44 - A Dublin Memoir

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It is half an hour before midnight on New Year's Eve, 1959, and snow coats the cramped, gray streets of Dublin. On the rooftop of 44 Seville Place, a ten-year-old boy clings to the steel rod of a television antenna. When his father urges him to turn the antenna toward England, the boy reaches up and pictures from a foreign place beam into their home. Our young hero, Peter, and his family will never be the same again. As the tumultuous 1960s unfold, the Sheridans - Ma and Da, Frankie, the baby, Shea (later to be known to the rest of the world as Academy Award-winning film director Jim Sheridan), Ita and the younger siblings - forge ahead into the unknown. Young Peter experiences all of life's mysteries - sex, The Beatles, drugs, the Troubles erupting just one hundred miles away in Belfast and, above all, the seductive power of the theater.