Island Irish power

As I recklessly rifled through four sets of NCAA brackets and sat at the Hooter's bar, an unusual couple came up to me for no reason at all.

It was the first day of the tourney and it was St. Patty's Day, which can be sort of a perfect storm for lunatics at the bar.

The lady had red hair and could not stop talking about how Irish she was -- "my father was this and that and my grandfather is buried at this random Irish graveyard that everyone is supposed to know" -- that kind of crap.

Her husband was pretty hilarious. He was decked out in Irish threads and even sported some St. Patty's Day pajama pants I was quite fond of (I later asked him if I could buy them and he declined my offer).

I got him to pose for a picture with Tiffany Reddick. When Reddick is not slinging suds at Hooter's, she's a USVI Olympic hopeful in boxing and she has a mean right overhand.

Anyways, I was trying to ignore them until they decided to buy me a shot of whiskey -- it's 12:15 p.m. and the games just tipped off mind you -- so I decided to halfway tilt my body in their direction and humor them briefly.

"Yeah, so I'm doing the Irish and black thing," the husband said to me.

"Oh yeah, how about we drink some Black and Tans," I respond. "That's a good Irish drink and I've got a decent beach complexion."

He agreed. But we were disappointed when I ordered. You would think that with such a vast array of adult beverages in stock, Hooter's would have more than enough Bass Ale to go around.

"Black and Tan ... what the hell is that?" the blond bimbo behind the bar said. "Is that like some Irish thing?"

"Indeed, it is," I said. "Bass Ale mixed with a stout."

"What's a stout?" she said back.

"Unbelievable," I muttered to myself, before I swiveled my bar stool back around to face my favorite interracial St. Patty's Day couple.

Instead of a Black and Tan, I bought them back a shot of whiskey and it looked like that would be enough for the redhead for a while. They told me they had been bar hopping since the early morning and apparently, were the only two members of a non-existent bar crawl that came through the area.

I watched the early games with limited interruption from the black Leprechaun, who gave me basket-by-basket updates of the games I had the most money on.

I paid my bill, said my good byes and went back into the office to finish up a few things. Later on, I was driving to a UVI basketball game and saw them stumbling around the waterfront in a drunken haze of some sort. Only on St. Patty's Day, I thought. Only on St. Thomas.