The largest St. Patrick’s Day party in the South has been canceled for the second year in a row due to COVID-19. But Allison Stice took it a step further and stopped drinking — a decision that has uncorked the question of belonging in a city of booze.
Essay by Allison Stice | Photo by Emily Earl
On any other St. Patrick’s Day, I would be working on my buzz and my first sunburn of the year with half a million of my closest friends in downtown Savannah.
To the sound of bagpipes, I’d skip through the public squares, where friends had staked their camp chairs and coolers the night before. The cast-iron gates guarding the courtyards of historic homes would be flung open to reveal a series of garden parties I’d pass through, never quite sure if I imagined them. When I lived on the parade route, I would make that night’s bar money by charging tourists $5 to use the bathroom. I’d come home to find my porch still crowded and strangers sprawled out on the couch.
With schools closed and work called off in tacit acknowledgment of the debauchery, all the familiar landmarks of this quiet town disappeared in a sea of green. Starting with brunch and carrying on to well past sundown, I’d be pulled along by the current, unable to hold still.
This year, I’m out. Strictly speaking, we all are, since the largest St. Patrick’s Day party in the South has been canceled for the second year in a row due to COVID-19. But I’ve taken it a step further and stopped drinking — a decision that has uncorked the question of belonging in a city of booze.
Even in a place with a year-round reputation for revelry, St. Patrick’s Day reigns supreme. My love affair with Savannah began during a spring break in college when the Forsyth Park Fountain flowed an emerald hue. I quickly fell under Savannah’s spell. At last, a place in America with a sense of history, from the buildings to the trees to the people, who rolled generations deep. After a nomadic childhood abroad in a missionary family, I longed for such roots.
Drinking was my ticket in. In the 10 years since I made my home in Savannah, I spent many happy hours posted up in watering holes and dives. As the afternoons rolled into nights, I’d sometimes find myself sitting on the rooftops of crumbling Victorians with artists and waiters when I’d feel the hangover beginning to dawn: For the previous evening’s fleeting pleasure, I’d spend most of the day doing penance. I tried limiting it but felt like I was missing out without being on a first-name basis at my favorite haunts. And it was so easy to pick up a to-go cup and exchange gossip with the usual suspects on my evening dog walks — a liquid-courage shortcut to feeling part of something.
According to the rollicking Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (locals call John Berendt’s masterpiece “The Book,”) the cardinal rule of Savannah is to always stick around for one more drink: “That’s when things happen.” That wisdom was never more true than during gala season, when my barfly friends and I routinely witnessed the black-tie set showing up three sheets to the wind, with mascara smeared and ties loosened, for a nightcap and karaoke at McDonough’s Restaurant & Lounge, a popular Irish pub. Their madcap, moneyed romp through town seemed to be the purest manifestation of Savannah: indulgence mixed with atonement. Even the famously pious Jimmy Carter got carried away here — legend has it he announced his presidential bid while standing on the beer-soaked counter of Savannah’s local dive, Pinkie Masters.
It's hard to imagine a city more hostile to the notion of sobriety than the one where I live. So what happens when the party’s over?
On St. Patrick’s Day 2020, Chatham County had no confirmed coronavirus cases yet. Now-ubiquitous precautions like masks, temperature guns, and hand sanitizer weren’t even on the table.
Postponing the parade was the first decision of consequence made by newly elected Mayor Van Johnson, who had toppled a Republican incumbent in a December 2019 runoff election that would presage Georgia’s shifting of the tides last fall. People were furious at Johnson’s caution. The parade, a tradition since 1824, had only been called off amid intrusions like the Civil War and World War I, with the last cancellation in 1921 in recognition of the Irish revolution.
Diehards rebelled, throwing clandestine celebrations, but I only saw them on Instagram as I scrolled through my phone on the couch, glued to the news and breastfeeding my 3-month-old baby. I’d taken most of the year off from drinking during pregnancy and new parenthood, but the heady swirl of stress and impending doom were a siren’s call.
In the hectic days that followed of balancing both full-time childcare and full-time work from home during a global pandemic, a glass of wine while fixing dinner after putting the baby to bed marked the end of the day — a boundary that quickly blurred, as the days ran together, and the occasions for a drink did, too. As the virus gained steam and a contentious election season loomed, my favorite craft brews drowned out the noise of cable news and Twitter feeds. What else was there to do? Zoom happy hours proliferated amid the nervous energy, most of us only too happy to forget where we were. They quickly tapered off, leaving me to imbibe alone — literally, since at home, my husband had gotten sober.
When we’d discussed cutting out booze pre-COVID-19, he’d wondered if we’d have to move. It was a fair question — some of our friends from the downtown days had to leave to get clean. Some, like us, had kids now, and their wild nights calmed down before ending altogether. Others had not made it at all. They would forever be 25, dancing in a green tutu and knee-highs, flush with sweat in the crowd on River Street, melting like an ice cube in an abandoned drink until it’s gone.
There’s nothing like parenthood to make you clear-eyed about drinking. By summer, my husband had decided to get rid of the temptation altogether rather than attempting to moderate it, saying he wanted to have every memory with his daughter that he could. Even though I wasn’t bingeing, I could see that alcohol was not quelling my anxiety as promised but spiking it, waking me up in the middle of the night in a panic. I dragged for days afterward.
I stumbled to the holiday season, dreading the reminders of how different everything was: no festive parties, no midnight mass, even the limited encounters with immediate family fraught with multiple tests and crossed fingers. I missed my city.
At Christmas dinner, I looked over my glass at my husband and his seltzer. I realized I would not be a good support to his sobriety until I figured out how to mark a merry occasion without alcohol. If drinking wasn’t for socializing and celebrations had trickled to a halt, then what was it for?
If the adage is true, that the way you spend New Year’s Eve is how you’ll spend the whole year, then I’ll be sober as a goose while I fail spectacularly at baking an elaborate food trend. I rang in 2021 by toasting with hot chocolate and going to bed early. I did dry January, and then I just kept going. Now, instead of rooting around for cans and bottles hidden in the pantry in the evenings, I reach for my baking supplies, and fill the house and my neighbors’ front steps with sweets.
When I gained back the hours I formerly spent acquiring and recovering from alcohol, I found I had lots of time where new things could grow. Time to pursue my creative projects, time to be present with my daughter on weekend mornings as she discovers the world, time to connect with people intentionally. A friend in recovery who joins me for Zoom game nights jokes that he has enough time to get a second job. (Game night may sound wholesome, but the competitive trash talk could curl your hair.)
Conversation goes straight to the heart these days. Being sober often feels like having no skin, all your nerve endings and veins exposed. Without booze, there’s nowhere to hide, no pretense, no bullshit masquerading as truth serum, no illusion of intimacy shattered at last call when the lights come on.
I discovered people who don’t drink in places I would never suspect: successful, popular artists; hip, young entrepreneurs; grandmothers who’d stopped in their mid-60s. People who had a choice in whether they quit, and people who had none. The definition of avoiding alcohol has grown to accommodate a variety of sober identities, from those who found solace in AA to those like me who just set down their drink one day and didn’t look back. The more I saw and learned, the more I realized I was lucky it was a choice I could still make.
I don’t know what life will look like post-COVID-19. Will there be a bacchanal, or will we be cautious forever? Either way, I’ve discovered the things you commit to have power. From helping new parents to feeding the hungry to getting more involved in my neighborhood and my church, I’ve taken more steps to expand my definition of myself and my adopted hometown. Where I find myself now is not a place or a legacy I was born into. It’s a place I can choose.
This year, the events that hold deep meaning for the Irish community — the Celtic Cross Ceremony, which recognizes the Irish immigrants who overcame great odds to settle here; the Jasper Green Ceremony, which pays tribute to the Irish military members from the Revolutionary War on; and mass at the Cathedral Basilica of St. John the Baptist to honor the great saint — will still take place, albeit virtually, with in-person event attendance restricted to just a few.
My own celebration will be similarly intimate. I’ll take a walk, no cup in hand, through Forsyth Park with my husband and daughter, whose steps are growing more confident each day. I’ll show her the fountain spouting dyed-green water. Inevitably, we’ll run into someone we know, and as they shout greetings from a social distance, I’ll be reminded of the home I’ve made here. Maybe soon we can invite them over again. We’ve been getting the backyard ready just in case. Did you hear they make nonalcoholic craft beer these days?
While other places I’ve lived still have snow on the ground, the arrival of spring has me brimming with warm-weather plans: a chance for renewal, a fresh start in a familiar place. With the azaleas in bloom, the calm canopy of trees swaying in the salt breeze overhead, the whole city will be wrapped in green, inviting me to stay awhile.
Allison Stice is a writer, editor, and award-winning journalist. Raised in a missionary family who lived in places ranging from Bouaké, Côte d’Ivoire, to Paris, France, she has a hard time answering the question, “Where are you from?” at parties. For more than a decade, she has put down roots in Savannah, Georgia. She writes about new motherhood at the end of the world at Apocalypse Wow. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @allisonstice.
Emily Earl is a fine art photographer, owner/operator of Prismatic Prints, where she assists clients from creative concept to finished artwork, and the executive director of Sulfur Studios, a community art space located in Savannah's Starland District. She recently published her first photobook, Late Night Polaroids, a collection of black-and-white polaroid images documenting downtown Savannah, Georgia's, nightlife scene from 2012 - 2020. Follow @emilyearlphoto on Instagram to keep up with her ongoing projects.
