Catch Up

Ok, so I know I have not been keeping everyone up to date and I'm sorry for that. I think the best place to begin is with St. Patrick's Day...

While I may get shot for writing about this, here goes. This year for St. Patrick's Day I was invited by Charles, Rachel's dad, to the 207th Hibernian Society St. Patrick's Dinner. A little back ground on this Society is important. The Hibernian Society is an Patrilinial organization for me that has been in existance for quite some time now. Hibernian Hall is located on Meeting St. in Charleston near the court house. Last I heard, the waiting list for non-members was 20+ years. There are of course "honorary" members, ie: Political officials that are very often fast tracked and made members on the spot. Important to note however that most of our elected officials have been members since birth due to the fact that there families have been living in the Charleston area since the begining of time.
Each year before this even happens, letters go out to all of the members asking them to send in the fee for the dinner, I'm sure somewhere b/w $100 - $300, and then also at this time they can request additional tickets if they come available. When my ticket came in I was ticket number 625. I am assuming that there were close to 1000, all white, men that came in dressed up in tuxedo's and started drinking around 6:30. In order to get a good seat you had to stand next to it or it would be taken. For the lucky board members and honorary guest reserved seats were set up at the head of the room. Our friend David Norton, whose house was used for Buba's and Mario's wedding is an honorary member. Finally we all were instructed that all the fancy people were starting to come in so everyone faced the enterance and as the bag pipes started playing all these men started marching in. It really was something to be taken quite seriously and I of course enjoyed laughing my ass off, silently!
Before we could sit down there were a number of toast that had to be recited. Side note, there were so many people and so little room to move around that all the alcohol was placed on the table in advance and we had to serve ourselves. After about what seemed like 20 cheers, we finally were able to sit and start eating. The food was nothing of note but why should it be, everyone was hammered anyways. Then finally after about an hour of eating round two of speaches started and ended with Bob Sheafer? spelling i know not.... He was actually quite funny. Just so you know, the speaker last year was Dick Cheney. The night ended shortly after and all these men filed out onto the streets. Now i'm sure most of them went out to the local pub's, but I went home and passed out. It was quite something!