Savannah, 2024

And so, the madness begins.

Saint Patrick’s Day in Savannah is our annual, riotous, pagan festival. Our parade is the second largest in the US, after New York City. I marched in it as a teenager, and walked in it many years later as a City Councilman, and it is interminable, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a technicolor presentation of local business, and politicians, and families, with some weirdness thrown in for good measure; if you have been here for more than a couple of months, you will know people in the parade. It’s patriotic with many military and ROTC units marching, many of the soldiers and cadets sporting bright red lipstick markings from the young women who “assault” them in their moving formation.

I said pagan, although, technically, the parade is run by Catholics, but the day, and especially the evening, is a bacchanal. We have a complicated relationship with alcohol here.

When General James Oglethorpe founded the colony of Georgia in 1733, with the establishment of Savannah, one rule he had was, “No Rum, No Slaves, No Lawyers.” That rule did not last long.

It used to be we would see some ceremonial events a week or so before the day, and celebrating might start a day or so early, but I think I first noticed these decorations a couple of weeks ago, and there seems to be a little more every day–trolleys with green wreaths on the front, sophomoric humor on green t-shirts–and we are still almost three weeks away from The Day (Sunday, 3/17), or the parade (Saturday, 3/16).

It’s the 200th anniversary of the parade this year, with only a couple of years when it did not happen, during Covid, and it’s on a weekend, so the street party will be big. By the Wednesday evening before, we will start hearing inebriated, weepy or angry debates from the street, around 3 AM, about who was supposed to remember where the car was parked. One favorite plea for help is saying, “We parked on the square.” Yeah, we have 22 of those just downtown.

So come and enjoy if you are so inclined, but please get an app that will remind you where you parked, please try to hold down the late night noise in residential areas, and please don’t pee in my flower beds.

(Announcement: I have had several people ask me about prints of photographs used in this blog, so I’m trying an experiment. From now until June 1st, I’m offering a $250 price for an archival, custom print of any photograph used in the blog (go to www.savannahphotographicworkshop.com to see them all), signed, unmatted, approximately 10×16 inches on 13×19 paper. Caveat: no photograph looks the same on a screen and in a print: my goal is to retain the feeling of the picture, not to duplicate.)

For more of Bill’s photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index.