Wife: October 2008 Archives

Last night, Kellie went to see one of the Irish Tenors come perform in Richmond. (Happy birthday, dear, just a little early.) Anthony Kearns (official site and Wikipedia) is her favorite Irish tenor, and he did not disappoint her. I don’t have the details of the concert, but I believe he performed over 2 hours of material (with an intermission) and left her saying that is was the best singing she’s ever heard.

And she also mentioned that he looks an awful like Tim (her brother). When I looked at the pictures on the small camera view screen, I kind of agreed. Looking at the pictures now, I’m not so sure. Here’s a clip of audio from the concert that was taken on the digital Elph.

We did get out to the Richmond Folk Festival, and I’ll be honest — we had a great time. The weather was perfect (mid-70s, a light breeze, mostly sunny). Will still talks about how much fun he had, so I think we’ll want to go back next year.

We actually parked by 11:30am and found a spot just a couple blocks from the festival area (down on Brown’s Island and the Tredegar museum area). We were there before any of the acts started at noon, and we also beat the crowds. Things were definitely getting more crowded by the time we left at 2pm. (The kids needed to get some rest.)

But in the time that we were there, we were able to catch parts of 3 shows, all of which were excellent:

• San Jose Taiko (Japanese ritual drumming)
• Dale Watson (honky tonk country)
• Líadan (Irish)

As we wandered around between stages, we overheard a couple of other acts — a bluegrass and a Persian percussion act stand out. There were many more performances which we didn’t get to stick around to see that I would have enjoyed, but we have kids now. I think Kellie really wants to go back to see Dale Watson tomorrow afternoon. We’ll see — though he did mention that he comes through Richmond a couple times a year. He was very good.

Here are some quick pix and video from the three performances that we did catch. (My apologies on the quality, as everything was taken with a small digital camera at a distance at max optical zoom.) Maybe you can join us for the festival next year.