St. Patrick's Day Parades are the new awesome

I don't know how you guys celebrate St. Patty's Day, but I wouldn't be caught dead in anything other than the BARTmobile at the SF St. Patrick's Day parade.
Or without an obnoxious green velvet top-hat.

Maybe you will remember that I have driven the BARTmobile in a few other SF parades, like Pride and Chinese New Year. This year I assembled another good looking team of revelers to help San Francisco understand how much BART loves the Irish.
Andy's favorite tagline of the day was "meet your neighbor, ride BART" and the even more popular "sit next to a stranger, ride BART!" I tried to tell him one of people's least favorite things about riding public transit is the forced interaction with creepy people that they don't know, but he just blew his pipe whistle in my face and kept yelling at the crowd.

Adam was a good sport when I told him there were no more velvet green top hats to wear and that he was going to get stuck with a kind of girlie tiara thing. He wore it proudly. Nothing says "Happy St. Patrick's Day" like two noisemaking paper blowout whistles, activated by a single straw extending from the top of the hat to the wearer's mouth. Genius!

Apparently on St. Patrick's Day, all the red-headed children in the city feel safe in the streets for once and come out from hiding. Seriously. I don't know where they keep all the red-head kids for the rest of the year, but they were ALL out on display on Saturday.

The green-haired kids came out too. I don't see many of them around either, usually. They must hide with the red-head kids the other 364 days of the year.

The crowd was certainly dressed up and festive. Do you think the real Irish get offended that this is what we think of them? Weird green glittery hats and tacky green boas?

This was my favorite photo of the day, because it really captures the excitement of the crowd. That kid is so stoked to be at the parade that she is eating beads!

Basically, if you can't tell from the photos, we had our own Ferris Bueller's Day Off experience, except where the ever-charming Ferris performed a stirring rendition of Twist and Shout amid thousands of dancing Chicagoans on a shamrock covered float, we had some cold people in green wigs waiving BART tickets at us. Pretty much the best St. Patrick's Day ... ever.