McDonagh. I only had three weeks to learn the lines and get the part down – and I got away with it for the most part 🙂 Sadly, even though I had, by now, very much caught the theatre bug, my schedule of gigs and teaching means that I am, once again, unable to commit to rehearsals, so it looks like I’ll be on a hiatus from acting for a while.

So that’s pretty much what I have been up to since I abandoned the blog. Long may it continue, (unless this coronavirus thing causes gigs to dry up, which is a bit of a worry). I’ll be back tomorrow with something a bit less rambling than this!

Ciao.

GM