St. Peter’s Fiesta in Gloucester

Over the past weekend Gloucester held its 81st annual St. Peter’s Fiesta, a giant amazing fishing, Italian, Catholic festival. It includes people carrying statues and icons through the streets and shouting blessings, a carnival, rowing races, lots of drinking, and the greasy pole competition, which involves costumed men trying to walk the length of a greased horizontal telephone pole and snatch a flag off the end.

Gloucester, as I expect you know, has been at the center of a media frenzy of late because of reports of 17 girls at the high school supposedly entering a “pact” to get pregnant together this year. (The girls are pregnant – yikes – but a lot of questions have been raised about whether there really was a "pact.") And the greasy pole walkers came up with a wicked response to the brouhaha – dressing up as a knocked-up Gloucester High School cheerleader, young mothers with beer-swilling babies, and the reporters who chase them.

Yes!














































































More Fiesta photos here (click on each picture to advance) and here.

Images copyright 2008 Greg Cook.