Screaming Orphans bring the house down at Dublin Ale House Pub in Cape Coral
The Screaming Orphans are making a stop in Lee County for a series of performances.
This internationally known group, usually playing large venues, showed their love of Lee County in their local performances before going on tour. Their first stop was Healthpark, where they played in the lobby for an enthusiastic crowd of patients, employees and visitors to the hospital. They met with girls from PACE and visited a kindergarten to perform. After that, they visited the kids at Edison Park Elementary.
And on Thursday evening, they appeared at a special gathering in an intimate pub setting at Dublin Ale House Pub in Cape Coral.
The Screaming Orphans consists of four sisters: Grainne (guitar), Joan (drummer), Angela (violin and bass guitar), Marie Terese (keyboards) Diver. They come by their music talent naturally – their mother was a well-known Irish ballad singer. The girls went to school at an orphanage in their Irish hometown and when they decided to form a singing group, they took the name “Orphans” from the orphanage school they went to and “Screaming” as a descriptive word to describe them. Although they were never orphans, the impact of their early life experiences carried through in the name of their band.
Frank Williams, owner of Dublin Ale House Pub (1708 Cape Coral Parkway), friend of the Screaming Orphans and a sponsor of the Golisano Children’s Hospital, also is one of the major sponsors of the performance at Sidney and Berne Davis on Saturday night. Williams said that the Screaming Orphans don’t play pubs anymore so to have a group of this caliber come to small venues in Lee County to play is unusual and a personal thing that the young women do in this area because they love Lee County and especially love participating in causes to bring much-needed funds to build the new Golisano Children’s Hospital. More than 100 tickets have been sold; there are still a few available for the Saturday performance.
Roger Ward and his wife Mary have been long-time friends and fans of the Screaming Orphans. Active members of the Fort Myers Rotary Club they and Rotary have been instrumental in bringing the Screaming Orphans back to Lee County the past four years.
Roger says his company, Family Health Center of Southwest Florida (branches in Cape Coral, Pine Island, Fort Myers, Lehigh Acres, LaBelle and Port Charlotte) has an 80 percent patient population of small children and feels the Golisano Children’s Hospital is a much-needed valuable resource to this area. The employees of Family Health Center of Southwest Florida personally contributed $6,010 dollars out of their pockets, which will be matched by Tom Golisano, bringing a total contribution from this medical practice to $12,020 towards the building of the hospital.
Ward and his wife met first met the Screaming Orphans in 2001 at the former Dwyer’s and got to know the performers and their parents over the years. He and Mary will be going on the Cruise of the Irish Stars, where the young women will be performing, along with many other Cape Coral residents.
They also will perform at the Cape Coral Irish Fest in March – keep an eye out to enjoy this hand clapping, feet stomping, jig dancing world-class band.