Shake your shamrock! (Kill me for that)

St. Patrick’s Day is a holiday I used to think I took seriously, until I moved to my neighborhood. Haha to me. Turns out I might as well be Polish for all the celebrating I’ve done over the years.

So, yeah, it’s almost a week later, but I thought my readers - more numerous than the stars in the heavens - (There are like 100 stars in the heavens, right? I’m bad at estimating.) deserved to know. Plus, I’ve been hungover lazy.

Nothing happened as wonderful as last year, when I watched a severely intoxicated 15 year old wander into the street. His drunkly heroic friend pulled him to safety and the kid rewarded the act of bravery by yelling at him and pulling them both into a knee-deep slush puddle. Erin go home.

You know there’s going to be ruckus, cavorting and ballyhoo going on when there’s a NYPD Mobile Command Unit stationed on your corner in the middle of the afternoon. This ain’t no Upper East Side, son, this a war zone!

On my way to the bar, I overheard probably the saddest pickup line of the night. “Yeah, it’s my last name and it’s also the town in Ireland where my family is from. Cool, right?” Um, you’re stretching it, even on SPD. Save it for the genealogy message boards.

The other great line of the night was a girl stumbling up to a guy smoking outside his apartment door, which she thought was a bar.
"Do you have a bathroom?"
"What, like in my apartment?"
"You're not a bar?"
"No, I'm not a bar."
"Oh."

The day was mild, the beer was flowing and NO ONE WAS GUARDING THE CITY! Arsonists and larceny-ists I’m looking in your direction: 3/17 is your day to strike, on account of every Irish cop and firefighter stumbling around and crashing into things. There aren’t enough Italians on the force to make up for their absence. The firefighters I met at the bar had grown special old-timey handlebar moustaches for the big day. Which led to someone asking me: “Hey Freckles, wanna help us shave them at the end of the night?” as he pulled out an electric Norelco. Say what you will, but homeboy thought ahead enough to A. Remember the razor. B. Know he and his friends would be too drunk to wield blades close to their faces.

Memo to the crane across the street

Look, I don't like you and you don't like me, but you're outside my apartment for the foreseeable future so we have to get along. I have my eye on you, bro. No falling-over-and-crushing-me-in-my-sleep funny business.

Obama, be the vice president of my heart

From the desk of Hillary Clinton

Hey Barack, it's me. You know, me.

I have a confession: Barack Obama, will you be the vice-president … of my heart?

If you called at 3 a.m. – be it on a red phone, purple phone, some sort of two-toned deal or a Paris Hilton pink Swarovski crystal bedazzled number – I would answer that call. Believe me, in my marriage I’ve gotten a lot of strange calls at 3 a.m.

We’ve known each other a long time and have spent 20 evenings together in the last few months. Just you, me, Tim Russert’s potato-head and Brian Williams’ perma-tan (Is it just me or does he look like he went face first into a bag of Cheetos backstage? LOL! Our first inside joke!)

All those nights with only our podiums between us has only made my feelings for you grow. All that talk of health care and campaign soft money has only made me love you more.

I keep trying to catch up to you, not only in delegates, but also on the campaign trail itself. You never wait for me! We’re both criss-crossing this crazy nation of ours, but never seem to be in the same place at the same time. We’re so star-crossed. I have a brainstorm: We should team up! We could save money and hold rallies together. And we could share a bus. All those hours together…

Michelle would have to ride on the press bus. I kicked Bill off my bus months ago.

I saw you dance on Ellen’s show, and let me just say, if smoothly waving your arms around in front of a lesbian could solve this whole superdelegate kerfluffle, I’d be all for it.

Those tears before Super Tuesday weren’t because I was frustrated with the voting process, they were for you, B.

I hope you’ve noticed I’ve started wearing my best yellow-and-black pantsuit all the time because I know how you love bumblebees. And I use my shrillest, no-nonsense, yelling-at-not-to-my-supporters voice because I know how you love a strict librarian.

Please see the attached 17 illustrations I drew of us.

Please check:

Cordially yours,

Hillary Rodham Clinton Obama????

How I learned to shut up and be a good little feminist

I went to the very swanky, very un-Kate Players Club this week. It’s some sort of old-timey New York actors' haunt and it’s all heavy 100-year-old doors and grand staircases and John Barrymore portraits. If I were writing an essay about it for freshman English comp I’d say the air was thick with decades of stories from men who knew the subtle nuances of fine storytelling. But it’s a blog, so there’s no need for me to say that.

Suffice to say, if they had served me oysters, I’d have sent them flying across the room Pretty Woman style.

The writer of the adaptation of Bridge to Terabithia (a book that I reacted to not unlike when I watched Atonement last month) was speaking about getting movies made. As a bonus, he brought along a funny five-minute short about three cavemen becoming enlightened and sensitive. (“Oog need send smoke signal to wife, let her know Oog be home late.” Because we all know cavemen could speak English, but verb conjugation slowed them down.)

That’s when things took a turn for the racist. You see, the three cavemen were all white, although two had medium brown hair and one had darker brown hair. One woman in the front row hopped up and started yelling at the director that he picked the whitest one to become enlightened.

Director: I don’t get it. They were all white

Mad woman in the front row: But the dark-haired one, he’s the last one to become sensitive. The whitest one was the first.

Director: That was John. He’s Irish, so yeah, he was pale.

MWITFR: But you see my point about the subtle racism.

Director: I’m sorry, but I really don’t. It was me, my brother and our friend and we’re all white.

MWITFR: I lived through the Civil Rights movement! There’s still racism everywhere we look!

The audience shifted nervously in our seats. Were we all so racist that we didn’t even see racism in front of us?

Moderator: I don’t think we’re going to settle this tonight.

Black actor taking the stage for the next bit: Ma’am, I don’t doubt you saw racism in the film, but that doesn’t mean it was racist.

MWITFR sits back down, until the play starts and it has the formerly-funny-now-racist-for-reasons-we’re-not-quite-clear-on bit about an old Chinese woman speaking Chinese and working at a dry cleaners. That’s when MWITFR stomped out.

There is racism everywhere, except possibly in a play about three white cavemen. I can only imagine what the teacher of the feminism class I accidentally took in college would've said about the gender stereotypes in the film.

Having been raised by a dad who made his motto the simple yet brilliant "Don't go looking for hurt" I tend to save my righteous indignation of things for when it's warranted.

But oh that semester I got an earful about how women are kept down by men (and I suppose The Man). The teacher would show us a clip from a news story about how science is discovering how male and female babies learn language differently based on what parts of their little brains light up. Then we’d spend the rest of the class telling each other what the reporter was really trying to say about how men learned better, were smarter, etc.

I failed the first two tests because I (like any good young aspiring journalist) would say things in my essay like, “Some people say… while others interpret the data as a sign of….” I finally learned to just parrot back exactly her line of thinking on the tests and my final grade was miraculously (and mathematically impossibly) raised to a B. The guy behind me, with nearly identical test grades, got a D.

Cause us women have to stick together, ya know?

This will all be included in my upcoming memoirs “How I learned to shut up and be a good little feminist.”