Opinion> Rhonda Lokeman> Good Golly Miss Molly

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Good Golly, Miss Molly

By the time you read this I will be sober.

I will have staggered into the daylight from a crowded Kansas City bookstore where I met old friends and made new ones.

After bingeing 12 hours on "Ulysses," I will have repaired and started the clock ticking again for the next Bloomsday.

The seat of the canvas chair that took the shape of my rear — the chair whose cup holder seldom was empty of Bushmills or Boulevard, the local beer — will be retired to the garage.

Then in soccer and softball season, the chair will be swept web-free to become the seat where the Soccer Mom drinks Nalgene-bottled water as she watches children on ball fields, rain or shine.

I do not mean to suggest that the Irish drink heavily. I only know that when I am with a good-natured lot of them, I most certainly do.

My Irish friends' stories are embellished by the pint, as are mine. We are similar, yet different.

Occasionally, I find myself surrounded by Celts, a consequence of the company kept and DNA, mine and my children's.

My appreciation for Bloomsday can be explained by this background but also by bibliophilia — which means I like books, not sleeping with dead authors (See: necrobibliophilia ).

I frequent the local celebration of James Joyce's book at Tom and Nancy Schawver's bookstore, aptly called Bloomsday Books. The store that sells rare and used books is part salon and part saloon. On Bloomsday, it is both.

With bookstores providing pub fare, wouldn't it be something if American pubs offered readings? Husbands could tell their wives, "Honey, I'm off to the book club for a draw and some Proust." To which wives could reply, "Bring back some milk and some James Michener, OK?"

To experience Joyce's meandering mind and the wandering Leopold Bloom's transformative walk-about is quite an undertaking, but well worth it.

TV viewers who witness Jack Bauer's 24-hour work day might find Bloom's 24-hour day action-packed, though of a different sort.

But taking Joyce's literary challenge requires more than an hour-long attention span, mind you.

Each year, Tom and Nancy, who have been celebrating Bloomsday for 13 years, put out the call for readers. When the reading is finished and the book closed, the story resumes with a reenactment by local actors.

There are similar readings nationwide around Bloomsday, June 16, when Joyce's story unfolds in 1904. The book is controversial and irreverent, which may explain its acclaim. Some have considered it obscene, as with a scene between Bloom and Dr. Mulligan.

The book had a prominent on-screen role recently in "The Good Shepherd," a film about Cold War espionage.

I've sat through several "Ulysses" readings in Kansas City. One year, I was asked to read. (Yes, yes I said, yes I will. Yes.)

No small task. "Ulysses," the story of an Irish-Jewish Dubliner, includes several languages and dialects. When you read to yourself, you can mispronounce in dignified privacy. Reading aloud gives volume to your errors.

Try this from the book: "Whorusalaminyourhighhohhh…" And this: "Panem de coelo proestitisti eis." Or this: "Putanna madonna, che ci dia I quattrini! Ho regione? Culo rotto!"

Reading aloud means being red-faced as you attempt Molly Bloom's orgiastic soliloquy while giving it the seriousness, passion and wit the character deserves. If you liked Meg Ryan's Big-O fakery in "When Harry Met Sally," you will appreciate this part toward the end of "Ulysses."

It is an interesting book with a strange effect. The longer I read aloud one Bloomsday, the more my voice became this unrecognizable Gaelic incarnation. By the time I finished, I had drawn the map of Ireland all over me, begad !

You know how the deeper in the South Hillary Clinton campaigns, the more she sounds like Kyra Sedgwick's steel magnolia in "The Closer" TV series? It's like that. What's that line from "Ulysses," "I am another now and yet the same"?

Rhonda Chriss Lokeman (lokeman@kcstar.com) is a columnist for the Kansas City Star. To find out more about Rhonda Chriss Lokeman, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.