Mother Divine in Fur

Picture, courtesy of Lori and Tommy Garcia, for 'From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia' (Fonthill Media, October 26, 2020)

Black Lives Matter: Pandering Applause

         The fallout from Philadelphia’s June riots has worked to radicalize the city’s cultural and arts communities. 

    Shortly after the rioting, museums, art galleries, theater companies and historical societies sent out statements in support of Black Lives Matter. These messages of support grew exponentially until the tsunami had every arts and community organization joining the chorus of praise and adulation.

    

    The rallying around BLM was no surprise for those familiar with the city’s arts and culture scene. Many city theater companies have been staging plays with leftist themes for a number of years. Some of these theaters have also become community centers where the promulgation of all things Left occurs in workshops, book clubs, discussion groups as well as the marketing of mass e-mailings that seek to instruct the unwoke.

    The leftist imprint is so entrenched in city’s theater community it’s not unusual to hear an artistic director introduce a new play with a reminder to the audience that the land on which the theater sits was once Native American ground. After this might come a moment of silence or a formal ‘thank you’ to the particular tribe in question. As a lifetime lover of Native culture, announcements like this strike me as pretentious pandering. What these artistic directors often forget is that the so called stolen land in question was also stolen by a number of warring tribes going back hundreds of years. Natives stole from Natives just as colonists stole from Natives. 

  

   The support for BLM that erupted after the riots even affected public relations agencies, massage businesses and small neighborhood associations that usually avoid ideological alliances.  

   The body massage outfit in question sent out an email mass mailing labeled, “I stand with BLM” while urging its sore muscles plagued customers to donate to the Philadelphia Chapter of Black Lives Matter

  

     Philly Arts for Black Lives, an organization formed after the riots, was organized primarily to support defunding of the police. In its policy statement Philly Arts for Black Lives makes the demand that “all arts and cultural organizations in Philadelphia sever known ties with the police.” Many of the theatre companies I know (and like) signed on as supporters. It occurred to me as I read though the list of supporting theatres that the riots helped mainstream the ongoing American Cultural Revolution. A friend of mine who grew up in Hong Kong and who remembers the beginnings of the Cultural Revolution there told me that what is happening in the United States today happened in his homeland decades ago.

     The Marxist Revolution in China included attacks on free speech, freedom of expression in books and film, and in some instances the demolition of statues.  In China presently there is no free speech when it comes to political issues.  Ordinary citizens cannot speak out but must text their thoughts and feelings privately to friends and others. The Marxist censorship overlords have apparently decided to overlook the world of text messaging. My Hong Kong friend insists that the United States is headed down the same path. “It’s déjà vu all over again,” he says.    

  

   InterAct Theatre Company, which bills itself as a theatre for today’s world, stated in its BLM support statement: “What is the power of new plays at this moment? What can a theatre do?” Well, it can do what The Philadelphia Artists’ Collective (PAC) is doing: come out swinging by providing website categories like “Find a protest” (making it easy to grab your sign and run to the location in question) or join a Pandemic Reading club that includes a section entitled, “For White People, Educate Yourself,” that features Ibram X. Kendi’s book, “How to be an Anti-Racist.” Because, of course, given the situation and your privilege, you can’t be anything but. You’re a racist even if you think you’re not a racist.  

    The award winning Wilma Theater, once known as the zeitgeist of the avant garde, stated its solidarity with Black Lives Matter.

    “The Wilma Theater stands in solidarity with those who have lost loved ones to racial violence and with those seeking a freer society through protest, outrage and art.” The Wilma set up a fundraiser for Black Lives Matter, a virtual showcasing of “Kill More Paradise” by James Ijames that one critic said puts “a buzz saw through the contemporary myth that all lives matter.”

     Racism matters and black lives matter but what needs to be examined is the Black Lives Matter movement, which has become much more than just a fight for racial equality. When you capitalize black lives matter you are tapping into a Marxist agenda and a platform of beliefs that go way beyond the fight for racial equality.  

   This is why President Trump made a mistake when he came out and called Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization but then refused to say anything more about it. He never answered the question why he thought Black Lives Matter was a terrorist organization.  He did not elaborate, but if he had bothered to explain we would have heard that Black Lives Matter goes beyond racial equality (a necessary goal in any society) to include issues that used to be promulgated by the Gay Liberation Front in 1970.

       GLF’s radical agenda in 1970 went beyond the issue of equality for homosexuals. While GLF did not promote defunding the police, BLM supports defunding the police. BLM also supports free abortions for minors, the end of so called cisgender privilege, heteronormative thinking, and the destruction of the nuclear family. BLM is also committed to overthrowing US imperialism and capitalism.

     GLF in 1970 issued statements against the nuclear family and even against monogamy for gay couples. Monogamy, GLF insisted then, was simply an aping of the heterosexual establishment’s system of viewing spouses in capitalist ownership terms, as if a spouse was commercial property. Gay people, GLF said, had to find a new way to love. Nobody owns your body; a lover has no right to demand that you be faithful. Your body is yours, nobody owns it.  

   GLF was committed to overturning US imperialism and capitalism. BLM in 2020 is also committed to overthrowing the United States government as we know it. 

    Just as GLF was only partially about equality for homosexuals, BLM is only partially about race equality.

     I wonder how many of the white millennial heterosexual couples that put BLM posters in their townhouse windows are aware that BLM doctrine basically disapproves of their heteronormative nuclear family affiliation.   

  

   The highly politicized Zuka Theatre issued a statement after the riots—“there’s “much work to do to counter the racism that pervades so many cultural institutions.” On the surface, this appears as a not so radical statement but a common sense sentiment many people would not disagree with.   

   The award winning Arden Theatre Company near South Street let it be known that “racism kills…it is insidious, blinding us to our own biases,” and promised to “listen more.”  Bravo! But curiously enough, the Arden stopped short of endorsing Black Lives Matter as an organization, almost as if to say that it is possible to care about black lives without endorsing the organization that promotes all of the issues listed above.

 

   1812 Productions, a company famous for comedy and its annual hilarious political satire, This Is The Week That Is, also used the term Black Lives Matter but in a generic sense. 1812 Productions co-founder Jennifer Childs, wrote “I believe, as everyone does at 1812, that Black Lives Matter.”

    Black lives do matter: just don’t put that truth in all caps and turn it into a Marxist polemic. 

    The Philadelphia Museum of Art, from its lofty and apolitical-leaning throne on the Parkway, issued a statement entitled “Black Lives Matter” without mentioning the organization per se but still capitalizing the words in a design of ingenious ambiguity. “We stand with all Philadelphians,” PMA’s statement read, “demanding an end to systematic racism in all areas of society.” 

  The statement continued: “We have also paused to reflect on the role of museums—and our role specifically—in historically silencing Black voices. We do know we have work to do.”  The PMA statement did not contain a link to BLM-Philadelphia, and there’s no suggested reading lists for unwoke “idiots.” 

   The Irish Heritage Theatre, the only producers of Irish and Irish American plays in the city, went full throttle in its embrace of BLM. “We resolutely stand by Black Lives Matter and its mission for racial justice and equality,” the statement read, conveniently overlooking or forgetting the other parts of BLM’s mission. I’m thinking of all those heteronormative Irish actors who plan on having nuclear families.    

    The Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation at Drexel University also threw its hat into the ring by declaring itself an ally of the BLM movement, as did Historic Germantown. No surprise here. Organizations connected to Academe rarely go out on a limb and think independently. And yet the Independence Seaport Museum avoided ceding to the movement when it said in its statement that “Black lives matter.”

    Black lives do matter, but not the organization with the same name. God bless the Independence Seaport Museum!

    Small neighborhood associations like the Northern Liberties Neighborhood Association and the Olde Richmond Community Association in the city’s Riverwards neighborhoods sent out statements of support, not wanting to be left behind in a Rapture that might possibly accuse them of indifference to racism somewhere down the line.

      The biggest disappointment for me in reading these statements of support was not finding any reference to the days or violence that wrecked Center City and many neighborhood businesses. For the most part the statements avoided any reference to looting, broken glass, blown up ATMs and partially burned buildings.

      The four days of looting became invisible because it was an inconvenient truth.         

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor

Covid Fear and Trembling

City Safari: By Thom Nickels Contributing Editor

Thom Nickles on Safari

Wed, Jul 15, 2020

How has the pandemic affected going to church, or sitting in Rittenhouse Square, and the current state of the ads on Philadelphia Craigslist?  

Church:

As you enter the church (fully masked) your temperature is taken by someone in the parish. You squeeze out a bit of hand sanitizer and keep the standard social distance. When it comes time to receive Holy Communion, you follow the guidelines established by the Bishop. Going to church now is no longer a simple walk ‘in’ and ‘out’ affair but a complicated dance that may not be everyone’s cup of tea. 

Guidelines, however sensibly constructed, are not going to please every parishioner. Some parishioners insist on a 100 percent protection: they want the Bishop to revise the ancient rubrics of Communion to placate their pandemic fears. They want absolute certainty that the environment is bubble-tight, a super structure of infallible protection.

100% protection does not exist in life. Nor does it exist in church. In church, one at least, expects the faithful to have a modicum of faith that would bolster the thin line between absolute safety and minimal risk. Bolstering the line between safety and risk is where faith comes in. What I’ve learned since this pandemic is that some believers, seemingly, have little faith. 

That’s why many churches are still nearly empty on any given Sunday, even with the 25-person limit set for indoor spaces. And yet people think nothing of flooding the Parkway and the Museum of Art area to protest, 70,000 strong, many not wearing masks and none of them practicing social distancing. One might say that these protest politicos have faith in social change, as if social change was a god that answered prayers and provided their lives with meaning.

My nearly empty parish church, that I see Sunday after Sunday speaks very much to this lack of faith. It’s disheartening. The pastor, in his patient benevolence, never calls attention to the empty space but I can read the disappointment in his eyes.  He’s trying to be charitable and understanding. 

There will always be people who don’t come out of foxholes until the war is long over.  

         

Last week in his homily the pastor said something remarkable. He was speaking about the dangerous and unpredictable times we live in, a time when science fiction has become the new reality. He said that people who have been away from church for years are asking him to teach them to pray. They have forgotten how to pray but they want to learn because they feel the world is in danger.  

One Sunday after Divine Liturgy, I visited the Parkway to take a look at the city’s tent city, Camp Maroon, then walked to the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul is see if it was open. The cathedral’s doors were locked tight, as were the doors of Saint John the Evangelist Church at 13^thand Chestnut Streets. While all the city churches seemed to be closed, I was able to slip into Macy’s, which, architecturally at least, has the look of a large temple. 

Rittenhouse Square:

For me, the real open-air temple during the pandemic has been Rittenhouse Square. Sitting in Rittenhouse Square has been something that I’ve been doing at least once a week with a good friend from Germantown. Sitting in the Square has taken the place of going to an indoor coffee house, our preferred meeting place before science fiction became reality. Our ritual involves buying coffee at a nearby WAWA (not the boarded-up WAWA on Broad Street destroyed by looters) and then walking to the Square and finding a bench in the shade.

We usually wind up sitting near groups of Square regulars. These guys cover the waterfront in terms of looks and disposition. Some are older, some look as if they might be homeless or close to homelessness while others just look like gritty city types who have the ability to hobnob with any class of people—bum, society matron or chief executive officer. These men—they are all men—seem to know one another. Seeing them week after week, I’ve noticed that they all invariably say hello or nod to one another. None of them are wearing masks but, then again, my mask and my friend’s mask are not covering our faces but hanging loosely about our necks ready to be pulled up in an instant. Sitting there among the Square’s massive trees one doesn’t feel the need to keep covered up like women in Saudi Arabia.

I call this little community of Square habitués, the Square Rustics. The Square Rustics do a lot of walking around and changing benches, going from this friend to that, sometimes talking in wild spurts for a long time and then becoming quiet and sitting with their eyes closed in deep meditation as if contemplating this new world that we all find ourselves in.  

Going to the Square week after week I recognize many other regulars. The dog walkers, of course, are legion. The dogs I see tend to be nice looking and unique in some way, from miniature toy poodles to regal Greyhounds but rarely do I see the all-jawface of a pitbull, aka, the hound from hell, and that’s as it should be. Many of the people walking through the Square are not wearing masks while many do wear them. Those who wear masks do not scold those who don’t wear masks, so the Square is virtue-signal free, at least for now. 

         

The lockdown and the stress of recent months have produced quite a few ‘hurt’ human beings. Studies have shown that people who live alone and went through quarantine alone generally have a harder time adjusting to social reintegration when the city goes green. 

The psychological fallout from the quarantine’s solitude has now cursed them with agoraphobic tendencies. 

         

The newly minted agoraphobics don’t want to leave their apartments because they have no interest in mingling with people again.

Other strange behaviors that may be pandemic related would have to include the two people I observed walking through the Square holding large signs. The first, a male in shorts and flip flops, held aloft a large sign that read: Tell Me Something.  He had the look of a UPenn athlete but the fixed smile on his face was disturbing. In another instance, a fat girl with blue hair kept walking back and forth over the Square’s lawns holding a small sign, no doubt political, that nobody could read.  

Sexual anarchy on Craigslist: People Need People?

Then there are the changes on Craigslist Philadelphia. I discovered these changes quite by accident while attempting to post ad concerning a car garage. That’s when I noticed that quite a few of the ads in the business and general categories section of Craigslist were personal ads advertising for quick sex, foot rubs, body massages and hookups. Craigslist’s ban on personal ads several years ago was a shock to avid Craigslist users. For years, that rule was circumvented by personals being put in the Missed Connections or the Rants and Raves. While these rogue ads were often flagged by professional flaggers, many escaped the censor’s hammer and managed to survive. 

The pandemic and months of stay-at-home quarantine have unleashed a tsunami of personals in nearly every Craigslist category, including farm and garden, real estate, rooms wanted and pets.      

 By Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor       

War Torn Center City Philadelphia-Civil Unrest

City Safari: Slouching Through Philadelphia

13thand Walnut Streets

Wed, Jun 24, 2020

City Safari:

Slouching through Philadelphia

Nothing is sacred
The ceremony sinks
Innocence is drowned
In anarchy
The best lack conviction
Given some time to think
And the worst are full of passion without mercy

–       Joni Mitchell

By Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor

Walking in Center City recently I passed the area of 13^thand Walnut Streets and noticed, to my horror, the façade of Printer’s Place, a popular Center City family owned business (1310 Walnut) since 1971. Another Printer’s Place enterprise, John C. Clark Stationers, just up the street at 1326 Walnut shut its doors some time ago.  Printer’s Place was the business card, resume and printing "go to” place while Clark’s sold office equipment, cards and stationary. 

I worked for Printer’s Place in the late 1990s as the manager of its affiliate shop, The Resume Place, located on the first floor of a nearby office building. The Resume Place was part of a cluster of a string of stores, including a Yogurt and sandwich shop, a jeweler’s and a hairdressing salon.  

In the 1990s-resume writing was big business. There was an "art” to resume writing then that for the most part has been lost. I helped customers choose a resume format after interviewing them about their past employment history. I’d work up a rough draft; the draft would be finalized and then sent off to the Printer’s Place printing shop. It was quite an operation. The easiest resumes were updates on existing resumes; creating a resume from scratch was more challenging. Resume writing taught me that for most people there was no such thing as job security, since nearly every client I met had been laid off, fired or resigned from positions that no longer seemed adequate for them.

Standing at 13^thand Walnut last week I was shocked to see the Printer’s Place walk-in shop reduced to boarded up panels. There was also a swath of paint smeared on what used to be the building’s glass exterior. On top of the paint there seemed to be scribbling or graffiti of some sort. The very top of the building, just above the sign Printer’s Place, looked as if it had suffered a structural accident or a harsh attack from the rioting looters in early June. 

I stood there and pondered the building, wondering if the exterior damage was permanent or just something that could be easily fixed. 

  

         My hunch was that this would not be a quick fix, especially as I scanned the entire block, a shadow of what it was in the robust 1990s and early 2000s. The block was replete with stores with paneled boards, a checkerboard of good and bad like Sarajevoin 1993 when Susan Sontagstaged Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot, in that war torn city.

I watched as people on Walnut Street walked past Printer’s Place, wishing somehow that the scene before me was a movie reel that I could rewind to a happier day in the past. 

This shock, this injured little "nothing” of a building that I always took for granted, is a symbol of where the city is headed in the future if things don’t change. (Change as not handling looters with velvet gloves.)     

         

As my eyes settled on the wrecked top exterior of Printer’s Place, I recalled the people I used to work with there.

Old man Lenny, the business patriarch, had his offices in the John C. Clark building. That’s where he hired me. This was Lenny’s homegrown business, large enough to offer employment opportunities for every member of his family, including his wife, Goldy, a slender petite brunette who would glide in and out of the Resume Place like a bird. Goldy, who always had a ready smile, was never one to bark orders. 

Son Steve was the tall hands-on applicator of Lenny’s mostly benign rules. Steve was so quick on his feet, I imagined that he was always playing a soccer game in his head. Like his father, he did not have the iron fist of the bad employer who overrules. Some family businesses are small tyrannies but not Printer’s Place. 

         Non-family employees included Allison, who ran the print shop in the Resume Place building. Allison was officially my boss but you’d never know it. She had a rare sense of humor. Laughter came easily to her; she could get the most serious point across without succumbing to the droll scolding of lesser talents. 

It seemed to me then that such a family business would go on forever, but of course, nothing goes on forever.  

After I left the Resume Place—the need for specially crafted resumes ended with the advent of do-it-yourself resume kits, home word processors and PCs—I’d go back to Printer’s Place periodically to get business cards, meet Allison and catch up on the news of the family.

         

Printer’s Place was always there, a Center City staple like Bundy’s, Brooks Brothers, Macy’s and CVS. 

Lenny had been slowly switching his focus on retirement and a life in Florida, so when he and Goldly went south permanently, son Steve took over the business. Then I heard news that both Lenny and Goldy had died, Lenny who seemed the very opposite of death with all his plans and enterprises, and Goldy with her youthful looking body and Audrey Hepburn bounce.

         How did that happen?

         Sitting at my desk in The Resume Place, I could look into the window of the Yogurt shop, run by a redheaded Jewish guy who came from a family of Orthodox Kabbalah-Zohar educated rabbis. Over frozen vanilla yogurt cones we would often discuss the mystical commentaries in these books that dealt with reincarnation.

  

         I could also look into the window of Rena’s jewelry shop where the air seemed to be scented with an intoxicant that made you want to buy jewelry. On most Friday’s Rena would produce a bottle of champagne and invite me and another store manager over for happy hour. We drank flute after flute of the bubbly while checking out her new shipment of rings and bracelets. A good man’s ring was always hard to find, but not in Rena’s. 

When I saw a lapis ring that she said was particularly special, I made a down payment and walked out with it a month later. 

         Looking back on that era—when plagues were a thing from 1918 or ancient Egypt, or in a scary story written by Albert Camus---the expectation was that the only threats to our individual lives were isolated "individual” assaults like coming down with cancer, getting into an auto accident, dying in a plane crash or of a sudden stroke like the one that caused the death of Anne d’Harnoncourt of the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Sunday, June 1, 2008. 

Unimaginable in the 1990s were city-wide riots and looting that would go on for days, along with police and fire truck sirens piercing the night air, and the sound of explosions that recall images of broken Sarajevo. Center City looted and boarded up?        "Why, the police would nab any rioters within an hour,” most people would have thought then. "The powers that be—the city government-- would never, never allow downtown to be held captive!” Yes, this is what we would have thought in 1999.

That is how naïve we were. 

How terrible things have become: they are tearing down public statues of Junipero Serra, canonized a Catholic saint by Pope Francis in 2015, and immortalized in a book (Junipero Serra, Pioneer colonist of California, 1933) by the great Philadelphia-based essayist, Agnes Repplier.  

From 13^thand Walnut, where I said my mental good-byes to Goldy and Lenny, I headed into Suburban Station, intent on taking a train to Malvern for a family birthday party. 

 Since I had time to kill before my train, I found myself walking around the station, disappointed that there wasn’t a sit down café but glad at least that I could walk with take-out coffee and hang out by the Clothespin and look at City Hall. I’m sorry to report that I found the scene around the Clothespin to be somewhat depressing. There were mostly street people milling about along with a few gray haired old Quaker types carrying protest signs. 

Back in the station, I noticed a police officer sitting in one of those station-mobiles. He was stationed by the entrance, obviously on the lookout for troublemakers. We exchanged friendly hellos and then wound up talking.  

I realized that just by saying hello to him I was, in a sense, "voting” against rioting and siding with law and order. 

I told him how I thought the mayor had failed the city during the days of looting. He seemed to agree. Then I mentioned how important it was for police to spring into action after the first ‘rioting’ brick is thrown. The longer you wait, the more dire the consequences.  

The officer indicated the businesses in Suburban Station and shared the news that many of the owners of those stores did not want to reopen.

The pandemic and the days of the siege had killed their urge to move forward. 

   

New Book, October 26, 2020

Roddy Doyle

City Safari: Some Irish “Love” From The Old Sod

Roddy Doyle

Wed, Jul 01, 2020

By Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor

Irish novelist, playwright and children’s author Roddy Doyle made a virtual visit to Philadelphia recently to promote his new novel, LOVE. Doyle talked with novelist Liz Moore as part of the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Author Events series to an unseen audience of 300. The Cloud Cast virtual event was live streamed and showed the author in his home in Dublin.

Doyle’s house just outside of Dublin sits on a hill overlooking the sea. At the bottom of the hill there’s a bus that can take him into downtown Dublin in ten minutes. When he’s not bussing it, he sometimes rides his bicycle, a 14-minute ride.  

A Dubliner by birth, Doyle is celebrating the release of ‘Love,’ about the reunion of two male friends in a pub where they relive and recount old times. In the pub they ape, as best they can, the way they shared experiences as younger men, when drinking heavily and intensely harbored no physical consequences. One of the men has a secret he will reveal during the course of the conversation. 

Publishers Weeklypraised the book. "This witty, satisfying novel about male friendship, aging, and guilt from Doyle dramatizes language’s inadequacies when it comes to affairs of the heart . . . The two men are nothing if not good company. By closing time, Doyle has focused the novel’s rambling energy into an elegiac and sobering climax. This one is a winner.”                                                                                                           

A Kirkus review of LOVE was somewhat less than favorable.

 "Whatever clarity they are finding isn't all that clear to the reader, who is beginning to find their company as exhausting and interminable as they do….  Eventually, they have to leave….By the time the novel belatedly reaches the big reveal, the reader has passed the point of caring. " 

After graduation from the University College of Dublin, Doyle taught English and Geography in high school for 14 years. In 1987 he self published his first novel, ‘The Commitments,’ about a group of working class teenage boys who start a rock ’n roll band. The fate of many self published books is often containment in moldy boxes on a basement shelf but Doyle’s vanity project went viral before there was a viral: the novel was made into a very successful film.   

The same fate awaited his second novel, ‘The Snapper,” (1990) a novel about single mothers or, as Doyle likes to say, "Had I written this book twenty years earlier when Ireland was a different country, the [out of wedlock] baby in this story would have to be hidden away in a convent.” 

His third novel, The Van(1991), about two friends who go into business together when they purchase a ‘chipper’ or a Fish and Chips van, was also made into a movie.

Three homeruns and you’re out, because Doyle said the book-to-film scenario hasn’t revisited him since The Van.

"It hasn’t happened since,” he told me by phone from his Dublin study,  "Although I wrote scripts for two movies… they were original stories. 

There were plans to make my novel "A Star Called Henry” into a movie but it never happened. My first three novels were adapted to the screen and I can see why. The stories were kind of in a straight line and I was very lucky in that regard. My fourth novel, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha,won the Booker Prize, so the early days were heady days.”

Doyle is one of those Irishmen with the gift of gab. Not only does he speak fast but his words pack a lot of information in a short number of sentences.

His book, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Hais the world as seen through the eyes of a ten-year old Dublin boy in the year 1968. Paddy Clarke’s words of wisdom, include:

   

"They didn’t understand. They didn’t understand that robbing had nothing to do with what we wanted; it was the dare, the terror, the getting away with it.”  

Doyle says that this highly productive six-year span in his life, from 1987 to 1993, "seems like a long time when you’re a young man and when you’re living them but when you look at them now it’s just a blink, really.” He tells me it surprises him that he not only wrote four novels in quick succession but a 4-part TV series, two plays, co-authored a screenplay and two original screenplays while teaching high school and being the father of two children.  

Listen to any online interview with, the always humorous, Doyle and you’re likely to hear more than a few noteworthy quotes. 

Some Roddy Doyle gems include:

         

"When you say you know Irish literature, you know some because it’s going to take you a lifetime to read.”

"While we are laughing, life is worth living.”

 "Men my age don’t read fiction, generally. They just want to read about Hitler and Stalin.”

"There was always a dog in the house when I was a kid.”

An interviewer asked him if he was happy. Doyle said, "No. Occasionally there are things that make me happy but how would you sustain happiness without the use of drink and drugs?”  

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Hahas been called the greatest depiction of childhood in English language literature. Sometimes a reader will ask Doyle about the book and mention two Ha’s Ha’s instead of the [obligatory] three. I fell into that trap during my own transatlantic chat with the author. "You forgot a ‘Ha,’” Doyle said. I told him that saying Ha three times in a row does have a certain sort of magic.  

How did he come up with such a title? Doyle says he was on a pay phone with his publisher to tell him that he had completed the novel. "He said ‘that’s great news, what’s the title?’ I said I don’t have one; he said ‘I think we need one quick, I want to get it into the spring catalog.’ This was a different book. I saw this sort of crude nursery rhyme, something the boys in the school would chant at Paddy Clarke…the Ha, Ha, Ha. Paddy’s schoolmates just keep chanting it. I suggested the title to my publisher and he liked it.”   

Doyle has written one non-fiction book, a memoir of his parents. "Rory and Ita,”(2002). "They’re dead now,” Doyle says. "I co-wrote a book with an Irish soccer player called "The Second Half—memories of Roy Keane,”which came out in 2014. I don’t write newspaper columns as such, and I’ve never written a column or an article about religion.”

I had intended to ask Doyle about religion but held back. After the interview I checked his Wikipedia bio and discovered that he’s an atheist.  

        

Vanity Fair’sfeature on Doyle in 2017 noted that, "Much of 

the change sweeping Ireland is, of course, tied to the waning influence of Catholicism. When Doyle was 17, he realized he was an atheist, a slow-burning epiphany that didn’t just vex his parents, but hampered his day-to-day decisions for decades: ‘I constantly had to explain, no, I can’t do that. I’m an atheist.’ Today, atheism is unremarkable (‘Nobody gives a toss what my religion is any more’), a reality punctuated by last year’s same-sex marriage referendum, which saw thousands upon thousands of Ireland’s diaspora fly home to vote for gay rights.” 

The change in Ireland was noted in 2012 when Psychology Todaynoted that religious attendance rates and belief in God in Ireland had dropped significantly, making Ireland "indistinguishable from the other affluent secular countries of Europe.”

In 2013, Irish Centralreported that, "The latest figures confirm a 2011 a poll by Gallup International, which showed that Ireland now ranks among the top ten atheist nations worldwide, in a huge shift from the last poll in 2005. In the six years between polls, according to the results, one in five Irish people set aside religion. "

The Irish 2017 Census reported that 78 percent of the country identifies as Catholic, down from 84 percent in 2012. 

Roddy Doyle’s work doesn’t generally stir up any controversy but that was not the case when his 4-part series about a working class Dublin family, The Spencers, aired on RTE and BBC1 in 1994. At that time, he received both praise and condemnation. Condemnation came in the form of death threats. His accusers thought he was attacking working class families and Catholicism.

Doyle says he read the compliments and threats as Facebook messages late in bed late one night and then went off to sleep. He adds he wouldn’t be so cavalier about getting death threats today but would go straight to the authorities.  

Doyle, who grew up in Kabarik, lives on a hill on the north side of Dublin, a 3 minute walk from the sea. "I’m not worried about climate change,” he told me. "I think there’s a good 50 years before the sea starts lapping up the front step.”

We wind up talking about the covid lockdown, which was especially intense in Ireland. 

"The messages at the beginning of the covid crisis were very clear. For instance, the direct contact numbers went down drastically because people just obeyed. It’s more complicated now, now that everything is voluntary. By degrees things are loosening up. Hopefully this has been a once in a lifetime experience. ‘

He says the lockdown didn’t change his life that drastically because, as a writer, he’s used to spending hours alone in his study. His once-a-day walks to the sea helped him get through most days. He says he is glad that his children are adults. "I didn’t have to worry about a teenage boy climbing out the bedroom window to go and find his friends. Essentially what you’re asking young people to do is behave like middle aged people for three months.”

         

He adds that he is grateful that both his parents are no longer alive so he didn’t have to worry about them during the crisis.

         

Still, the 3-month lockdown experience has wrought unexpected changes to what Doyle imagined he would be working on. "I’m now writing short stories. I had several plays lined up for this and they are all postponed or cancelled. I don’t know when theaters will be able to be able to open again. Theater for me for many years has been a great source of joy. "   

         

"We’ve experienced quite a lot in the last three months,” he tells me before signing off. "There might be a rush of really not very good novels [about covid and the lockdown experience].” 

          

I tell him I’m beginning to see these trends in Philadelphia, with theater companies offering memberships in a PANdemic Reading club. 

         

Doyle says he’s looking forward to seeing live theater again, although if he has to he will be content with virtual theater because "it’s better than nothing.” 

         

Oscar Wilde’s quote, "Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess,” doesn’t necessarily work in the case of theater. 

         

"You know, if I see a really, really brilliant theater monologue, I don’t necessarily want to see another one a week later.”