Night of Eire - Or, "How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Walk Out Of Bad Shows"

On Sunday, as a special event, my family and I decided to attend a special show at the Southworth Planetarium in Portland.  This is a small planetarium in the University of Southern Maine.  It's not a very large planetarium, but it allows for a more intimate display rather than the grandiose IMAX displays you'd get at somewhere like the Boston Museum of Science.  Each has its advantages, but for the type of show we were expecting that night, it seemed that a smaller venue would be more appropriate.

So, what was Night of Eire supposed to be?  Well, here's the description:

While the upper world convulses with the tumult of St, Patrick's Day revelers, the Southworth Planetarium will commemorate the holiday with a more elegiac and celestial observance:  an event that blends the ancient Irish elements of stones, stories and stars.    This program represents an amalgam of stone circles; celestial mythology; and Irish legends.     Our stone circle scholar, Lawrence Price, will guide you through some of Ireland's most exquisitely beautiful and storied stone circles: such as Lough Crew, the witch's hill; and the Hill of Tara, which has witnessed the coronations of 142 ancient Irish kings. Also, the colossal Newgrange, designed to capture the solstice sunrise and, astonishingly, the moon cycles.

Sounds pretty neat, huh?  Well, it's not quite what we got.

In fact, let's twist this around into a Top Eleven Ways To Make Me Leave Your Event


Number 11:  Don't have a professional photographer provide your photos.

Now, to be fair, most cameras/cell phones/whatever the "scholar" used aren't designed to have their photos blown up by a projector and displayed on a curved surface of a planetarium.  I'll grant you that.

However, you'd still expect them to be in focus.  Or not so poorly lit that all you can see are dark blobs.  Or four photos of the same rock from different angles.

Instead of a nice, professional presentation of multiple stone circles around Ireland, what we instead got was a guy desperate to show off his pictures from his last holiday, including pictures of his wife walking up a path "because she hates having her picture taken," pictures of interesting things he found on the ground, and pictures of himself standing next to rocks.

Number 10:  Be vague and possibly misleading when you refer to "Irish legends."

Now, again, to be fair, I assumed we were going to be learning some classic Celtic mythology at this, and how it links to constellations or to stars that are connected to ancient tales.  And we did get some interesting discussion about the various "old crones" through Celtic myth.  However, we had a forty-five minute story told by a woman who was a teacher, not a storyteller, full of terms nobody understood, lecturing us on a story nobody could follow that culminated in something that sounded really preachy about how St. Patrick and Jesus saved the day from pagan religions.

Now, I'm not anti-religion by any means...but I really didn't expect Jesus' name to pop up in a night discussing Irish legends.  St. Patrick, maybe, but when I started to hear the woman telling this story have one of the "gods" of the old Pagan faith explain to a follower that in fact there is "one god above all," I immediately had sirens going off in my head.

Number 9:  When you have a boring story that nobody can follow, don't tell it for forty-five minutes.

Without breaks.

The worst part was that we had arranged for sign language interpreters to be present for my sister, and an hour of interpreting had already gone by before this woman got up to tell her story.  The scholar asked her if there should be a break and her response was "no, I'm fine."  I wanted to yell "sure, you're fine, how about the two people repeating everything you say with their hands?"

Number 8:  Don't leave crude and/or pithy jokes at home.

There was a really interesting discussion about a tree growing out of a well near an old church, and some of the legends that surrounded it.  The same woman who later told a story that made me want to rip off my feet and stuff them into my ears was discussing how it could be decorated with two different types of items.  One was "pretty" items, to ask for blessings from the spirits, the other would be a dirty rag dipped in the "mystical" waters at the base of the tree and then rubbed on a wound, infection, or other injury before being tied to the tree.  As the rag fell apart, the ailment would heal.

While explaining that it would be used to wipe infections, the woman decided to make what she surely thought was a sly hint towards more... intimate infections.  It was really unnecessary, and took away from one of the good stories she told.

Number 7:  Forget the stars.

The program was scheduled to go from 9:00 to 11:00.  It's happening in a planetarium.  We finally got up and left at around 10:50 (there are more reasons why to follow), and so far all we'd seen were family photos and listened to lectures.  Supposedly, there was supposed to be a story involving Orion's Belt or something, but considering there was supposed to only be ten minutes left in the program and they'd have to disconnect the projector to allow the planetarium to actually show the stars, I didn't have much hope of that happening.

Number 6: List the order of events/discussion in the reverse order.

When we saw the signs describing the event, here's the order it was presented in:

1)  Stars and mythology
2) Stories
3) Ancient stones.

Here's the order it happened in:

1) Stones
2) Stories
3) Number 1 on the list
4) ?

I don't even know if stars and mythology was even brought up, because at the point I left nothing had been said yet other than "stones were placed to be in the perfect position for the solstices."

Number 5:  Don't learn how to use the microphone even though you've already done this for one show and have apparently done this for several years in a row.

If the microphone is clipped to your shirt, don't lean over a podium so it can't pick up your voice.  Hearing a story fade in and out and in and out over and over again is just irritating.

Furthermore...

Number 4:  Don't learn how to use the rest of the equipment either.

Here's a hint for people.  If you have a projector presenting a slide or image on a screen, and you want it to change pictures... don't point the remote control at the screen.  Point it at the projector.

It's not rocket science, people.

Number 3:  Don't introduce the interpreters at the start of the show.

No, really, it's okay.  They're only there to make sure everybody can understand what you're saying if they can't rely on hearing you say it.  But fine, just ignore them like they aren't there and leave people guessing after the introductions are over.

Number 2:  Criticize the other presenters work while they're presenting.

I was lucky enough to sit near the edge of the audience, which meant that when a presenter wasn't speaking, they wound up sitting near me.  You had presenters correcting each other, interrupting each other to say the other was wrong, and in the case of the number one thing on this list, commenting to me, a member of the audience to paid to be here just how awful the other person's presentation was.

Oh, and now our number one thing.

Now, this last thing could be done well.  It could be quite informative.  It could manage to not make the entire audience carsick and wishing for the sweet release of death.

But instead, be sure to do this:

1)  Have an eight minute video presentation, in a setting where everybody is sitting back and looking up at a planetarium ceiling to see it, of your shaky hand holding a cell phone out a window to let them know how windy, bumpy, and narrow Irish roads are.

Set to music, no less.

Myself and others in the audience found ourselves constantly having to sit up and look down so we wouldn't want to vomit.  When you were watching, your body was instinctively twitching in various directions to try to adjust to bumps that didn't actually happen.  The camera would point one direction and then suddenly turn perpendicular to the car to show a view, or a waterfall, or a cow, or something else before swinging back around again.  It'd start on one side of the car, then cut to the other side, then back again.  It'd sometimes turn inside the car as if the reviewer was talking to the driver (read: his wife).  There was nothing provided to put any of the drive in context.

For instance, narrow winding country roads have small indents out at strategic places so that if there's a car coming and you're near one, you can pull in slightly and give the other car just enough room to get around you.  They tend to work because there usually aren't that many people out on those roads at any given time (when I was in Ireland, you'd at most see two cars in a row on far out country streets, and since we were on a bus, we always had right of way) so you don't really need anybody to go in reverse back to a wider area to let people through.

Halfway through this is when we left, simply because we couldn't take it anymore.  My sister had a serious headache by this point, as did the rest of my family.  I didn't have a headache, but I needed fresh air before I left my dinner behind.

It was the most disappointing experience I think I've ever had at a show, and not even up to what I'd consider to be "program held by a school" standards.  It was monotonous, preachy, disconnected, misleading, self-indulgent, and extremely poorly planned and implemented.

I can wholeheartedly recommend going to see it, but only if you bring a barf bag, an mp3 player to drown out the voices, and a blindfold so you can get some sleep.