Color Us Happy

Long, dreary winters screw everything up, from your motivation to sculpt your swimsuit-ready figure (we can pretend like that's really a thing) to your rods and cones. After seeing so much brown on the trees, bushes, grass, you name it, and heaps and heaps of white everywhere, you might not believe that other colors can exist, well, anyplace outside of your crayon box and scarf collection. Fortunately, at the 45th annual downtown St. Patrick's Day Parade, beautiful, lively, hopeful green will be in wonderful abundance all day, thanks to the 120-plus floats and gigantic balloons and bands and more. The parade -- complete with Irish and local dignitaries! -- steps off at noon eastward down Market Street (starting at 18th Street), yet the fun starts much, much earlier. Families can watch the balloons being inflated at 18th and Chestnut streets beginning at 8 a.m., and the Irish Village in Kiener Plaza (at Broadway and Market Street) starts serving eats and drinks beginning at 9 a.m. The Village fun continues long after the parade ends, with more food, more green beverages and live music from the Pedestrians. To get additional information, check out www.irishparade.org.
Sat., March 15, noon, 2014