Sights and sounds of the 2011 Northwest Side Irish Parade

The Notre Dame Resurrection Marching Band participated in this year's Northwest Side Irish Parade.








A group of athletes from Notre Dame College Prep also marched in the parade. With that group were Head Football Coach and Athletic Director Mike Hennessey and Coach Joe Gale, Chair of the school's physical education department.






The Northwest Side Irish Parade forms up at Onahan School. Onahan's group marched near the front of the parade.




A JROTC group from Foreman High School also participated:





And there's always an interesting variety of costumes on display at any St. Patrick's Day Parade. Today's was certainly no exception:



The spectators sport interesting costumes, too:



And there's always something to learn at a parade. For example, until today, I never knew how to use windshield wipers as a flag waving device.



Special thanks are due my daughter Brigid for volunteering to take all the pictures used in this and all the other posts I've put up about today's parade. She pointed out, not unreasonably, that I take an inordinate number of pictures of my shoes or of fuzzy things that seemed perfectly in focus when viewed through the unaided eye.

As today's posts attest, Brigid's pictures turned out very well. Brigid, however, is a dog fancier. She seems to have taken a disproportionate number of pictures of dogs. It didn't help that the Norwood Park Dog Association participated in the parade. Here are a couple of pictures from that large group:




There was yet one more dog, near the very end of the parade, who had to be photographed. Descriptions of this creature would have been scoffed at unless accompanied by this indisputable proof that a dog can achieve this prodigious size:


Brigid advises me that this is an Irish Wolfhound. It looks more like a Whole-Pack-of-Wolves-Hound to me.