THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 16, 1997 TAG: 9702160069
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: 55 lines
A note from Bert Chancey of Bon Air says that my anguish at encountering TV commercials boosting Riverdance is nothing compared to an evening amid a captive audience in a Washington, D.C., hotel ballroom listening to the sound of 100 Scottish bagpipers.
What worsened it was that people all around him were emoting on what a glorious concert it was.
Chancey wins. That had to have been a horrific din, one calculated to drive men mad. Women could quell it. Most women have serenity not even a bagpipe could shake.
A single bagpipe's keening is a winter wind worrying at a knothole in a ramshackle shed. They are best heard from afar. In one funeral, a bagpiper stood on a distant knoll from which the faint, wailing skein, an eerie, stately air of the lone figure's bagpipe, underscored the mourners' melancholy.
As trying as bagpipes was an eve with sage Buckminster Fuller in Old Dominion University's gym. It began in cozy intellectual intimacy as young admirers sat on the floor at the feet of the master, who'd pulled his chair to the edge of the stage, the better to get at us full force.
At an hour's end his rapid speech became gibberish. The young were leaning back on their elbows as one rhetorical storm surge after another crashed over their heads.
I edged to the rear, stretched on my side, folded my coat into a pillow, relaxed. The Army conditioned us to make the best of anything.
Two hours on he was still running. ``Go at it, old Bucky!'' I thought. ``Show these young'uns there's even such a thing as too much wisdom.''
After three hours, the place was littered with prone figures like a Napoleonic battlefield. I hoped he'd go until dawn. As we wavered out, somebody asked how it had been.
``I'm fuller Buckminster,'' I said.
Reviving Riverdance, Charlotte VornDick advises me to use the mute on the remote control.
``It's nice to watch with the sound off,'' she writes, ``as those dancers are very young and talented and have probably worked very hard to perfect their routines.''
She's right. I'll use the mute. Or throw a shoe.
Ralph Womeldorf wishes I could see the likes of the Irish clog dancers, mostly 10- to 14-year-old girls he and his wife saw at county fairs and horse shows when they were visiting her kin in Ireland in the 1950s.
The present troupe, he notes, got its break when it was asked to fill in during intermission at a music festival in a Dublin theater.
They brought down the house, ``and so the fame of the group began by an accident of being in the right place at the right time.''
What have I, an irate clod, done to deserve such thoughtful, temperate, edifying readers?
It ain't fair.