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American Dream, Belfast, Bob Dylan, Concerts, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Irish Diaspora, Las Vegas Shooting, Red Rocks Amphitheater, saying goodbye, Soundtracks of our Lives, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Dear Tom Petty . . .
Dear Tom, Last Friday night, you and your Heartbreakers played the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, and I was there with my boyfriend. It was his first time seeing you perform, but I’ve lost count since I first saw the Grateful Dead open for you and Bob Dylan at Rich Stadium, Buffalo, in 1986. This was special, every bit as special as I had expected, knowing you told Rolling Stone magazine last year that you’d be lying if you didn’t say it would probably be your final tour. And the Hollywood Bowl? A bucket list venue for me, the place that still conjures black and white Beatles taking America by storm,…
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2017 V by Very Blog Awards Ireland, Blogging, Blogging, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Irish Diaspora, Writing
Shortlisted People ~ Randy Newman, Susan Lucci, & Me.
I love a list. It has a beginning and an ending. It’s a certainty. A sure thing. Naturally, then, I love Rob Gordon, a kindred spirit erstwhile hapless record shop owner in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. A compulsive maker of lists which somehow make sense of a world that doesn’t always make sense, Rob’s “top fives” run the gamut of pop culture, eclectic compilations that include his top five episodes of Cheers, top five Elvis Costello songs, the top five musical crimes perpetrated by Stevie Wonder in the 80s and 90s, and the top five “women who don’t live on his street but would be very welcome.” Like Hornby’s character, I can produce all kinds of top-five lists . .…
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9.11.2013, 9/11, Anything can Happen, Belfast, Billy Collins, Blogging, bombing, British Army, cancer, Diary, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Healing Field Tempe, Loss, Memoir, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, Peace, Poetry, Remembering September 11th, Seamus Heaney, September 11, The Peace Process, The Troubles, The Troubles, Themes of Childhood, Writers
the last name on the list ~ remembering September 11th
I have yet to be disappointed by what happens when my online world collides with its ‘real’ counterpart. Landing on the virtual doorsteps of people in the middle of lives parallel to my own, I have been beautifully blindsided by unexpected coincidences and exchanges of truths that may not otherwise have seen the light of day. In my virtual home, it is easy to pull up a chair and trade ideas and opinions with people I may never meet about why Seamus Heaney will always matter; about the beautiful, bruised Northern Ireland that both scared me and shaped me; about breast cancer and the pain of it, the politics of it…
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Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, Dr. Martin Luther King, DREAM Act, Human Rights, Immigration, Justice, Northern Ireland, Prop 300, The Troubles, Themes of Childhood
Whose American Dream Matters? #DefendDACA
Each of us from a different corner of the world, each of us an immigrant in Arizona, we wanted to make a point with our simple declaration - "We're all immigrants" - the point being that America makes immigrants of us all.
