Before Riverdance, Before Green Bagels...

So there’s now only hours left in which to blog about St. Patrick’s Day.   If you’ve read this blog before (or even just the title) you already know that Michael Bloomberg and I are about equally Irish (well actually him a bit more, since I’m sure he attends the parade, he’s probably been to Ireland at least once, and I think he wears those white cableknit sweaters even on other days).

Of course I usually try to wear some green on St. Patrick’s Day and always did when I was a kid, simply because it was fun to match everyone else in school and on the street. Here was harmless conformity that didn’t threaten or conflict with my Jewish identity; it was in fact a perfect fit with my New York Cityness, in my outer-borough way, and my parents’ before me.  Weren’t our neighbors, on the other side of the wall that separates row houses in Queens, born-in-Ireland Irish? Mrs. Vardi even had a brogue.  Even our teachers were more Irish than anything else, in those years before the wave of graduating Jewish ed majors crested. Our principal was a Miss Calahan.  For third grade, Mrs. Mulhern.

Pupils and teachers, Irish and not, all held some kind of St. Patrick’s Day observance every year. So on this particular March 17 of the sixties, here’s me, six years old, sitting with my similarly green-clad schoolmates in the auditorium of PS 102 Queens, where the teacher at the piano is playing Irish music.  There’s a nice, deep, wood-paneled proscenium stage in front and framed prints of famous paintings on the walls; paintings, like Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and  Seurat’s La Grande Jatte,  that I will recognize for the rest of my life as those I first met in PS 102. Of course there’s an American flag in one corner and I think the flag of New York City, the one with the windmill and beaver, in the other.

That day some teacher asked -- I forget who -- if anyone knew how to dance an Irish jig. I know this was loooong before Riverdance.  I think it was long before the Irish dancing trend hit regular neighborhood kids. Far as I know, none of my friends took Irish dancing lessons, and while I remember the strange sight of miniature bridal gowns (or so they looked to me) on seven-year olds in the spring, I never saw any kids (and certainly not the O’Hares on my block) sporting any of those $500-and-up Irish dancing costumes kids get today with the stiff, short flared skirts and the elaborate piping.

But at some point in my six years to that point, I must’ve seen some Irish people, or non-Irish people, dancing jigs. It looked to me like a simple matter of raising your knee and kicking or toe-stepping your foot at three corners of an imaginary square. So I raised my hand.  I distinctly remember my teacher, knowing that I had to be one of the least Irish people at PS 102 Queens (this being years before the Asian influx), exchanging  glances with the piano-playing teacher and shrugging.  

Then she nodded to me, I went up to the middle of the stage, the piano player played, and I proceeded to do my best approximation of an Irish jig, steps I must’ve seen on Ed Sullivan, or Danny Kaye, or (the previous year, before getting the bus for afternoon kindergarten) Captain Kangaroo. 

My dancing wasn’t good enough to draw applause or bad enough to offend.  What it did do was encourage all the kids with just slightly less chutzpah to suddenly remember that they knew how to do the Irish jig, too, and pretty soon, one by one, we amassed a whole stage full of Irish jiggers, all high stepping and kicking into the corners of their imaginary squares.

That’s all I remember about that.  This is a memory of a fearlessness that must have hit its peak when I was six, on a day before the dawn of doubt.