So it's Sunday, and I'm finally vertical again.

Friday and Saturday were taken up with this year's St. Patrick's Day marathon, where I played the role of Emergency Backup Bodhranista with local band Whiskey Before Breakfast, and I'm still in the process of recovering.

Friday at 5pm, we opened at the Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts, where we noshed on bread and wine and played to a enthusiastic crowd. As soon as that was over we were packed up and headed out to Fiddler's Hearth, where we closed the place out, and discovered that South Bend has the happiest, nicest, most conscientious drunks an Irish band could hope to have for an audience. Ironically, the Fiddler's Hearth audience also had just about the best sense of rhythm and tempo I've ever seen at a performance, drunk or sober. They must've all been Notre Dame music students or something, and clapped along a deafening accompaniment to our sets and songs. It was rowdy as all get-out, but entirely in a positive, audience participation way, where we had about a dozen guys madly jigging away and shouting for more tunes when we finally knocked off.

We rolled back into town at around 3am, fell asleep as soon as our heads hit the pillow, then were up and running the next morning at 11am to play at O'Duffy's Pub after the Kalamazoo Irish Parade. That was a great gig, too -- especially for me, because a trio of bekilted Scottish drummers liked my bodhranning enough to buy me a drink (Relax, mom. It was before noon, so I had a Virgin Mary). No sooner had we played our last tune than we were out the door, headed for Papa Pete's and a private party. Things were going so well that we didn't stop for a break and played a straight two-hour set, after which we tore down and immediately headed out for our third and final gig at Ari's London Grill Downtown, where we played a full four sets. Ari's was also a really nice gig, and for some reason, the pub wasn't a zoo. It was busy, but not the kind of full-contact crush one expects on the Saturday night before Pat's Day. This actually made it our best performance of the weekend; we could all see and hear each other really well, and the crowd noise was at a normal enough volume that we could really get some finesse (and even high speed, once Cara and I had downed a pot of tea apiece) into our sets.

For those of you keeping score at home, that was essentially twelve nonstop hours of playing, setting up and tearing down, not counting the five hours on Friday. We had a few breaks, and were well fed and drunk, but holy cow, am I tired.

Good stuff, though, and we only had to play Danny Boy a hundred and seventy-five times.

Okay, it was only five times. But it felt like more.