Chicago Gaelic Park Irish Fest 2009

Attended my... 9th? maybe 10th Gaelic Park Irish fest this past weekend.
Found it soon after moving to the area, when we spotted a flier in a window of a store near our house.

four days, three stages of live music, beer tents, many varied food booths, a tent full of retailers, and free midway rides.
All this for a not-unreasonable price of $15 per person, per day.

My god, how can you go wrong with THAT?

Well, you can host such an event while spending as little money as possible.
You can stop paying for bands once they start to get popular.
You can, by and large, only book acts that are eager to play Chicago for the first time, or who don't have much in the way of travel expenses, IE - local bands.

You can rent or buy the cheapest possible folding chairs, and then just keep using 'em year after year until they all break and/or someone gets hurt....

Like I did, last year, while holding my (At the time) 9-month old daughter.

"Ah, but you've gone back year after year, whiner. you're not telling the whole story."

Ok.

Back in the day...

...the beer was sold in small-ish plastic pitchers. $5 would buy you your own, say, quart of miller lite. A couple of those, and you're diggin' on the midway rides, and in a more receptive mood in relation to whatever music was put in front of you.
"This is the best band ever!!!! Let's go ride the Matterhorn again!"

...You'd have friends, local and more that would come into town, childless like you, and you'd do what a couple thousand other people did over the holiday weekend. turn it into a big party.

...Every town, village, and municipality in the midwest did not host their own irish festival, thus making it easier for the decent bands to get gigs elsewhere...
Combo of beer and lack of competition introduced me to a couple of my very favority bands to see live, Great Big Sea and The Clumsy Lovers. Also afforded us opportunities to see the Young Dubliners, Black 47, The Elders, the Fenians, and various other good bands that know how to combine rock and roll and traditional celtic music.

So we'd brave one extreme weather situation after another, one year flooding, another year freezing cold, the next year scorching hot, and we'd go. And if some years I had to engage the 4WD in my jeep, just to get out of the parking lot at the end of the day, that was just a cool, mud flinging bonus.

Now.....
...We have a child.
...Friends aren't coming into town for the party anymore. Many of them have kids, too. or the single ones have gotten married, and don't see the need for these kind of adventures anymore.
We've grown up, apparently.
Dammit.
...Beer's still $5, but comes in a 12 oz cup.
...Quality of music's gone way down hill. We used to have to pick the best day out of 4 good ones, now we search for the one that sounds like it has more promise than the others.
"Pictures of the bands playing on Monday are not all of a bunch of old people.... a couple of 'em have websites...."


And one of their cheap-ass, as-old-as-I-am plastic folding chairs DID collapse while I was sitting on it, last year. And not just cuz I'm large, there were larger folks sitting everywhere.
And I WAS holding my infant at the time.
I opened my eyes to find myself looking at the ceiling of the tent, laying in wet gravel, still holding my daughter, who didn't seem too traumatized by the experience. The fact that I instinctively held on to her, and she was not lying in a mute heap 10 feet away, injured, made me feel really good about my parenting skills, and my dedication to her well-being. I knew I loved her, and would do anything to keep her safe, but there it was, actual proof.

MY dad was standing there, staring at me with a horrified look.
"You ok?" said my retired fire-fighter dad, in full-on firefighter rescue guy mode.
"I don't know yet" I said quietly, still holding my child aloft by her armpits. I indicated the baby. He took her.
She smiled at him.
I slowly stood up, and realized I had drawn a crowd.
Also realized that nothing was broken, and that I had kicked over the stroller as I went down, sending beers flying.
One of the bystanders pointed to where I landed, and said "you're lucky."
I looked to where he was pointing.
There, literally an inch from where my skull landed, sticking up out of the ground, was a large, steel, tent stake. If I had landed one inch from where I did, I would have been dead, or paralyzed, or lucky to get off with just a minor skull fracture.
I eventually stopped shaking, and walked around a little bit to get away from the well-meaning crowd, while my dad held his unharmed granddaughter, who was by this time clapping along with the music.
I replaced the beers I had kicked across the tent. I fielded the "holy sh*t are you ok, what happened?" questions from my wife, and moved on.

And we were back there again this year. It was 60 and rainy, a forecast far worse than predicted, and bad enough to cause our friends to cancel, turning their car around en route and going back to their house.
The potentially not-crappy bands were... pretty crappy. And my daughter had no interest in the music at all this year, nor in spending any time in the tents.
Maybe if the bands were decent.....

We spent the afternoon shuffling back and forth between the merry go round, the petting zoo which also offered pony rides, and the tent containing various irish breeds of dogs.
every so often, we'd try to spend some time listening to one of the boring bands, while waiting out a rain shower.
I drank a $5 beer in a plastic cup, quickly so as not to have it diluted too much by rain water.
We did NOT get our $15 per adult worth of fun, though my 21 month old thought the animals were swell. And it was pretty cool watching her march up to an Irish Wolfhound, one of the biggest dogs god made, and just give it a big hug. My god, she's fearless.

And we'll probably go next year, if we're around, law of diminishing returns be damned. We'll bundle up if forecast calls for it; wear shoes we won't miss; pack an umbrella AND sunscreen; and maybe, like this year, my daughter's enjoyment of all parts NOT related to irish music will almost be enough to make it worth our while, should the band line up suck, the weather not cooperate, and the friends cancel.