TV presenter SYBIL MULCAHY and best friend LIZZIE LYNCH
TV viewers are used to the sight of Sybil Mulcahy sparking off her male co-presenter Martin King on TV3’s The Morning Show. But while the pair have been entertaining fans with their on-screen chemistry for the past year, in reality Sybil is all about having a good set of girlfriends.
“There are about eight of us who are still close and in touch from our school days and Lizzie is chief among them,” she says of best pal Lizzie Lynch. The pair met when they both moved to the same primary school at the age of ten. “We didn’t know anyone else so we gravitated towards each other,” says Sybil.
Lizzie feels the pair actually had a lot in common from the get-go. They are both from large families headed by strong matriarchies. Lizzie adds: “I think it was probably expected of both of us that we’d become lawyers and marry doctors!”
The career paths they did take put thousands of miles between them in their early 20s. Lizzie, who works for Goldman Sachs, lived in London for many years. “I still don’t have a clue what her job entails,” confesses Sybil, “I just know that it involved a lot of jetsetting and she earns about four times what I do.”
Lizzie claims they are both impressed with each other’s success. “Mine is the serious boring job but Sybil’s is much more glamorous.”
When Lizzie was in London, Sybil ended up in the States for five years. “She met a guy there and started doing TV work, so we thought we were going to lose Sybil to Ohio,” says Lizzie.
However, both girls ended up back in Dublin and fell easily back into the friendship. “I think it’s not just a case of shared history,” says Lizzie. “Sybil and I genuinely enjoy each other’s company and when we’re together we can get back to who we are.”
Sybil insists that she was “the messer” of the two of them in school. “I was suspended from school for two weeks once but she wasn’t bold at all. She would have been very academic and kept the head down.”
Lizzie argues: “Neither of us were model pupils. We were BOTH suspended at different stages. It was nothing malicious, just high spirits, and coming towards the end of the six years we knuckled down. Actually Sybil was a very good netball player in school.”
Now both women have families of their own – Sybil has two children and Lizzie has three – but see each other at the weekends. “We both love drinking wine, having a laugh, shopping,” says Sybil.
Their lively relationship is not untouched by the odd argument. “Mostly after a few drinks,” they chime.
“The only time we row is about politics,” says Sybil. “We had some humdingers about that. She would always have been a real Fianna Fail head during the Celtic Tiger and I would be going on about corruption and brown envelopes.”
Lizzie says the disagreements are healthy because they are both honest and open types. “Sybil wears her heart on her sleeve but she doesn’t bear a grudge.
“Most of all she’s just great fun. When I was her bridesmaid with another friend, we got a Wonder Woman outfit for her to wear on her hen. With someone else you might have to bully them into it but Sybil needed no persuasion. The boots were on in minutes, the cape over the shoulder, bold as brass. She is just as much fun as she was when we were kids.”
ENDS
Showing posts with label Next-of-Kin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Next-of-Kin. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Next-of-kin: The bumper issue! Peter Sheridan, Louise Lennox and Katherine Lynch
A few pieces from my Next-of-Kin series for the Weekend magazine were published while I was away, so here's who you (and I) may have missed!
Playwright PETER SHERIDAN and son FIACHRA
Peter Sheridan has moulded his life around the arts. He and brother Jim founded the Project Theatre Company in Dublin in the early 1970s, Peter going on to become a prolific playwright and author and Jim directing films like My Left Foot, The Field and In The Name of The Father.
“Our dad introduced us to the theatre when we were teenagers and we just fell in love with this medium even though we had been playing music, we had been in a garage band together,” says Peter.
Despite this familial way with words, Peter was surprised when his youngest son Fiachra approached him with a draft of his first book, a memoir called The Runners. It was published last year.
“I was very surprised when Fiachra started writing because of all my four kids I would have least expected him to,” says Peter. “My daughter Doireann always had a strong interest in my work, but the conversation between me and Fiachra would have been more like, ‘Isn’t it terrible Liverpool were beaten 3-1 yesterday?’”
There was no-one more surprised than Fiachra. He had a chequered career in his 20s, spanning a spell as League of Ireland footballer and a hedge fund manager and, eventually, his current day job as a maths teacher. “I went through a lot to realise teaching was what I loved,” says Fiachra. He wrote The Runners at weekends and in the holidays, and is currently working on a sequel.
“For the whole of my 20s, I really hadn’t a clue what I was doing. I think now: How did Dad achieve so much in that time? He had four kids in his 20s. I was nearly 30 when I had my first.”
Peter and Jim had just turned 20 when they founded the Project. Fiachra thinks his experiences of growing up in an artistic environment might have delayed the bite of the writing bug.
“I hated the arts and all I wanted to do was play football,” he says. “All I saw was the Project and actors sitting around drinking coffee and going to rehearsals. As a kid, rehearsals are inherently boring. When you’re a kid, you rebel against everything your father does.”
Peter, although committed to the arts, understood his son’s reluctance. “To be honest, I would have much preferred if they became footballers because that’s what I wanted when I was a kid, maybe play for Man United,” he says.
Neither, says Fiachra, did the financial insecurity of a career in the arts appeal.
“They (children Doireann, Ross, Fiachra and Nuala) always felt that the arts equaled poverty and they were right,” says Peter, “We were living on very small pickings in the 1970s and 80s. We lived in a very small house in Ballybough, I remember my two daughters sharing a bedroom that you could barely fit the bunk bed in.”
These days, Fiachra can see his dad’s house from the bedroom window of the north Dublin home he shares with his wife and their two small children. In the back garden, his six-month-old son Julen is gurgling at his granddad.
“When he became a father, I felt it was this huge bonding thing in the family,” says Peter. “You feel that thing of life starting again, of the circle continuing. It’s been a big bonding thing for us and has deepened our relationship in the past few years.”
The writing too has brought them together. “When Fiachra came to me with his first attempts, I was so taken aback. He has that gift of expressing something in a very unaffected manner.”
Praise from a proud father? Fiachra demurs. “I know the most honest opinion I will get will be from him. I don’t fear showing him something and him telling me it’s crap. That’s alright.”
• Peter Sheridan directs The Shawshank Redemption at the Gaiety Theatre Dublin until May 29.
TV chef LOUISE LENNOX and her sister NICOLA
When pastry chef Louise Lennox appears on RTE’S The Restaurant, sister Nicola is often carefully watching. Not to see Louise keep the visiting celebrity cooks in line - but to check that Nicola’s clothes are not making a surprise appearance on TV.
“My flatmate is convinced Louise has a key to our place and she comes up when we’re not there and raids our wardrobes,” says Nicola. “It’s when she wears the stuff to cook in that it annoys me. They get destroyed. She gets chocolate everywhere!”
Nicola, a nanny, tuned in one day to see Louise do a cookery demo on The Afternoon Show. “I was making a sandwich for the little girl I was minding and told her to tell me when Lou Lou was on the telly. She comes running in saying, ‘Nicky, Lou Lou is wearing a pair of your earrings!’”
Apart from the issue of accessories gone AWOL, their relationship as adults is much more stable than it was as children. The youngest two of five, there was a substantial gap between Nicola and Louise and their older siblings. As a result, they were both “the babies” of the household.
“We were as thick as thieves because we shared a room together,” says Louise, “But then we’d kill each other and be best friends an hour later.”
When they fought, they’d fight ferociously. “Oh, hair-pulling and biting and scraping,” says Nicola, “We each had our signature moves. I would start to cry and Louise would give me one of her sweets if I wouldn’t tell Mum, and I’d be like, ‘Okay’.”
Two very difficult times in their lives pushed the childish battles behind them. Both girls were diagnosed with dyslexia as youngsters. While Nicola felt her secondary school was supportive, Louise felt no-one but her siblings could really understand the frustration and embarrassment she suffered as a result of her reading difficulties.
“It’s kind of how I got into cookery,” says Louise. “I used to stutter through reading assignments so my teacher let me figure out recipes from a cookbook my aunt gave me when I was ten and bake a cake for my homework. That was great – it gave me self-belief.”
She needed that confidence when she started secondary school, a different one to that which Nicola attended.
“The teacher would make me stand up and read and I’d have panic attacks, feeling this heaviness all around me. I couldn’t even read words like ‘the’ and ‘these’, which I normally could. I bunked off school a lot so I wouldn’t have to read aloud.”
Then, when Louise was 17, her best friend Janice died in an accident.
“Louise is two and a half years older than me and that was a huge age gap when I was 14, but when Janice died it drove us closer together,” says Nicola.
“From the day Janice died, I used to sleep on Louise’s floor,” says Nicola.
Louise takes up the story: “Because I was afraid to sleep on my own. Scared Janice would come down to say, I’m okay!’ It was okay for me to cry around Nicky. I’m really weird about letting people see me cry, but I felt comfortable in her space and then we developed a friendship on a whole new level.”
Louise describes Nicola as “really caring” – she does a lot of voluntary work outside her job as a nanny – and for her part, Nicola is proud of her sister’s TV work but knows it’s not for her.
“Our parents never compared us to each other,” says Louise, “There’s never been sibling rivalry in that way.”
Nicola thinks for a moment and adds: “The only thing I would be really jealous of is if she got to do something with Westlife. I really like them and she just wouldn’t appreciate it!”
Comedy actress KATHERINE LYNCH and best friend WARREN MEYLER
ONLY a very, very good friend can persuade a woman to burst out of a costume shaped like a sanitary product in front of a packed auditorium.
That was the test of friendship set for TV comedy star Katherine Lynch by her best pal and co-writer Warren Meyler – and she passed. As the only woman among a chorus of men entering Alternative Miss Ireland in 1998, Katherine had to stand out. She chose a drag alter-ego, Tampy Lilette, who she describes as a periodically-obsessed country and western singer.
“So we had her burst out of a giant tampon onto the stage, saying, ‘Sorry I’m a little late!’” laughs Warren.
“I was going, ‘What is that?’ when he suggested it,” says Katherine, “And Warren was saying, ‘It’s a tampon. Just get into it’.”
The pair take their comedy quite seriously now. They run their own production company, Waka, which created the RTE2 series Single Ladies and Wonderwomen, with Katherine the performer and Warren producer, director and co-writer.
Their shared comedy roots go back to the mid-1990s when they first met but it wasn’t exactly friendship at first sight. Warren was working in a late-night café in Temple Bar called Smalltalk – “a real whiskey-in-the-teapot place” – when Katherine started as a waitress.
“We hated each other at first,” he said. “I thought she was weird, and she thought I was weird.” (Katherine interrupts: “He WAS weird. Warren was a Michael Jackson fan and he moonwalked everywhere.” For the record, Warren denies this. Strongly.)
Working nights proved a bonding experience. “We used to have people on shift work coming in, from doctors to U2 and Boyzone,” says Katherine. “One night Quentin Tarantino and Mira Sorvino came in and stayed till six in the morning because we doused them in whiskey. I sang Caledonia for Mira and she cried… in pain.”
They “settled into each other” and discovered a mutual love of kitsch, slapstick humour.
“We shared a flat together on Parliament Street and when we were broke we’d be sitting in and doing sketches and that’s how we ended up writing comedy together,” says Warren.
Over a decade on, Warren and Katherine still socialise and work together. They say their romantic partners are very understanding of their close friendship. Ask if that was always the case in the past and they laugh. “There have been one or two situations like that but someone who is threatened by your friendships isn’t right for you,” says Warren.
They are currently holed up in an office together writing material for Katherine’s live shows in Vicar Street this August. (“And Warren’s doing my VAT for me,” adds Katherine.) Don’t they ever get on each other nerves? “We laugh loads and we argue loads,” says Katherine.
They are still pals with the Smalltalk gang some of whom, like Brendan Courtney and Declan Buckley (aka Shirley Temple Bar), have also found success in the entertainment biz. They might be all grown-up now but it doesn’t take much prompting to get Katherine and Warren reminiscing about their party days.
“We were adamant we were going to get into the MTV awards when they were in Dublin, do you remember that?” says Warren. They blagged into seats beside Whitney Houston – with Katherine dressed in a floor-length white puffa coat pretending to be a Dublin hip hop star and Warren and a friend as her backing dancers.
“The poor boys were dressed like a pair of gay dancers with bellytops on them,” says Katherine, “I couldn’t take my coat off because I had my work clothes from the restaurant on underneath. I was sweating buckets!” Sounds like a good idea for a comedy sketch…
Playwright PETER SHERIDAN and son FIACHRA
Peter Sheridan has moulded his life around the arts. He and brother Jim founded the Project Theatre Company in Dublin in the early 1970s, Peter going on to become a prolific playwright and author and Jim directing films like My Left Foot, The Field and In The Name of The Father.
“Our dad introduced us to the theatre when we were teenagers and we just fell in love with this medium even though we had been playing music, we had been in a garage band together,” says Peter.
Despite this familial way with words, Peter was surprised when his youngest son Fiachra approached him with a draft of his first book, a memoir called The Runners. It was published last year.
“I was very surprised when Fiachra started writing because of all my four kids I would have least expected him to,” says Peter. “My daughter Doireann always had a strong interest in my work, but the conversation between me and Fiachra would have been more like, ‘Isn’t it terrible Liverpool were beaten 3-1 yesterday?’”
There was no-one more surprised than Fiachra. He had a chequered career in his 20s, spanning a spell as League of Ireland footballer and a hedge fund manager and, eventually, his current day job as a maths teacher. “I went through a lot to realise teaching was what I loved,” says Fiachra. He wrote The Runners at weekends and in the holidays, and is currently working on a sequel.
“For the whole of my 20s, I really hadn’t a clue what I was doing. I think now: How did Dad achieve so much in that time? He had four kids in his 20s. I was nearly 30 when I had my first.”
Peter and Jim had just turned 20 when they founded the Project. Fiachra thinks his experiences of growing up in an artistic environment might have delayed the bite of the writing bug.
“I hated the arts and all I wanted to do was play football,” he says. “All I saw was the Project and actors sitting around drinking coffee and going to rehearsals. As a kid, rehearsals are inherently boring. When you’re a kid, you rebel against everything your father does.”
Peter, although committed to the arts, understood his son’s reluctance. “To be honest, I would have much preferred if they became footballers because that’s what I wanted when I was a kid, maybe play for Man United,” he says.
Neither, says Fiachra, did the financial insecurity of a career in the arts appeal.
“They (children Doireann, Ross, Fiachra and Nuala) always felt that the arts equaled poverty and they were right,” says Peter, “We were living on very small pickings in the 1970s and 80s. We lived in a very small house in Ballybough, I remember my two daughters sharing a bedroom that you could barely fit the bunk bed in.”
These days, Fiachra can see his dad’s house from the bedroom window of the north Dublin home he shares with his wife and their two small children. In the back garden, his six-month-old son Julen is gurgling at his granddad.
“When he became a father, I felt it was this huge bonding thing in the family,” says Peter. “You feel that thing of life starting again, of the circle continuing. It’s been a big bonding thing for us and has deepened our relationship in the past few years.”
The writing too has brought them together. “When Fiachra came to me with his first attempts, I was so taken aback. He has that gift of expressing something in a very unaffected manner.”
Praise from a proud father? Fiachra demurs. “I know the most honest opinion I will get will be from him. I don’t fear showing him something and him telling me it’s crap. That’s alright.”
• Peter Sheridan directs The Shawshank Redemption at the Gaiety Theatre Dublin until May 29.
TV chef LOUISE LENNOX and her sister NICOLA
When pastry chef Louise Lennox appears on RTE’S The Restaurant, sister Nicola is often carefully watching. Not to see Louise keep the visiting celebrity cooks in line - but to check that Nicola’s clothes are not making a surprise appearance on TV.
“My flatmate is convinced Louise has a key to our place and she comes up when we’re not there and raids our wardrobes,” says Nicola. “It’s when she wears the stuff to cook in that it annoys me. They get destroyed. She gets chocolate everywhere!”
Nicola, a nanny, tuned in one day to see Louise do a cookery demo on The Afternoon Show. “I was making a sandwich for the little girl I was minding and told her to tell me when Lou Lou was on the telly. She comes running in saying, ‘Nicky, Lou Lou is wearing a pair of your earrings!’”
Apart from the issue of accessories gone AWOL, their relationship as adults is much more stable than it was as children. The youngest two of five, there was a substantial gap between Nicola and Louise and their older siblings. As a result, they were both “the babies” of the household.
“We were as thick as thieves because we shared a room together,” says Louise, “But then we’d kill each other and be best friends an hour later.”
When they fought, they’d fight ferociously. “Oh, hair-pulling and biting and scraping,” says Nicola, “We each had our signature moves. I would start to cry and Louise would give me one of her sweets if I wouldn’t tell Mum, and I’d be like, ‘Okay’.”
Two very difficult times in their lives pushed the childish battles behind them. Both girls were diagnosed with dyslexia as youngsters. While Nicola felt her secondary school was supportive, Louise felt no-one but her siblings could really understand the frustration and embarrassment she suffered as a result of her reading difficulties.
“It’s kind of how I got into cookery,” says Louise. “I used to stutter through reading assignments so my teacher let me figure out recipes from a cookbook my aunt gave me when I was ten and bake a cake for my homework. That was great – it gave me self-belief.”
She needed that confidence when she started secondary school, a different one to that which Nicola attended.
“The teacher would make me stand up and read and I’d have panic attacks, feeling this heaviness all around me. I couldn’t even read words like ‘the’ and ‘these’, which I normally could. I bunked off school a lot so I wouldn’t have to read aloud.”
Then, when Louise was 17, her best friend Janice died in an accident.
“Louise is two and a half years older than me and that was a huge age gap when I was 14, but when Janice died it drove us closer together,” says Nicola.
“From the day Janice died, I used to sleep on Louise’s floor,” says Nicola.
Louise takes up the story: “Because I was afraid to sleep on my own. Scared Janice would come down to say, I’m okay!’ It was okay for me to cry around Nicky. I’m really weird about letting people see me cry, but I felt comfortable in her space and then we developed a friendship on a whole new level.”
Louise describes Nicola as “really caring” – she does a lot of voluntary work outside her job as a nanny – and for her part, Nicola is proud of her sister’s TV work but knows it’s not for her.
“Our parents never compared us to each other,” says Louise, “There’s never been sibling rivalry in that way.”
Nicola thinks for a moment and adds: “The only thing I would be really jealous of is if she got to do something with Westlife. I really like them and she just wouldn’t appreciate it!”
Comedy actress KATHERINE LYNCH and best friend WARREN MEYLER
ONLY a very, very good friend can persuade a woman to burst out of a costume shaped like a sanitary product in front of a packed auditorium.
That was the test of friendship set for TV comedy star Katherine Lynch by her best pal and co-writer Warren Meyler – and she passed. As the only woman among a chorus of men entering Alternative Miss Ireland in 1998, Katherine had to stand out. She chose a drag alter-ego, Tampy Lilette, who she describes as a periodically-obsessed country and western singer.
“So we had her burst out of a giant tampon onto the stage, saying, ‘Sorry I’m a little late!’” laughs Warren.
“I was going, ‘What is that?’ when he suggested it,” says Katherine, “And Warren was saying, ‘It’s a tampon. Just get into it’.”
The pair take their comedy quite seriously now. They run their own production company, Waka, which created the RTE2 series Single Ladies and Wonderwomen, with Katherine the performer and Warren producer, director and co-writer.
Their shared comedy roots go back to the mid-1990s when they first met but it wasn’t exactly friendship at first sight. Warren was working in a late-night café in Temple Bar called Smalltalk – “a real whiskey-in-the-teapot place” – when Katherine started as a waitress.
“We hated each other at first,” he said. “I thought she was weird, and she thought I was weird.” (Katherine interrupts: “He WAS weird. Warren was a Michael Jackson fan and he moonwalked everywhere.” For the record, Warren denies this. Strongly.)
Working nights proved a bonding experience. “We used to have people on shift work coming in, from doctors to U2 and Boyzone,” says Katherine. “One night Quentin Tarantino and Mira Sorvino came in and stayed till six in the morning because we doused them in whiskey. I sang Caledonia for Mira and she cried… in pain.”
They “settled into each other” and discovered a mutual love of kitsch, slapstick humour.
“We shared a flat together on Parliament Street and when we were broke we’d be sitting in and doing sketches and that’s how we ended up writing comedy together,” says Warren.
Over a decade on, Warren and Katherine still socialise and work together. They say their romantic partners are very understanding of their close friendship. Ask if that was always the case in the past and they laugh. “There have been one or two situations like that but someone who is threatened by your friendships isn’t right for you,” says Warren.
They are currently holed up in an office together writing material for Katherine’s live shows in Vicar Street this August. (“And Warren’s doing my VAT for me,” adds Katherine.) Don’t they ever get on each other nerves? “We laugh loads and we argue loads,” says Katherine.
They are still pals with the Smalltalk gang some of whom, like Brendan Courtney and Declan Buckley (aka Shirley Temple Bar), have also found success in the entertainment biz. They might be all grown-up now but it doesn’t take much prompting to get Katherine and Warren reminiscing about their party days.
“We were adamant we were going to get into the MTV awards when they were in Dublin, do you remember that?” says Warren. They blagged into seats beside Whitney Houston – with Katherine dressed in a floor-length white puffa coat pretending to be a Dublin hip hop star and Warren and a friend as her backing dancers.
“The poor boys were dressed like a pair of gay dancers with bellytops on them,” says Katherine, “I couldn’t take my coat off because I had my work clothes from the restaurant on underneath. I was sweating buckets!” Sounds like a good idea for a comedy sketch…
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Next-of-kin: Sallyanne and Sarah May Clark
Restaurateur SALLYANNE CLARKE and her daughter SARAH MAY
Sallyanne Clarke jokes that she has three children: daughter Sarah May, 20, son Andrew, 14, and L’Ecrivain, the famous Dublin restaurant she owns with chef husband Derry.
Sarah May nods in agreement. “The restaurant is 21 years old this year,” she laughs, “It’s like the eldest child in the family.” And a particularly demanding child at that. Sallyanne originally intended to help Derry out for just the first six months after l’Ecrivain launched. Two decades later, she is still welcoming diners at the front of house while Derry keeps things sizzling in the kitchen.
“There was us and there was the restaurant,” says Sarah May. “It’s not like we were abandoned or anything but it came first. When you’re younger, you don’t understand that the restaurant is what is clothing you and putting food on the table, literally.”
These days, Sarah May has a clearer insight into the pressures her parents were under as she works several shifts a week in l’Ecrivain while studying marketing and event management in college.
“When she was a child, we’d come home at night and she’d be sitting up waiting to talk to us and play,” remembers Sallyanne. “She was very with it, very outspoken, very precocious, very bright. She always asked questions and still does.”
Sallyanne would bring the children to school in the morning and collect them afterwards. Squeezing in a rest between lunch service, the school run and evening service wasn’t so easily guaranteed. “We would try to persuade Sarah May to have a little nap with us, and she’d say, ‘But I’ve already had mine!’
“I always remember she would be in the bed beside you in those afternoons when we didn’t have someone in to help out, she’d be sticking her fingers in your eye and pulling at your nose, trying to get you to wake up so she could talk to you. You might have had a late night and an early morning and you knew you’d have a late night again ahead of you so it was always go, go, go.”
Mum and daughter agree that combining family and work was a delicate balancing act. “It’s always a trade-off,” says Sallyanne. “But being a working mom meant I could structure my time and when we were with them, we gave them our undivided attention. It was their time, nobody else’s.”
Sunday is sacred for the Clarkes. “The restaurant is closed on Sunday so it was always a family day, and still is,” says Sarah May.
The dynamics of their relationship have changed somewhat as the kids have grown. As Andrew, who is currently in boarding school, told Sallyanne recently: “You know Mum, I think you’re missing me more than I’m missing you!”
Moving into her own place has made Sarah May realise that her childhood equipped her with a sense of independence.
“I was talking to one of my friends the other day and he said ‘I don’t know how you live on your own, I don’t even know how to work a washing machine’,” she says. “That’s ridiculous. I can’t believe how some parents baby their children. They are 20, 21 and they don’t know how to do anything for themselves.”
Now that Sarah May is moving on in life, Sallyanne notes that it’s more important than ever to make sure the family bond survives that transition to adulthood. “Outside of seeing her at work, we do a dance class on Monday night together. We usually meet up an hour beforehand, go for a coffee. It’s just one day a week but it’s a conscious effort we make to do something together. It’s brilliant fun.”
Sallyanne Clarke jokes that she has three children: daughter Sarah May, 20, son Andrew, 14, and L’Ecrivain, the famous Dublin restaurant she owns with chef husband Derry.
Sarah May nods in agreement. “The restaurant is 21 years old this year,” she laughs, “It’s like the eldest child in the family.” And a particularly demanding child at that. Sallyanne originally intended to help Derry out for just the first six months after l’Ecrivain launched. Two decades later, she is still welcoming diners at the front of house while Derry keeps things sizzling in the kitchen.
“There was us and there was the restaurant,” says Sarah May. “It’s not like we were abandoned or anything but it came first. When you’re younger, you don’t understand that the restaurant is what is clothing you and putting food on the table, literally.”
These days, Sarah May has a clearer insight into the pressures her parents were under as she works several shifts a week in l’Ecrivain while studying marketing and event management in college.
“When she was a child, we’d come home at night and she’d be sitting up waiting to talk to us and play,” remembers Sallyanne. “She was very with it, very outspoken, very precocious, very bright. She always asked questions and still does.”
Sallyanne would bring the children to school in the morning and collect them afterwards. Squeezing in a rest between lunch service, the school run and evening service wasn’t so easily guaranteed. “We would try to persuade Sarah May to have a little nap with us, and she’d say, ‘But I’ve already had mine!’
“I always remember she would be in the bed beside you in those afternoons when we didn’t have someone in to help out, she’d be sticking her fingers in your eye and pulling at your nose, trying to get you to wake up so she could talk to you. You might have had a late night and an early morning and you knew you’d have a late night again ahead of you so it was always go, go, go.”
Mum and daughter agree that combining family and work was a delicate balancing act. “It’s always a trade-off,” says Sallyanne. “But being a working mom meant I could structure my time and when we were with them, we gave them our undivided attention. It was their time, nobody else’s.”
Sunday is sacred for the Clarkes. “The restaurant is closed on Sunday so it was always a family day, and still is,” says Sarah May.
The dynamics of their relationship have changed somewhat as the kids have grown. As Andrew, who is currently in boarding school, told Sallyanne recently: “You know Mum, I think you’re missing me more than I’m missing you!”
Moving into her own place has made Sarah May realise that her childhood equipped her with a sense of independence.
“I was talking to one of my friends the other day and he said ‘I don’t know how you live on your own, I don’t even know how to work a washing machine’,” she says. “That’s ridiculous. I can’t believe how some parents baby their children. They are 20, 21 and they don’t know how to do anything for themselves.”
Now that Sarah May is moving on in life, Sallyanne notes that it’s more important than ever to make sure the family bond survives that transition to adulthood. “Outside of seeing her at work, we do a dance class on Monday night together. We usually meet up an hour beforehand, go for a coffee. It’s just one day a week but it’s a conscious effort we make to do something together. It’s brilliant fun.”
Monday, May 3, 2010
Next-of-Kin: Finbarr Wright and wife Angela
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NEXT-OF-KIN is a new series I have started for the Irish Independent's Weekend magazine, interviewing some well-known faces and the person closest to them about their relationship.
We kicked off with the very happy, very jolly tenor Finbarr Wright and his wife Angela...
Singer Finbar Wright has serenaded us with songs of love for two decades – but it was the siren call of his wife Angela that he found impossible to resist. The couple first met when they both attended singing classes at the Cork School of Music in the late 1980s.
“Her lesson was after mine and the routine was that she’d arrive early and sit inside the door, this gorgeous blonde,” says Finbar. “I never missed a singing lesson!”
Angela waves away his romantic take on events. “The real story is that the teacher was so enamoured with his voice that his lesson would run longer and eat into my time,” she laughs. “That’s the reason he’s a singer and I’m not!”
The couple didn’t get together until Angela went to UCC a year or so later. “Finbar tricked me,” says Angela. “He pretended he wanted access to the library to see some music scores. He had left UCC at that stage so I had to sneak him in under my card.
“It was just an excuse for him to say to me, ‘I have to make it up to you; let me take you out’!” Mindful of the age gap between them – “we say it’s ten years, but it’s nearer 12” – Angela resisted the date at first. “I remember being nervous and wanting to cancel the date the day before but I’m glad I didn’t. We just clicked. We never looked back.”
The couple’s two children are now nearly grown. Son Fergus is nearly 18 and daughter Ileana has just turned 16. “Angela was so vital to the growth of my career because she had to carry on with everything while I was away singing,” says Finbar who is celebrating 20 years as a professional singer this year with a nationwide tour. The couple also celebrate their 20th anniversary this year.
“We married in 1990, before my first album came out,” says Finbar. “Starting off and building a career in showbiz is difficult and we had lean times, certainly.”
Angela remembers one friend asking her if she knew what she was letting herself in for at the time of her marriage. “She said, ‘Are you mad? This guy is only starting down the road.’ It thought it was her who was mad. I was madly in love and there is no life unless it’s with Finbar. You can’t be in a bad mood when he’s around.”
Accordingly, the times when Finbar is away from home can be tough. “The week before he goes, I absolutely hate that,” she says. “But what’s strange is that I can’t wait until he goes because then I can physically count the days until he’s back again.”
Finbar finds that absence makes the heart grow fonder. “Definitely,” he says, “It has kept the relationship very fresh and it’s lovely coming back together. The first night I’m back, we go out to dinner and we always make time for each other.”
Angela lectures in marketing at Cork Institute of Technology. She has always worked, even with the children, and finds that when Finbar’s away she can actually get a lot done. “She studied for a PhD that way,” says Finbar, “I have to call her Doctor!”
The busy pair sometimes daydream about retreating to a little house in France. “We say that about once a month,” jokes Finbar.
“Sometimes we talk about taking a year off,” adds Angela, “but it’s all been a journey for us. I didn’t know what would happen – but it has exceeded my expectations.”
• Finbar Wright celebrate 20 years in music at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin on May 9. Dates for his other concerts nationwide are at www.finbarwright.com
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