St Patrick’s Day Shenanigans

No actual shenanigans today, but when St. Patrick’s Day comes around I am always reminded of the time I marched in the New York St. Patrick’s day parade. The year was 1979. St Patrick’s Day fell during my spring break. Since my school spring break did not fall the same week as my sisters’ I was getting to spend a cold week at home in Wilton, CT.

Some of my Walker’s friends were equally bored at their homes in the New York suburbs so we made plans to meet in the city on St. Patrick’s day. New York in 1979 was still seedy around Times Square, and bars were incredibly lax about checking ids, especially since the drinking age was 18.

The friends I met that day were Jenny Hetzler, better known as Hetz, Anne O’Reilly, the only truly Irish one among us, Suey Lierle, and Katharine Dusenbury, better known as Dusey.

As friends in an all girls boarding school we often had to find ways to entertain ourselves on cold winter weekends at school. Jenny, being the biggest comic of the group, often wrote songs for our entertainment. She tended to group them by subject matter into their own song books. One favorite was the Trigger song book, named for our trigonometry teacher, aptly named Peggy Trigelius. She could write on the black board with both hands at the same time, a trick which should have gotten her a spot on Johnny Carson.

My favorite song book of Jenny’s was the Green box song book. Green boxes where the small metal trash cans in our dorm bathrooms. Being a girls school you can imagine what went in those cans. Without ever actually spelling it out, the songs were brilliant in their tongue-in-cheek humor. They were all written to popular and familiar tunes.

On this particular St. Patrick’s day we met on fifth Avenue. We had a bed sheet painted with large green letters, Green Box Society. At some point in the parade their was a space between marching bands and police walking in unison, so we just jumped into the parade stretching the sheet between us, singing from the green box song book.

Due the to tune recognition people assumed they knew the songs we were singing, but thankfully the parade moved quickly enough that they did not quite get the lyrics, before we were already gone.

Back in 1979 there were no such things as metal barricades, or cops watching the crowd, so jumping into the parade was just not that hard. Plus, by the time we joined enough people had been imbibing that they were unconcerned with four teenage girls dressed in green carrying a homemade banner.

I wish I had photos from that day. It was such a highlight as a St. Patrick’s Day I have never actually celebrated it since because nothing could top marching in the NYC parade illegally. Jenny definitely missed her calling as a song writer.