ASH Wednesday February 2011
I just returned from February’s ASH Wednesday dinner at O’Casey’s in Midtown Manhattan, accompanied by fellow sherlockian and roommate Atomly. Despite the post-pea souper (or it’s NYC equivalent) weather we’ve had lately, a nice group of fifteen or so Sherlockians were in attendance. A special thanks to ASH’s Susan Rice (‘A Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen’ or ‘Beeswing’ to the BSI) for her warm invitation and continuing welcoming spirit. Newly investitured Lyndsay Faye (“Kitty Winter”), author of Dust and Shadow, was in attendance along with Peter Crupe a clubable man if there ever was one and co-founder of The Montague Street Lodgers of Brooklyn.
Pleasant conversation was split rather evenly between Sherlockian and non-Sherlockian topics, the former focusing mainly on Holmes as portrayed by Jeremy Brett, Douglas Wilmer and other notable (and not so notable) actors along with the relative merits of the more obscure Sherlock one-off films such as Without a Clue, The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother, and a personal favorite of mine (Billy not Gene) Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes; though some fun was poked at the use of non-canonical older brothers and robotic dinosaurs in a certain recent Sherlock film.
Though only my second ASH Wednesday dinner, I was again comforted by the warmth and friendship that the upstairs rooms of O’Casey’s exudes, perennially watched over by that other great figure of literature:
[James Joyce]
