by Debbi | Mar 4, 2010 | Downtown, Events, St. Patrick's Day
We're very excited to announce that construction of our 2010 St. Patrick's Day Parade float has officially begun! It actually started last weekend, when the longer-than-usual trailer was delivered to our rented garage space, and some of the usual suspects hauled out their power tools and lumber.
This is at least our 14th or 15th year in a row to have a float in the annual parade. Our float, like the parade itself and the crowd that watches it, has grown bigger and better every year. Except maybe for 2008, the year of the Soggy Sandbarn– the torrential downpour that day kept lots of people away from the parade and made our dancers cranky.
Every float is our favorite one at that particular time, but the 2007 Showboat stands out as perhaps our largest undertaking ever (two levels of people!), and the 2003 Love Shack was a crowd favorite that featured a palm tree falling off the float and nearly crashing into the judge's table. Fortunately, no small children or animals were injured.
We're officially behind schedule since Mother Nature has been particularly uncooperative this year. But as long as it's sunny and somewhat warm on the big day, we're not complaining.
The Parade is held on Wednesday, March 17, at 1 p.m. It begins at South Park and travels north on Massachusetts Street and across the bridge, and then from there it's anyone's guess. The Flamingo Club is still the destination, but due to never-ending construction in North Lawrence, we don't know what the actual route will be yet. (We're just hoping that our enormous float will be able to make the trip through North Lawrence, actually.)
Become a fan of the Lawrence St. Patrick's Day Parade on Facebook, and RSVP to the Parade.
by Debbi | Feb 22, 2010 | Events, St. Patrick's Day
Did that get your attention?
The Sandbar sponsored a team at the 8th annual St. Patrick's Day Pub Quiz Trivia event last night. This event has traditionally opened the St. Patrick's Day season in Lawrence, although this year some other events have actually taken place already. We've had at least one team in this event every year since it started.
Our buddy/regular/go-to web guy Frank's business also sponsored a team this year. Between us, we originally had about 12 people committed to play, but one by one they started flaking claiming headaches and school work as excuses, so we ended up with eight. Which caused us to pool our brains and collapse our two teams into one. Good thing, too.
Art director Brother Pants named our team Frank's Dirty Banana. (You can take that however you want. We did.) Our category of choice was Train Songs. Our team members skewed heavily to the old-school crying country fan base, so we figured we'd own those questions. And we did, for awhile.
Our first important missed question: some long-winded diatribe about Johnny Cash and prison and we answered too quickly with the seemingly obvious "Folsom." Uh, no. The song title might have Folsom in it, but it was actually written about San Quentin, which practically every other team in the room knew.
Perhaps our more embarrassing miss of the night involved a question about The Sandbar's muse, Jimmy Buffett. Did you know that Bono, lead singer of U2, was on Jimmy's plane with him when they were shot at by Jamaican authorities who thought the plane was smuggling drugs? Yeah, neither did we. We've all heard the story behind the song "Jamaica Mistaica," (from the Banana Wind album), but we don't even have a U2 song on the jukebox and would've never guessed who the passenger on the plane was.
Andy, the announcer, was happy to point out that The Sandbar missed a Jimmy Buffett question. We like to say that we were Scottie-Mack'd. Twice.
We redeemed ourselves somewhat by answering the final question correctly:
(image borrowed from Sandbar friend & fellow trivia player, Chris Pumpelly, who posted this on his Twitter stream.)
It wasn't enough to land us in the top three, but we managed to end up with a respectable score.
Congrats to the team from The World Company, who knocked off the consistent winners from Tabula Rasa to take first place this year!
Do you know the answer to the final question? Leave it in the comments.
