Slice of Life: Begorrah! Here’s a St. Pat’s Day early warning

Hundred fifty thousand marchers

Two million line the street
For the big St. Patrick’s Day parade
On March the Seventeenth
All Irish eyes are smilin’
And green is everywhere
There’s a leprechaun a-spyin
I can feel it in the air.

(From a song “Everyone’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day”)

Writing this column every three weeks, as I do, I sometimes find myself out of synch with the calendar. Last time, for instance, I mentioned some February holidays that were past and gone by the time the article appeared. Probably no damage done, though.

You may have missed out on Wave All Your Fingers at Your Friends Day on the 7th, but we do that all the time anyway. And when the article finally came out, on the 10th, it was already Umbrella Day. But around here you don’t need me or anybody else to remind you to carry an umbrella.

Nevertheless, this time I’m ahead of the curve. By two weeks in fact. We’re going to take an early look at St. Patrick’s Day, March 17. At least, I’m going to take a look at it. If you’re not interested, go read the police blotter.

In case I’ve never mentioned this before, I am the beneficiary of 14 years of Catholic education — grammar school, high school and the first two years of college, all sanctified. Back in those days, before the lines between things became quite so blurred, St. Patrick’s Day was a big deal for Catholics.

At Archbishop Molloy High School in Jamaica, Queens, we would put on a shivaree of Irish music and dance, coached by a Brother Terence, I believe it was, who had done a stint in Africa and could do the Wim-O-Weh song in the original version. But, for the most part it was “Hello, Patsy Fagan” (“I’m workin’ here in Dundee and I’ve got a daycent job, carryin’ bricks and mortar and me pay is fifteen bob”), and “Just a little bit of Heaven fell from out the sky one day …,” and “If you ever go across the sea to Ireland…,” and so on.

We took our wearin’ o’ the green seriously in those days, although it usually didn’t amount to much more than a pair of green socks or a green tie. Likewise, the spectators at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade — the real one, in Manhattan, to which we all went — generally wore some modest, token green item.
Molloy didn’t have a marching band in those days, although it has one now, sponsored by Aer Lingus — a 22-piece pipe and drum band decked out in Hamilton tartans, Prince Charlie piper jackets and Glengarry hats.

But whether you had a band in it or not, the New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade, big as it was even back in the early 60s, had a family feel, a sort of a “just us-ness,” to it.

And then, somewhere along the line, something began to happen.

It’s the kind of thing that seems to happen to all holidays after they’ve been in America for a while. It began manifesting itself in small ways, with the merchandizing. Little shamrock decals that the girls, at first, stuck to their faces. “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” buttons. Green beer? All right, unnecessary (the dye, not the beer), but we’ll allow that one. Then the cultures started oozing into one another. Green bagels with green cream cheese?

And while the actual marching participants didn’t change much — they’re still pretty tightly controlled — the spectator crowd got a whole lot bigger and uglier.

Huge herds of teenagers from the ’burbs, with green hair and full face paint, like Celtic warriors headed for battle — and these kids were — would swarm into the city on the Long Island Railroad, leaving a swath of destruction through midtown, not to mention the trains themselves, which were unusable for weeks afterwards.

I haven’t been near any of it for many a year, but I’m guessing it’s the same or worse. The New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade, according to the NYC Visitors Bureau, is now the world’s largest St. Patrick’s Day Parade, as well as the largest of all New York City parades, with 150,000 marchers and probably a squillion or so painted, green-beer-yacking spectators.

Our little parades way out here are not quite so dramatic, and the behavior is generally better. And of course, you can always just have your own celebration at home. According to e-how.com., “All you need is some imagination and a bottle of green food coloring to get your family into the spirit of St. Patrick’s Day.”

The site offers recipes for making green scrambled eggs, green meatloaf and green mashed potatoes with green gravy. Alfredo sauce and pesto are the right color, even if they’re not particularly big in Ireland.

And, if you’ve got anything in the refrigerator that’s already green, I guess this would be the time to use it.
Saints preserve us.