Erin Go Barf

Happily, I had a cousin who worked at Liquor Mart (big liquor store that used to be a supermarket - makes sense). He's the one who told me that I didn't have to pay extra for the dyed green keg for my Saint Patrick's party. All you really need to do, he assured me, was put a generous dollop of green food coloring just inside the rubber ring at the opening just before you tap the keg, and you'll be drinking Kelly green suds for the duration of the evening. He failed to mention that this can cause a certain amount of mess and splatter as the tap is being inserted, but hey, it ain't a party til something gets dyed permanently.
Back in the day, my roommate and I referred to Saint Patrick's Day and other "drinking holidays" such as New Year's Eve as "Amateur Night." After all, we didn't really need an excuse to get face down drunk. March seventeenth did allow us the chance to wallow in all things emerald. We put the remainder of our green dye to work on anything that we might ingest: food, drink, or any other non-toxic substance that might find its way into our systems. Processing all that food coloring proved to be a challenge for our digestive tracts, and those who were unable to keep all that fun down in the first place may have been better off. Days later there was still a pale vestige of the shamrock experience we had enjoyed so much on that festive night.
Invariably we ended up with extra food and liquor, and the challenge was trying to work up the interest consume green food or liquor in any quantity after the initial onslaught. For this reason, we ended up with a bottle of gin, very cheap gin, that looked to be mouthwash after our experiments. As a confirmed beer drinker, I had no interest, and my roommate kept his distance because - well - it was green gin.
So there it sat, for months. Until one evening, the guy next door dropped by for a friendly game of Trivial Pursuit. We offered him a drink, and he asked, "What's that green stuff?" We told him it was gin, but didn't bother to elaborate on the color, since that was obvious. We didn't bother to tell him that it was generic, since the color had actually enhanced it beyond that. And we had carefully scrawled on the label "Real Good" right above the plain black letters that said "Gin." "Gimme a shot of that," he drawled. We happily obliged, and we proceeded to trounce him thoroughly as we did most contenders to our collective trivia crown. He took our abuse with good humor, and went home to sleep it off.
He came back the next week for more trivia and more green gin. As he got more and more "relaxed", he pontificated on his own personal hell: Bloomington, Indiana. He never won a game, but he drank a lot of green gin. He pined for his old girl friend, and he drank a lot of green gin. Eventually, this guy, whose name was also Dave, moved away and we poured the last few shots of his favorite spirit down the drain. When the next Saint Patrick's Day came, we bought Tanqueray.