St. Patrick's Day Celebration - Céad Míle Fáilte

For many a year, Mill Valley Lodge No. 356 has celebrated the St. Patrick's Day with unique style and great gusto with our families, friends, and brothers from Fairfax Lodge No. 556. Of course, the bar is always open, and the main fare is Irish Stew - better known as Corn Beef and Cabbage.

To add to the flavor of an evening dedicated to Erin, Master Bruce Rossman, and Past Master Stan Bransgrove entertained the crowd with readings from the sons of the Emerald Isle, Irish poets, Irish playwrights, and Irish philosophers, including George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest, John Millington Synge's Playboy of the Western World, James Joyce's Ulysses, and William Butler Yeats. Moved by so much blarney, we even had a few volunteers from the audience take to the stage to regale us with Molly Malone and Danny Boy - it just goes to prove, "You can accomplish more with a kind word and a shillelagh than you can with just a kind word.!"

"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place" [George Bernard Shaw]

"There are only three kinds of Irish men who can't understand women— young men, old men, and men of middle age."

"I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation." [George Bernard Shaw]

"Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad." [George Bernard Shaw]

"Says I to him, I says, says I, Says I to him, I says, The thing, says I, I says to him, Is just, says I, this ways. I hev', says I, a gret respeck For you and for your breed, And onything I could, I says, I'd do, I wud indeed. I don't know any man, I says, I'd do it for, says I, As fast, I says, as for yoursel', That's tellin' ye no lie. There's nought, says I, I wudn't do To plase your feyther's son, But this, I says, ye see, says I, I says, it can't be done." [The Way We Tell a Story (Pat McCarty, 1851-1931)]

To A Child Dancing In The Wind, by W.B. Yeats

DANCE there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water's roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool's triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind!

WM Bruce Rossman & Fiona Bransgrove
"There was never a shabby sheep in the flock
that didn't like to have a comrade."

"Here's Céad Míle Fáilte to friend and to rover That's a greeting that's Irish as Irish can be It means you are welcome A thousand times over Wherever you come from, Whosoever you be Irish Men."