Parades. I really really love them. Really.

Yours Truly, completely minding my own parade-related business, meandered through the mean streets of the Middling City's Old First Ward to collect up some pixels documenting the annual real Saint Patrick parade.
Whereas the other MC Irish parade centers on throngs, silly string, and a too-long cavalcade of seemingly every org/club/wolfhound/Celt/saint/union in the vicinity, the OFW version is short, sweet, and in a much more photogenic setting - trees and homes in lieu of businesses.
Plus there is the matter of backlighting - the Sunday/Delaware/Elongated parade is peskily backlit as it heads from south to north. The light is diffused but there are moments when it would be much more photographically pleasing to have the whole kaboodle marching in the opposite direction - YT thinks the parading feng shui would be much more right on.

So this above image rather fits in to my ongoing Girls with Guns series. But the other images show girls holding faux rifles, usually painted white. This gun appears on the ground, as if thrown post-armed robbery.



Big big parade news in the MC was that the powers that be allowed for the premier time a group of openly homosexual marchers to march.
So despite the fact that YT could no longer feel her hands or feet YT marched along con brio down the avenue to meet the gay Saint marchers on the crest of the bridge that spans from Ward to Valley.

A triumph.

Parades should be all-accepting as they're usually for some higher purpose or cause - holiday, nation, victory.
One year at the Delaware version of this saint parade YT cried as some high school marching band musicians were harangued by a group of terrifying drunk white loser men.
And YT hoped that these children didn't hear these taunts over their music.

This was the first year that I did not cry at a parade - not sure if this is another triumph.

My favoured YT-Sobbing-at-Parade story is me at the age of twenty-something when I stayed at the rowhouse near Columbia, owned by Columbia, off of Amsterdam, and watching a lovely short and sweet neighborhood parade bobble by, as I held a piece of pizza on a paper plate, tears dropping all over the slice.

The End.

Sliced, tearing, jubilant, parading Love.