Chicago's Mardi Gras

[bitterfig]

St Patrick’s Day has been called Chicago’s Mardi Gras in the worst sense of the term. It’s basically a trashy, touristy drinking binge. While St Patrick’s Day isn’t actually until tomorrow, around here the party started a couple days early. On Saturday I was driving to work at 7:00 a.m. when I spotted my first reveler in gilded green plastic

Comments

[lawless523]

St. Patrick's Day is an excuse to get drunk and party in NY also. That's why I feel a bit nauseated when the committee organizing the St. Patrick's Day parade justifies their prohibiting a contingent of gays and lesbians from marching as such by pointing to the supposedly religious nature of the day and parade. I wish the courts would take judicial notice that this is a complete crock.

There's a little bit more authentic feeling behind the day in Boston, where people get drunk in the bars and not so much on the street. But then again Boston has a higher percentage of actual Irish than New York.

I'm another person who's Irish on her mother's side and am a big William Butler Yeats fan - he's one of my favorite poets. My mother's maiden name was Eileen Bridget Griffin - you can't get much more Irish than that. And her father was a member of the IRA when it was a freedom fighting, not a terrorist, organization (not that it is anymore but it was for a long time).

I hope the upstart IRA group doesn't start the troubles up again.