Irish Ayes

Ginny Boyle tapped her feet in time to a lively Irish jig. Patrick Browne whirled his wife, Angela, around the dance floor. Loyce and Jack Brown sat at the bar, nursed drinks and recalled stories about relatives who have passed on.

Wearing green, eating corned beef and cabbage and taking in an Irish step dance show, the couples from across Los Angeles gathered at Mr. B’s bar and restaurant on Hollywood Way to celebrate their common culture on St. Patrick’s Day.

“I love this day,” said Boyle, decked out in a kelly green kilt and a white sweater and tights printed with green shamrocks. “I took today off and tomorrow too--so I can mend.”

Boyle said she is so enamored with the holiday--she marks the day by eating a real shamrock for good luck--that she nearly returned to her native Philadelphia when she couldn’t find a place to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day shortly after moving to Chatsworth in 1970.

“When I first came out, I found lots of little Irish pubs playing jukeboxes, not Irish music,” said Boyle, a special-education teacher’s aide. “I said to myself, ‘They don’t even know how to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day here.’ ”

The fabled luck of the Irish apparently was with Boyle two years later when she first heard Des Regan’s Irish American Band at a New Year’s Eve party.

“[Regan] told me about a pub that he owned at the time and all the places where he played,” Boyle recalled. “I’ve been with him ever since.”

True to her word, Boyle and her husband, Joe, sat at a table only steps away from a tiny stage where Regan and his bandmates sang “Danny Boy,” “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” to the lunchtime crowd at Mr. B’s on Wednesday.

The Brownes appeared to be Regan fans as well because every time the four-piece combo launched into a new tune, the Westwood couple took to the dance floor. With the smooth moves of longtime partners, Patrick Browne and his wife expertly danced intricate steps that made her emerald green skirt swirl.

St. Patrick left his native Ireland to join a monastery. He was sent back home as a bishop in the 5th century “and converted people to Catholicism,” Patrick Browne said in the Irish brogue of his native Roscommon. “It’s an annual thing to celebrate the occasion.”

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Another Emerald Isle native, Ellen Murphy, said American and Irish St. Patrick’s Day celebrations vary widely.

“In Ireland, St. Patrick’s Day is much more of a church holiday,” Murphy said. As a youngster growing up in Cork, she attended Mass in the morning, ate a holiday feast for dinner in the afternoon with family and friends, and attended alcohol-free dances in the evening.

“There are parades with priests, nuns, military units and floats representing industries,” she said. “And there are horse races and games of hurling, which is like lacrosse.”

American celebrations offer much more “joviality, fun and games,” Murphy said. It wasn’t until the Irish got TV and saw what was going on in New York, Chicago and Boston that they realized the way Americans marked the day was quite different.

Still, the holiday evoked sad memories for Loyce Brown of North Hollywood.

“My mother passed away four years ago, and I hadn’t celebrated St. Patrick’s Day until today--it hurt me too much,” Brown said, her eyes welling with tears. “It still hurts; that’s why I’m crying. We are a very close family.”

Brown’s mood appeared to lift a few moments later as she and other patrons watched Irish step dancers from Margaret Cleary’s School of Irish Dance in North Hollywood perform a traditional soft shoe.

“Oh, they are so cute,” she said.