While studying abroad, I flew to Ireland for a weekend trip with friends. The customs officer opened my passport and called his colleague over to have a look. After a few seconds I realized that I wasn’t in trouble; they just wanted to have a laugh at how Irish this American girl was.
When you have curly red hair and your name is Molly Kathleen you are a caricature of yourself. Sometimes I look in the mirror and think, we GET it. This is why I tend not to wear much green. It’s like Nancy Pelosi wearing a kente cloth - too much.
I am not 100% Irish. I remember kids in my Chicago suburban school saying things like, “I’m 50% Czech, 30% Polish, 10% German, 8% Irish and 2% Welsh,” as if describing the makeup of a multicultural V8 juice. My husband doesn’t understand this. He’s from the South where everyone is 100% American.
(Today’s listening:)
But you don’t need to be a thoroughbred Irish lass to participate in the Rose of Tralee International Festival, which bills itself as “a celebration of the aspirations, ambitions, intellect, social responsibility and Irish heritage of modern young women.” The only requirement is that you be born in Ireland or have an ancestor who was. Also that you’re young, female and under the influence of your parents.
My great-grandfather, Joseph Devane, was born in 1879 in Tralee, County Kerry, which gave me the green card to enter the Chicago semi-final when I was a senior in college.
(When he arrived in the US at the age of 20, my great-grandfather was hungry and bought a banana, but for lack of knowing any custom on eating it, ate it skin and all. He was not a fan.)
The Rose of Tralee festival exists to encourage tourism to Ireland, and if you win one of the semi-finals they hold across the globe, you get a free trip and the chance to compete in Tralee. It’s kind of like the Olympics for gingers (a term I hate!)
It claims that it’s not a beauty pageant. If it was, I would have won.
I don’t really know why I did it, other than to make my friends laugh and make my parents love me, but I did want a free trip. I’d been hoping to return to Ireland since college, when one of the girls I went with, a mousy girl whose whole body was Ugg boots, made us leave an Irish pub because it was “kind of an older scene.” We were 21 and the people there were mostly 25, so she had a point (the difference between 21 and 25 when you’re 21 is 100 years), but why else does one go to Ireland? For the sausages? (In my case, yes.)
The Chicago chapter was held on the South Side, where my great-grandfather and his fellow countrymen came to settle. There were 30 participants in total, and we made up a Celtic cereal of Mc’s & O’s, dressed in prom dresses and sponsored sashes (my sponsor was my podiatrist, Dr. O’Carroll), our pale pink skin swathed in bronzer and the cold hard sweat of competition.
The winner is the woman deemed to best match the attributes relayed in the song “The Rose of Tralee”:
She was lovely and fair as the rose of the summer,
Yet 'twas not her beauty alone that won me;
Oh no, 'twas the truth in her eyes ever dawning,
That made me love Mary, the Rose of Tralee.
The 10 judges, who’d come over from Ireland, were all men in their 80s.
When I think of the last group of people on earth who can most accurately detect the truth in a woman’s eyes, it is a group of 80-year-old men (see here). If there’d been a pit bull on stage with us, who knew how to wink just so, it could have won.
Instead, the contestants should have judged each other. Who better to judge girls in their twenties than girls in their twenties? We’d sit in a big circle and after three minutes of non-verbal communication, would have easily sniffed out the riff-raff and most fittingly crowned the winner. The Lady of the Flies.
I don’t remember much about the competition. I do remember that we had to do arts and crafts with a group of local children, having been told that the judges would be wandering around, spying and gathering intel.
I remember being called on to the stage and getting interviewed by a woman in her 50s, a big South Side cheese named Barbara, whom I saw years later at a 4 AM bar when she was mid-blackout.
I remember one girl who knew the history of the festival and all of the roses who’d won in the past and that it was her third year trying to win. I’ll just buy you a ticket to Ireland, I thought.
I remember making two fast friends, Maureen and Eileen, and we bonded over about the whole thing being kind of deranged and embarrassing.
I remember not winning, mostly because I remember who did win. She was a red-lipped girl from California, whose connection to Chicago was tenuous and who’d had two outfit changes with the help of a lady’s maid. She wasn’t visibly Irish looking, as most of us were, and it seemed like her connection to Ireland was wearing green glitter for St. Patrick’s Day, not being gifted a green rosary blessed by the Pope on her Confirmation, like me.
It was an optional to do a talent, so of course I didn’t do one and of course she did. She sang “At Last” by Etta James but it was clear by her swagger that she was actually singing “At Last” by Etta James by Beyoncé at Obama’s inauguration the previous year.
I remember going up to the festival bar afterwards and ordering a beer, and asking if I could have it for free because I’d “just lost.”
I remember that my friends came to cheer me on and that we flew to Delray Beach, Florida the following morning for our spring break, and discovered that we were spring breaking in a retirement community. I remember when we went to the town’s Irish bar on St. Patrick’s Day and my friends being unable to find me, but then spotting me at a table eating fish and chips with a group of 80-year-old men. I remember looking up at my friend Kaitlin, the truth in mine eyes ever dawning, and telling her I’d meet up with them soon. I remember, but just barely.
*****Happy St. Patrick’s Day! In the spirit of the day, please, please share!*****