Real, Live Irish Debutantes Contend for Rose of Tralee Crown

OK, so I’m Irish. Make that Irish-American.

This happenstance of birth has blessed me with skin that blisters under even a wintry sun, constellations of freckles, a pug nose, a tendency to brood over life’s tragedies and unfortunately sturdy limbs of the kind New York Times columnist Kathleen Quinlan once described as “Irish girl piano legs.”

My heritage, I thought, meant I was not made of the same fluffy stuff as debutantes or beauty queens. In Philadelphia many years ago, I was offered a chance to “come out” as they say in social circles. But it was the peak of the rad-fem ‘70s and I laughed it off as silly, old-fashioned and elitist. I had never aspired to be one of those white-gloved Cornelia Guest social X-rays in training. Or even a Miss Woodland Hills.

But maybe I could have been a contender for Rose of Tralee.

I recently discovered that there are real, live Irish debutantes right here in Los Angeles. Fifteen of them in fact.

I met a couple of them one recent night at an Irish pub in Van Nuys called Ireland’s 32, which takes its name from the long-held dream that the 32 counties of the true mother country will be reunited some glorious day.

The reigning Southern California Rose of Tralee, Katherine Geary, 25, and one of the hopefuls, Rosetta Talley, 19, did not fit the Cornelia Guest mold.

Talley, who lives in Canoga Park, plays the drums, is studying music theory at UCLA and has amazing hazel eyes. Her ancestry also includes Jamaicans on her mother’s side, but she entered to learn more about her father’s Irish ancestors, she says.

Geary is an accountant. She has mastered a devilish wink, which she says the Irish prefer to the traditional regal wave for beauty queens. During our brief time together, the men in the bar found the reigning Rose magically delicious.

“Jesus Christ, can’t you stop looking good?” one lug asked Geary, who merely smiled demurely.

After charming the judges at a series of garden parties and boning up on Irish history, the debutantes take their bows this Saturday, the night after St. Patrick’s Day, at the Rose of Tralee Ball at the Biltmore Hotel. The event blends a little bit of the Miss America pageant with the airs of Old World society.

The debs/contestants wear white dresses (no swimsuits) and the organizers are having real Irish shamrocks flown in. Irish bands play and, of course, libations flow.

The winner goes on to compete for an international crown against 31 other local roses from Ireland and the Irish Diaspora at the Rose of Tralee festival in County Kerry in August.

The pageant is in its 11th year in Southern California, its 36th year in Tralee.

The original Rose of Tralee was a woman named Mary O’Connor, who inspired a much-loved Irish poem:

” . . . She was lovely and fair as the rose of the summer,

“Yet ‘twas not her beauty alone that won me;

“Oh no, ‘twas the truth in her eyes every dawning,

“That made me love Mary, the Rose of Tralee.”

In the poem, her beauty brought no happiness to Mary, a shoemaker’s daughter whose love life would play well on “Days of Our Lives.”

In a nutshell:

Boy (William Pembroke Mulchinock aka Willie aka “Ulick”) meets girl (Our Mary). Boy woos girl. Family disapproves because he is rich and she is poor.

Boy’s family ships him off to the army in India for six years. Boy finishes hitch and returns for her, still lovesick. Too late. Past the pub where he stops for a drink parades the funeral procession for Mary, dead of a broken heart.

He lamented his loss with these verses:

“In the far fields of India, ‘mid war’s dreadful thunders,

“Her voice was a solace and comfort to me,

“But the chill rent of death has now rent us asunder,

“I’m lonely tonight for the rose of Tralee . . .”

Boy becomes a drunk, marries family-approved shrew, flees potato famine for America and becomes writer.

Boy dies and is buried next to his true love in Tralee.

How Irish. (Indeed, this actually happened to me in high school, except for the dying part. And maybe the rich part.)

The Rose of Tralee hopefuls do not consider the fate of their namesake to be a bad omen.

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Talley is competing for the first time. (Women of at least partial Irish descent between 18 and 25 can enter as many times as they like.)

“She’s one of our favorites,” said Tom Lawler, one of the pageant organizers.

But Talley fears she may already have lost, for blurting out during the questioning of candidates that she was down on St. Patrick because she heard he burned books. Bad-mouthing St. Pat is probably no way to be chosen the official princess of the Irish-American kingdom, she figures now.

“I think I blew it,” she said.

The list of local contestants has the tuneful lilt of an Irish ditty: Tina Yerkish, Therese Sullivan, Ailleen McKeagney, Allison McGuire, Leslie-Ann Lanigan, Micah Joyce, Maureen Sullivan, Adrian Hinds, Rebecca Canighan, K.T. Wiegman, Rosetta Talley, Carrie Twomey, Sorca McMenamin, Dawn Soronen and Gwenn Parriss.

I am quite taken by the name Leslie-Ann Lanigan and the way it rolls off the tongue. I’d like to commend her parents. It sounds so much more lyrical than my name, Ann Ward O’Neill.

With a name like Leslie’s, I could have been a contender. Piano legs and all.