Not even marching wiener dogs can distract some people from beating a dead horse. Sigh.

'Beating a dead horse' was one of my mother's expressions. She came from a Scotch-Irish family that had been in America so long that 'Scotch-Irish' was nothing but a label. No music, no stories, no reason for emigrating survived.

My mother didn't get along with her squabbling siblings, and a Greek family more-or-less took her in, enabling her to keep her sanity through high school. My mother had red hair, and the pater familias called her The Redbird.