Solpadeine is My Boyfriend, a play we saw yesterday during the Dublin Fringe Festival, was about the most moving performance I've seen since The Last of Mrs. Lincoln when I was in my 20's.  I'll remember it for a long, long time. (Solpadeine is a drug for headaches.  It has codeine in it so it's addictive.  It's really amazing to me that you can't buy a big bottle of aspirin tablets here but you can get an addictive drug over-the-counter.  I think the issue must be quantity and how it's taken because it seems you can only buy 12 at a time of any headache remedy and almost all of them--including this one--is effervescent and dissolved in water.)

The show, a one person performance, written and performed by an incredibly talented young woman was about the struggles young people face in Ireland -- all over the world really -- when they can't find jobs.  The poignant aspect about this condition here in Ireland is that joblessness among the young is almost always 'solved' by emigration.  Now they are mostly going to Australia but the effect is still the same on Ireland as when they were going to America.  Pain and loss among family and friends left behind.  I'd never really looked at it from the perspective of the young people who stayed behind.  The courage, it seemed, was in the going.  This young woman, Stefanie Preissner, has captured and articulated the courage it takes to stay.  I was really, really impressed.  If you are interested, you can read more about this performance and her here:  http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/emigration-stefanie-preissner-585621-Sep2012/

I'm reminded over and over again how what we thought in America was a bad economy, is really so, so much better than what it could be like if the recession was as real there as it is here.  For all the talk of how bad it is there, and I'm not minimizing the lack of work that I know continues to bedevil the U.S. economy and people we know and love there; the double dip recession that is here, is frightening.  Not only are there no jobs but investments are not performing either so even people with savings continue to be hurt.  We had a brief conversation with a woman about our age while we were waiting for the doors to open on the performance.  She has three sons and even the suggestion of them emigrating brought tears to her eyes, she knows it's a real possibility that one or more of them will do it.  It was really sad.

On a happier note, both Alan and I received copies of the books we worked on the in last year in the mail this week.  It was a real pleasure to see them in print.  Mine, 10 Lessons for Cultivating Member Commitment is a "best seller".  Which in association terms, means has sold over 200 copies since it was published in August.  I don't have the numbers for Alan's, Environmental Scanning for Associations.  I don't think Alan is really touting this achievement in any event since his area is really fiction.  He's been busy working on a play and has joined a writer's group, so that's his main focus.

I've taken two drop-in dance classes already, and will start the more formal set dancing class on Monday.  I'm very excited to begin.  The drop-in classes are on Wednesday afternoons and so far I've learned a few steps in the jitterbug and the start of a minuet.  It's quite a bit more strenuous than it seemed at first but good fun.

Next week we will start going to the plays we've booked in the Dublin Theater Festival, including the first staging of James Joyce The Dubliners with our visitors, Alan's sister and brother in law.   We are so looking forward to seeing them.