St. Patrick's in Pictures

St. Patrick's celebrations this year meant getting up at 7:15 AM on a Saturday. Punishment like that deserves a reward just as large: drinking. We officially started at 8:00 AM when our neighbor John kindly prepared coffee spiked with Bailey's Mint Creme, to get us properly warmed up for our ride by Red Line train downtown to watch the Chicago Police dye the river green. Since the dying did not start until 11:00 and we got downtown at about 9:00, that left a significant gap which we handily filled with a stop at a bar for green beer and the most godawful sandwiches I have ever seen. The corned beef looked like it had been sheared from an animal fed for the majority of its short, artery-hardened life with 100% pure lard, and that it had fought the cutting. They came with "chips" (British for French Fries, I guess because they don't like the French either, after that whole Henry V thing), but the whole thing looked so impregnated with fat that open flame nearby would probably have been considered a fire hazard.


Eventually, we got to the river, and waited forever for the dying to begin. I have lived in Chicago for almost thirteen years now, and had never seen the river dyed. Saturday, therefore, was one of the most anticlimactic days I have ever lived, since, when the dying finally started, most of us had no idea that it had, or whether the Chicago Police had even finished. From our vantage point by the Clark street bridge, all we saw were slightly brighter green tendrils drifting downstream, mingling amongst the ordinary dark green of the Chicago River. We went upstream to see if we could spot the dye bombs or whatever they use to turn the river an unnatural Leprechaun green, but they had already finished. Yet, looking downstream, we still saw hundreds of people perched on the bridges and all along the river, hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever the hell we had been looking for moments earlier. Maybe, after enough time elapses, all of the green coagulates into some awesome monster, or turns into money, but about the only entertainment we got out of it was trying to catch necklaces the Heineken people were throwing to promote their Dutch beer on the Irish holiday.

Oh, and the above picture is my wife, against the green river. It's pretty bright. As they remarked in the Harrison Ford film, "The Fugitive", "If they can dye the river green today, why can't they dye it blue the other 364 days of the year? "

Touche, Marshall Biggs.