I am delighted to invite you to experience our traditional Irish band The Beggarmen in a concert that will be taking place on the set of Irish playwright Conor McPherson‘s “The Weir” at Theatre Cedar Rapids.

The last time I performed on TCR‘s Grandon Stage this past summer, I was a barefoot and pigtailed fiddler playing in a coal mine with an unparalleled bluegrass-y band: Matt Brooks on guitar and dobro, David Ollinger on bass, and Greg “Bucket” Kanz ripping it up on his unique and personally constructed drum kit.

The coal mine now lives only in our memories. TCR’s Scenic Artist and Props Master Daniel Kelchen has transformed the Grandon into a traditional Irish pub in a fictional rural Irish town that resembles rural towns in McPherson’s grandfather’s home county of Leitrim. Incidentally, or perhaps not at all, Leitrim is only 45 miles away from my mother’s home county of Cavan.

The connections don’t end there, not remotely, because all of the proceeds from this concert will go toward a scholarship fund for TCR’s Just Right for Me class, the theatre arts class for  autistic children that our son Atticus enjoys and that I recently wrote about.

There are so many reasons that I want you to attend this concert, not the least of which is that I am so grateful to Theatre Cedar Rapids for consistently providing a breadth of opportunities for people of all ages and abilities to come together to experience the magic of theatre.

This same sense of community runs very deep in our efforts as a band to connect people to music that tells a story and that keeps a beautiful cultural tradition thriving as it has for centuries.

Please join us for what is sincerely a once in a lifetime opportunity to promote community through art. Sunday, November 8 at 6 pm.

And spread the word!