At long last, here it is: our float for the 2008 St. Patrick’s Day Parade, the Sandbarn.
Dave and Justin constructed a giant red barn, complete with white fencing, a silo, a windmill, and hay bales all around the edge. It even has a hay loft area with a window. Thanks to all of this year’s helpers: Michelle, Coleen, Bridget, Aaron, and Andrew.
Heritage Tractor in Baldwin City has donated the use of a giant John Deere tractor to pull our float and our regular float driver, Andy, has brushed up his tractor driving skills.
The lovely ladies dancing on the float will be decked out in western wear: cowboy boots, denim, cowboy hats, and spectacular white shirts complete with red fringe and stars. The boys will be similarly dressed but with plain white t-shirts.
We may not have any green color on our float, but The Sandbar is "going green" for the holiday in another way. Approximately 85% of this year’s float was built using materials recycled from previous year’s floats.
Be sure to join us downtown tomorrow for another great parade! The parade begins at 1 p.m. at South Park, and continues north on Massachusetts Street, across the bridge, and through North Lawrence to the Flamingo Club. Our float crew performs both dances the entire length of the parade every year- it’s a great workout.
After the festivities at the Flamingo Club, our float will head back to The Sandbar. If you’re joining us there, be sure to get there early, because it’s packed on St. Patrick’s Day!
Our second song for this year’s St. Patrick’s Day float is She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy.
Michelle, Heather, Coleen, and I spent several hours last week working on this one, first upstairs at the bar and later at my house. I’m sure my neighbors wondered about the dancing in the living room.
Again, the dance moves are very simple and very repetitive. But we think it turned out cute, and the float riders who came to our dance practice on Monday seemed to learn both of these new dances more quickly than any of our dances in the past.
Well, since we had float practice last night, that means it’s time to share our new dances with the world. Last year I started uploading our dances to YouTube so float riders could practice at home, or so those who missed practice could see what they missed.
Like last year, we have two new dances this year.
Our first new dance is Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy, proudly choreographed entirely by Peach. She taught it to a few of us last week, and on Monday we unveiled it to the float crew. Now, I unveil it to the internet:
It’s a pretty repetitive, easy dance to follow along- our dances have to be so that the uncoordinated among us can still manage to look like we know what we’re doing.
Come back tomorrow to see our second new dance for this year.
St. Patrick’s Day is still a week away but we’ve already had our first casualty.
Our annual float practice was held tonight at the bar- an evening where the float participants gather for food, drink, and lots of cheesy dancing to prepare for the big day.
Costumes are in preparation, and Peach’s new white shirt was beautifully finished with it’s red fringe and stars. She set it down on a table and everyone kept talking. All of a sudden, Michelle noticed it was getting really bright behind her. She turned around to find the sleeve of the shirt caught in the candle’s flame. She grabbed the shirt and as she was trying to decide whether to stop, drop, and roll it on the floor or dash outside with it, our fearless leader Dave grabbed it and ran out the door.
He stomped the fire to death on the sidewalk and brought the shirt back in so we could all see the carnage.
Interesting that the fringe is apparently not flammable, but the flame vaporized the cotton/poly/spandex blend sleeve.
Lesson to be learned here: keep your sleeves away from the candles. The ghost might just decide to play tricks on you.
(Oh, and everybody be sure to tease Brother Pants about his Joe-Factor moment. He worked an extra hour tonight because he forgot to set his clocks at work ahead.)
Apparently, St. Patrick’s Day is causing a bit of confusion this year.
For the first time since 1940, the holiday falls during Holy Week, the seven sacred days before Easter. Being a lapsed Catholic, I don’t really understand what all of that means, but CNN explains it pretty well here.
Basically what I got out of the article is that because of liturgical rules within the church, a Mass cannot be celebrated in honor of St. Patrick during Holy Week. Some religious leaders are taking this even further and asking their cities to change the date of their St. Patrick’s Day celebrations so that parades and other festivities don’t take place during Holy Week either.
People often ask if the Lawrence parade is actually on St. Patrick’s Day or if it’s scheduled for the nearest weekend like some towns do- it’s always on March 17, always at 1 p.m. The religious conflict apparently hasn’t been an issue here, or else we just aren’t aware of it.
The good news is that the calendar conflict won’t happen again until 2160, and none of us will be around to care.
Every year around this time, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade Pub Quiz kicks off a season full of charitable but fun events for The Sandbar crew. And every year when it’s time for the trivia game, we’re always kicked out of our winter fog by the realization that we need to get busy building our parade float.
Last night’s Pub Quiz was a huge, noisy, fun event at Zig & Mac’s. Former Sandbar staffer and trivia guru Scotty Mack organized the affair; he also wrote the questions. The Sandbar sponsored two teams, each with four players, and we had other friends and employees show up on several other teams.
"Ghost of The Sandbar" Team #1 & "Stink Pickle" Team #2 (Ask Pants what it means, ’cause I don’t know)
"Single Tall," made up of Sandbar friends/staff; Sheela, Scotty Mack, & Coleen
Even though Dave didn’t make it into a trivia question this year, The Sandbar managed to in kind of a roundabout way. One of the categories, "A Real Pub Quiz," was made up of obscure facts about local establishments.
"John Wolf, Patrick and Tom Conroy, and myself {meaning Andy Bob, the question reader} all have our names etched in bronze as members of the 49ers Club at which place?"
Patrick and Tom are two of Peach’s brothers. This wasn’t our question, but the team who drew it couldn’t answer it, so we all got an opportunity. The answer? The Bottleneck. Dave explained that they used to have a cooler where they kept 49 different kinds of beer, and once a person had tried all 49 varieties, they became a member of the 49ers Club.
Although neither of our teams won, we came pretty close. The final question was drawn from parade trivia:
"As the grand marshal of the bicentennial parade, he wore red, white, blue, and black."
And both of our Sandbar teams managed to think like Scotty Mack and answer this question correctly. No, we didn’t cheat off each other. We held our breath for awhile thinking we might be the only ones to answer correctly; but alas, there were other likeminded people in the room. Our "Ghost of the Sandbar" team ended up placing fourth and winning themselves each a St. Patrick’s Day Parade t-shirt. {Think you know the answer? Come back tomorrow to find out if you’re right.}
By the end of the night, the Pub Quiz raised about $2400 for this year’s charities.
