Well, St. Patrick's Day was a week ago today and I'm suffering from a case of the post-St. Patrick's Day blues. It's that lonely time of the year when the fun and energy of St. Patrick's Day is still so fresh in my mind that I want to do it all over again tomorrow, yet I know I have to wait a whole year to do it again!So in case you haven't figured it out, my St. Patrick's Day was another rousing success. I decorated my drones with green beads, donned my new tie dotted with 4 leaf clovers and met up with the band for tuning at 2pm. By 3pm we car-pooled off to our first gig. At 5pm we boarded a bus and in total we hit 10 bars between 3pm-12:30.
Highlights for me included all of the family and friends that came out to see us. At just about every stop I saw someone I knew. In general, the people were wonderfully enthusiastic at every stop. At our very first gig a bunch of women came up and insisted on having their picture taken with me because I was the only girl in the band. This was fun as typically the girl in the kilt is not as novel as the guys in the kilt.
Another great thing about this year was the reputation we've established. Last year we played along with the bagpipe bit in AC/DC's "It's a Long Way to the Top". At a couple of spots one of our bandmates even climbed up on the bar and led us through it. This year our reputation preceded us, and at several of our stops people came up requesting our AC/DC rendition.
I'm also happy to report that for the first St. Patrick's Day ever, I didn't have to put corks in any of my drones. In previous years my strength and lips have just given out and corking up one or all of my drones makes it easier to play.
One tragedy of the night was one set of bagpipes that sustained some pretty serious damage, two large cracks in the bass drone to be exact. We're not quite sure where it happened, at one of our stops a drunk guy fell into some bagpipes that we thought were safely stowed with another band's instrument. And at another place some of us had stuck our bagpipes down behind some folded tables. Presumably at one of these places his bagpipes were injured. It happened towards the end of the night and they've already been sent off for repairs. We'll see what the bill is. And now our Pipe Major has decreed that we are, absolutely and under no circumstances allowed to set our bagpipes down anywhere when we're out doing gigs. It was a rude awakening but a good lesson for all of us. I am careful with my bagpipes but I do set them down and generally think of them as being pretty indestructible. Has anyone out there really damaged their bagpipes before??
Well, blogging about St. Patrick's Day hasn't really helped with the blues, but it has been fun reliving it here in blogland.
Pipe on!
