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Mary Rose plays violin and has done so since seeing one of the three little pigs play the fiddle and dance at the same time. She plays with her brother and mom and of course, with good ol' Spiral Seisiun when she isn't writing lesson plans for high school freshmen. |
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Kara graduated from the University of Illinois in 2003 and now teaches music in the small country district of Teutopolis, IL (T-Town). Now hailing from Effingham, the crossroads of America, she has studied classical music since the age of nine and took up Irish music in 2002. She helped establish the Society of Celtic Cultures to help students and members of the community learn to play Irish music. Since getting married in July 2004 she is looking forward to graduate school in flute performance at the University of Arkansas in the fall of 2005. |
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Jack has been playing guitar since he was 13 and started playing Irish music when he was a freshman at the University of Illinois. He also plays and sings in two other bands; Sincerely Calvin and One Lucky Day. Music and performing have been key parts of his life since his childhood and he plans on playing indefinitely. |
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Erik's parents made him start taking piano lessons when he was seven and he stuck with it until he graduated from high school. He was involved in all of his high school's musical activities (not hard to do in a school of 120 people), playing flute, percussion, and singing, but upon entering the University of Illinois majoring in civil engineering, his participation in such things became far less formal. With the goal of having something to play that was more portable and dorm-friendly than a piano, he took up the guitar, 5-string banjo, and ukulele through the course of his undergrad years. After starting graduate school, the impulse purchase of a mandolin in the spring of 2002 shortly before finals week proved to be a poor decision academically for that semester, but lots of fun after that. A few years bouncing around between classical, rock, country, bluegrass, and old-time music with varying degrees of success (much to the annoyance of his roommates and neighbors) brought Erik to the fall of 2002, when he noticed a sign advertising the slow session organized by Kara and Mary Rose and thought "Irish music? That sounds like fun." |
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Jeff is the first-born son of a wealthy Arab sultan, but was kidnapped as an infant by a band of Turkish pirates. They kept him for their amusement for two years on the sea, until their ship was destroyed by a great whale that measured two miles from nose to tail. Miraculously, Jeff landed on a bit of driftwood from the splintered vessel and floated to a tropical island inhabited by a tribe of cannibals. Since he survived the voyage as only a small child and his arrival fell on the night of a lunar eclipse, they hailed him as a god and raised him in (relative) luxury. In the year 1987 when Jeff was only four, the island was occupied by the Soviets as a base for ballistic missiles. He was taken back to Russia as a prisoner, but deftly escaped to the streets of Moscow. He stowed away on a train all the way to East Berlin. There, he was taken in by a kindly old gentleman. When the Berlin Wall fell on November ninth of 1989, the old man was so overjoyed that he decided to make the ninth Jeff's birthday (since, obviously, his true date of birth was unknown). One day, the young Jeff snuck on to an American army truck which was in the process of being withdrawn due to the the USSR's collapse. Jeff was carried to the United States aboard the truck in the hold of a cargo plane, and was discovered there by a young army mechanic. He brought the child home to his wife with the intention of raising him as their own, but his wife was a wicked woman who grew very jealous of the young man's attention. One day, she took the child to a bridge over a huge river and threw him in. Luckily, a pillow barge was passing beneath at that very moment. It continued upriver, bringing its massive cargo of pillows to Chicago which was at the peak of its famous Great Pillow Shortage of '91. There, a dock worker found Jeff in the ship's hold... Then some other things happened and now he is happily married, lives in Urbana, and plays Irish music. |
