Slice of life

I went to the St. Patrick's Day parade Downtown yesterday. The city has started the parade earlier and earlier to try to prevent so many people from getting drunk. It doesn't work. No offense to my husband, but the Downtown parade is not somewhere I would go with him because, frankly, he is not an intimidating man, and I'm not sure whether he could block me from the crazy people. Let me just say that last year, I watched part of the parade from the upper levels of the parking garage at work. From that safe distance, I saw a girl show her boobs multiple times in order to get someone to throw her beads. Someone else got shot during the parade, and this was not too far from the office.

Anyway, this year I ventured to the streets to take in the parade, but I didn't go alone. A girl in advertising and I went escorted by three guys from the office. The guys were very good about keeping track of us women. Because we met some interesting people.

We headed out for the parade a little before noon, and people were already drunk. Two guys walking in the opposite direction approached us arguing about stumbling into the street. The first guy says, "Man, you better be careful how you walk. You could go right out into the street. Something like this could happen," he said, as he shoved the other guy right into traffic. The second guy shoves back, and they are both oblivious to me, leading our merry office group, and only miss stumbling into me because I stop and step aside and wait for them to pass by.

We saw (and smelled) several people smoking pot in the crowd, including a white guy in dreadlocks who shoved through the crowd shouting, "The cops are coming!" There were cops everywhere, so you can only imagine how it would have been without the significant police presence.

Three very drunk, smelly guys stumbled among us, one of them smoking a cigarette that was about half-an-inch long. One decided that he knew J., the other girl with me, and tried to hug her. She declined, and the men in our group converged to get the guys moving on their way. The men had a scary moment when they thought they had lost me. I had moved up to stand by J. and keep my back against the wall. I wanted to avoid getting bumped from behind. ... But then a guy on my right tried to cozy up to me. The men in our group threw him a few sharp glances, though, and he edged away a little bit.

The three drunk guys finally moved along with the lead guy shouting to the straggler, "Coooooome ooooon. Leeeeeeeet's go. Yooor like a slow turd! You ain't never gonna come out!" That was the best quote of the parade, and the guy grinned drunkenly at us to see how we liked it.

A while after those guys passed by, we heard the crowd getting excited about the "green Jesus" coming down the street. It actually was a giant balloon of St. Patrick himself.

A duo of girls who were about 19 or 20 stumbled up to our little group, demanding to see whether we were wearing green. They concentrated their attentions of the men of our group. One girl decided that the guys were wearing insufficient green and she was "tooooooootally going to pinch you." In the end, she settled for showing us her St. Patrick's Day spirit with her green jacket, green shirt, green tank top under her shirt and her green underwear ... her hands did briefly stray to her fly, and I thought perhaps she was going to show us her green underwear, too. But she wasn't quite that drunk ... yet.

After that, we decided to head back to the office, declaring our parade experience a success with the sighting of the green Jesus and a new phrase to hurry up slowpokes at the office.

We passed by a girl fight in a parking lot, which had attracted a circle of onlookers chanting, "Fight! Fight! Fight!" just a half-block away from a traffic cop, who looked a little nervous when told by a passerby that he should go break it up.

And we passed a guy wearing all black who accessorized his ensemble with a belt of bullets.

And then we made it back to the land of suits and paperwork.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!