color the day

? Kansas City reached just west, over the state line, for the theme of its St. Patrick’s Day parade on Sunday. The color scheme came, as always, from the Emerald Isle.

But mixed in with all of the green  on hats, T-shirts, even false eyelashes  was a wide streak of red, white and blue.

The official theme for this year’s parade was “There’s No Place like Home,” a nod to Kansas and “The Wizard of Oz.”

“This is the greatest day ever,” said Patrick Gillcrist, of Overland Park, Kan. “You’ve got Irish heritage and American patriotism.”

But on the first St. Patrick’s Day since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, signs of patriotism were everywhere  not just at the front of the parade, where a contingent of New York police officers, firefighters and Port Authority officers walked the two-mile route as special guests.

Flags waved from the crowd and flew from almost every float. The Rosedale Irish float, assembled by the O’Brien, Fitzgerald and McDonald families of Kansas City, Kan., combined the official and unofficial themes with a red-white-and-blue rainbow.

“If it’s not going to be green, it had better be red, white and blue,” said Adam Schwery, 21, also of Overland Park.

He and Gillcrist, 20, were part of a group that stood on the sidewalk cheering parade participants, drinking beer and good-naturedly accosting passersby to make sure everyone wore green.

Women failing the color test were asked to kiss Pat McMurtry, 21, of Kansas City  who, even though he wasn’t collecting many kisses, proclaimed the day a success.

“It makes me proud that everybody can come out and say, ‘You know what? We’re all buds. We’ll put everything else away, and come out and be together and have fun,”‘ he said. “It doesn’t matter where you’re from.”

Lynne Greenamyre, a radio executive assistant and stand-up comedian from Merriam, Kan., noted that for all its patriotic overtones, St. Patrick’s Day is still the city’s biggest party day.

“You can’t pass it up, when a conservative town like Kansas City allows its patrons to carry around open containers (of alcohol), and when normally whitewashed citizens paint their hair green, put tinsel on their heads and stagger downtown with their children in tow,” Greenamyre said.

The mixture of patriotism and partying showed in what people were buying at the trinket stands, vendor Patrick Dumaw said.

“(American) flags are selling really well,” said Dumaw, who was making his third St. Patrick’s Day trip to Kansas City from Hurst, Ill.

“But my biggest seller is probably the beer glass necklace. I’m already sold out of those.”