What I Learned

Bathrooms in Canada are called washrooms. Yellow traffic lights are called amber. Ice, oddly enough, is hard to find. You can buy a "smoked meat" sandwich almost anywhere, but you get no indication of what kind of meat it might be. Canadians are having a huge laugh over the falling value of the American dollar and love pointing it out to you. And I learned that there is some incredible traditional music being made in Eastern Canada.

The 4th conference of the directors of Irish Festivals from across America has ended with 16 hours of travel yesterday for the Kansas City contingent. By the time it all ended, we'd had very little sleep, a lot of meetings, more music than I can count, and more beer than...well, a lot of beer.

A typical day began with a 9:00 breakfast at the lodge where we all staying. It was one of those dreadful breakfast buffets every day, which I began to skip after the first day. By the way, let me make one more sweeping generalization about Canada. The food, by and large, blows. After breakfast for those who chose it, came a full day of conference activities. Guest speakers, meeting with music agents, round table discussions, a plethora of Powerpoint presentations and most helpful of all lots of conversation with people who do the same jobs we all do in other cities and town across the country. These people, most of whom have been doing this Fest stuff a lot longer than we have, are like walking Irish Festival encyclopedias. You'd leave each day's conference meetings with your head stuffed full of new ideas, which conveniently helped push out the hangover you woke up with. Because the nights were as tightly packed and scheduled as the days. A fleet of vans would descend on the Silver Dart Lodge at 6:00 every evening and whisk us away to various venues across Cape Breton Island, which incidentally is breathtakingly beautiful. Some of the drives were 45 to an hour long, some of the venues small halls, some big arenas, some community gymnasiums. The Celtic Colours festival isn't a festival in the sense that the Kansas City Irish Fest is a festival. It's more like a series of concerts spread across 30 some different venues and communities over 9 days. The evening shows were typically 3 or 4 different performers each of whom would play for a half hour or so before yielding to the next. A final number would feature all the players from the evening's showcase.

When the evening show was over, the vans (the K.C. delegates won the van pool lottery when we scored Fraser White as our driver, who is the nicest man in Canada if not the world.) would head off to the island's Gaelic College and the Great Hall Of The Clans, a kind of creepy stone hall with kilt wearing manikins standing along the walls. The hall was the home every night of Festival Club, which was more, less formal performances by lots more bands and solo performers. These would run literally all night, with school buses running every half hour back to the town of Baddeck where we were staying. We had backstage access at Festival Club and it was an easier place to visit with the artists than the early shows. We'd stay at Festival Club until we couldn't choke down another Keith's and then ride the bus back to do it all again the next day.

The schedule varied little until Sunday, when after a morning's worth of conference business we were granted 5 hours of unscheduled free time. Ed and Patti and a large group of fellow festies took a sailing tour of the lake and fed bald eagles, Keli and I hiked through a Provincial Park full of autumn color up to a beautiful waterfall. Sunday night was back to music as Fraser drove us to the town of Whycocomagh for our last show, this one featuring the great Dougie MacLean, a wonderful Acadian band called Vishten and Capre Breton fiddle legend Buddy McMaster, aged 84. Buddy was a special favorite of Keli's. (hint: her birthday is in December and there wasn't a Buddy McMaster CD in her pile of discs when we left.)

Back to Baddeck at 11:00 and to a quickly thrown together party and sing-song in the lodge lobby. An amazing amount of horded food and liquor, a couple guitars and a giant stuffed lobster appeared from delegate rooms, and April, the night clerk, helpfully looked the other way for the whole crazy thing. By 2:30 or so everyone was in bed resting up for the long day of travel yesterday.

In the days to come I'll tell you more about the music we heard, some of which I promise you you'll see here in August. I'll also be telling you about some changes coming to Irish Fest as a result of meetings and idea sharing (stealing) with other festivals.

In the meantime, as I catch up on sleep and wring out my liver, thanks to Barney Walsh for manning the tin can telephone while I was in the woods. And thanks to all the wonderful people from all the great festivals with whom we shared the experience. It's become a big, happy, dysfunctional family over these last four years and one full of treasured friendships. You all always have a home at the Kansas City Irish Fest.