Irish American stand up Colin Quinn's one man show will take New York by storm

“Our neighborhood used to be considered a kind of tough neighborhood, you know? Now when I say I’m from Park Slope they say, ‘That’s not Brooklyn!’

“We were the real deal back in the day. Now it’s just baby carriages. We look like a Swiss village. But guess what? There was a time when, and that’s all we’re going to say.”

Quinn is quick to point out that for all its yuppie hordes, things in Park Slope could have been much worse.

“It’s not hipsters in Park Slope, all the hipsters are in Williamsburg. We’re just soccer moms and lesbians and lesbian soccer moms,” he says.

But back in the day Park Slope was filled with unforgettable first generation Irish people like his aunt, who had a classic Irish immigrant’s take on life.

“My aunt would invoke a different saint for everything. Everywhere she went she was always having some kind of drama,” Quinn recalls.

“It was her against the car service drivers she would hire. You’d hear her saying, ‘That son of a bitch, I had to say a prayer to St. Dympna.’ She was always giving out money too, throwing $10 bills at the local kids and then yelling and cursing at all the different ethnicities of car service drivers.”

Another unforgettable Irish old-timer in the hood was Irishman Aidan Donovan.

“He who was one of those literary Irish guys who would say things like this to the Russian barmen, ‘Listen, you little f***ing Rasputin, go over there and get me a scotch and water.’

“And the young kid would always get the order wrong and then he’d get more abuse for it. ‘This little f***ing Barabbas would sell you out,’” says Quinn, quoting his old pal, and then erupting with laughter at the memory.

“The beauty of the Irish people is how they can turn a phrase and make me laugh. There’s just something so down to earth about them.”

Quinn clearly treasures that defiant Irish stance, especially when it comes to the powers that be.

“About five years ago my brother had his daughter christened. Aidan Donovan shows up in the church. He’s really old now,” Quinn remembers.

“We’re in the church and I promise you this is true, the priest says over the baby and says, ‘Do you renounce evil?’ Suddenly you hear piping up from one of the pews, ‘No!’ Donovan’s heckling the priest during the ceremony.

“Then the priest asks, ‘Do you renounce Satan and all his works?’ Again he shouts, ‘No!’ He wasn’t drunk. He was just saying no till the day he died against the Catholic Church.”

Quinn has fond memories of his youth.

“Growing up in Brooklyn I used to see everything I loved about Irish people. A fierce intelligence that was just thrown out without pretension, like all the Yeats and Thomas Aquinas references and all the cursing. That was the beauty of it. They were still down to earth,” he says.

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Nster.com