For mac instal Dice King
Thom also did some acting work, including a role as the Executioner in the Gate Theatre’s classic production of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. “In the run-down Dublin of the 1970s,” wrote Dermot Bolger many years later, “he brought immediate colour into our lives while living in a succession of flats in semi-derelict Georgian Dublin.” There he posed as a model for life drawing classes, before running various workshops and performing in shows. Thom became involved with the Grapevine Arts Centre, a community cultural venue then located on the northside of the city. The following day he dressed up as a white-faced clown and sat very still and silent behind a sign: ‘IN LOVE WITH THE COUNTRY BUT UNABLE TO GET EMPLOYMENT, PLEASE GIVE GENEROUSLY, THANK YOU.’ Benefactors were rewarded with Thom’s signature trait: a wink. Then one evening, as he later recalled, “I said I’m going down to the Dandelion Market the next day and I’m gonna sit in make-up and gear and hope people give me money.” For a few weeks, he survived on his small savings and by selling various personal possessions. In 1976, with £40 in his pocket and the hope of work as a life model, Thom arrived in Dublin. His first job was, he later remembered, “hanging naked from a balcony in a crucifix position, balancing on my left toe.” However, he failed to complete the course, and in order to earn money, he became an art school model. Instead, he went to Strathclyde University to study accountancy. Thom served as an altar boy and briefly considered becoming a priest. His father was from Donegal, his mother from Wicklow, and every summer the family would holiday in her home town of Baltinglass. Thomas McGinty was born in 1952 in a village outside Glasgow. Time and again, bang in the middle of Grafton Street, Kennelly found himself “gazing on this figure, utterly immobile or moving with a slowness so perfectly measured as to be almost imperceptible.” So who was the Diceman? Professor Brendan Kennelly once observed that McGinty’s gift was to mesmerise his audience. His real name was Thom McGinty, and he died exactly 25 years ago. The Diceman belongs to that honourable tradition. People like Zozimus and Bang Bang became famous far beyond the city’s boundaries.
DUBLIN HAS LONG been renowned for its street characters.