You buy the beer, I'll wear the kilt (Insert snake joke here for St. Patrick)

My Irish weekend (Part 2) started at an Italian restaurant, wound up at a German bar, involved wearing a kilt, and closed out watching the Sopranos and a show about Mormons.

Of course, it took more than 20 minutes to get to the Italian place, a mile away from my house, with traffic in my town New York-style gridlock as a bridge is out for its 100-year repair work.

And if you’re going to put a base down for your St. Patrick’s Day, Italian is preferable to corned beef and cabbage. So what if I wound up smelling like a huge portion of Celtic scampi.

Friday, as cliché requires, I did wear my wool cable-knit sweater - a knockoff from Kohl’s made somewhere in Asia that I picked up for $15 a couple winters ago. Traditionally, the knot work was used to identify Irish fisherman should they wash ashore. For all I know, my knots say, “Cheap imperialist bastard.”

Anyway, I’ve sat out the last couple St. Patrick’s Days, not being in the mood for being a Mick, for poorly poured Guinness or moldy beer passed off as “green” for the holiday. But occasionally you have to take part in the silly part of your heritage. And I felt like drinking, so it made perfect sense.

We went to see a band called Gaelic Storm play at a cultural center, which is not the best place to see an Irish band on such an occasion as the crown tends to want to be in their shamrock pajamas by 10. Which only encourages the rest of us to have more poorly poured $5 plastic cup Guinness.

Which only encourages me to deep think in that flirting with maudlin, Tuesdays with Morrie sort of way during the slow songs, pining for Ireland and peat bogs and leprechauns and green beads and listening to a band that could have been in Lord of the Rings, instead of Titanic, they are all that short, and the flute/bagpipe player could have been the dark haired cowboy in Brokeback Mountain.

But so what. Every culture has its goofy parts, which is what holidays and parades are all about. So I start letting the beer do the talking and extrapolate that what this stupid War on Terrorism really should be about is having a world where no one afraid to look like a complete idiot spilling beer from a plastic bottle left on the floor.

Where, as long as no one gets hurt, no one should be afraid to dance about celebrating part of who they are or who they love or associate with or where they come from. (Maybe some of the plastic cup leached into the Guinness - or Harp, because I switched as I just couldn’t take what they were doing to the dark, brown chocolate goodness, as it were Budweiser or something).

We’re all jigsaw puzzles, dammit, and it’s hard enough as it it to get all the pieces to fit - or maybe wonder if the should fit in the first place. And everybody’s culture, background, family, while maybe not fodder for a Eugene O’Neill play, is fucked up. So let’s party.

Yeah, right on. Show’s over. Let’s go to the closest bar - a German place, where I get two beers bought for me, one being the size of a small aquarium, which is the actual loose translation for “stein.”

The singer who opened the show, a woman from Louisiana, shows up around 1 a.m. This peaks my interest as: A) she was wearing one of those spaghetti strap shirts with an exposed naval, which means she could NOT work in my office (thanks to a guy who complained about a woman who did. A guy! What is this world coming to?); and she has one of those tattoos just above her ass, which is sort of stupid, yet stripper-sexy. Plus, she is funny and tall and can play Irish and Greek instruments.

Though deep down I am sure she at least considered it for a nanosecond, she will not dump her career to join me in my suburban life. Her boyfriend runs her record label. Yeah, but he looks like Tim Burton, the guy who made Batman.

And these days, well these days middle age may be catching up, but with my attempted beard - and a kilt - I can look damn sexy. That is, if your idea of sexy is a bouncer at a Pogues concert, or maybe a haggis-eater at a Highland Leather Bar.

The kilt is what I wore to a party on Saturday afternoon, per the promise of free drink. The drink I opted for was water, because by this point, though having no sign of hangover, I was a bit worried about my liver. So I got a free sandwich out of the deal.

See, my Irish buddy Shay got tied into running the events at this bar for the afternoon, which included a kilt contest. I borrowed his and must admit that with a sleeveless T-shirt and work boots I was quite butch. In fact, I could be the new lead singer in Queen.

There were five other guys in kilts present, and by what they all said, I was the only one wearing an undergarment. Hey, friends don't freeball in friends’ clothes.

Plus, I was worried this was/is all going to show up on www.kiltboy.com anyway, and thus ruin my chances of ever being Lieutenant Governor.

Now the other guys in kilts were not as scary as I expected. Yes, three were reenactor types, but two of those were into WWII, which really doesn’t explain the kilts, does it?

The other reenactor was an Ambercrombie and Fitch kind of guy, replete with a racist T-shirt about the Koran. I’m not quite sure what it had to do with St. Patrick’s Day but that it was green. Since he was gel-riffically chiseled, of course he swayed the lady judges.

One other guy was a theater dude who teaches stage combat. He had a sword with him. Make your own joke here.

The other guy worked at the bar and had someone else at the bar make a kilt for him. Ick, in a Brady Bunch episode sort of way.

Thing about wearing a kilt, though, is it actually is kind of cool (pun intended). I wear long shorts all year anyway. And when you swagger in one, it kind of swaggers and sways along, giving you waves of fabric with your step.

Plus, like whoever your people are with their parades and concerts and colored beverages, you can’t be afraid to be stupid in public. My role model: my long lost buddy Bob who once spun on the floor on his side like in the Three Stooges, just because he was in the mood to, and who once ran naked in the snow with a parka on his head and boots on his feet, for $20.

That’s the beauty of America, isn’t it?

Plus, if the joy is gone you wind up like Tony Soprano, which being close to his age, is something I think we all go through in middle-age. (Hey, we don’t even want to define middle ages at 35-45 anymore, even though most of us will drop on out of here between 70 and 90.)

By then, we have all these jigsaw pieces, a lot of them we only know about ourselves, or maybe some back in the box we would rather forget about. Sometimes we try too hard to put them together.

Christ, I hope that doesn’t sound like Mitch Albom. Plus, Tony is a fat, murderous mobster. Loneliness is the least he deserves.

But as an Irish mutt, it’s sadly comforting to find out even a mafia don can feel like we do. Because the Irish, dontcha know, cornered the literary market on solitary, dark souls a long time ago. Thank the British, the Pope and rain for that. Why do you think we all wound up here?