The first Capone's Day wasn't even known as such. It all began with a radio broadcast on WWHR, the student run station at Western Kentucky University, when I did a special "anti-Valentine's Day" edition of my Top 25 show. It gained its name sometime in the next year, after reading about the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, in which several of Al Capone's men killed several of Bugs Moran's men in a fight over the liquor market in Chicago (it's never been legally proven, but everyone knows he did it).
Single as I was, I didn't appreciate all of the baggage that goes with Valentine's Day. You know, the thought that if you weren't with someone, you were garbage? I did the broadcast to help combat that, and now this new holiday will give us single folk something to celebrate on that day that is completely antithetical to the Valentine's Day ideal. Sure, it's rather tasteless to celebrate a bunch of people being killed, but it beats being sickened to death by all the mushiness that comes to the surface on a typical Valentine's Day.
Of course, if I ever did somehow find a girlfriend, my attitudes on this would probably change. That's okay, Al Capone always welcomes you back into the fold if something goes wrong, and gives you something other than the now ex-significant other to concentrate your energies on. I say ex-SO because Al Capone is also equal opportunity: women, gays, whatever. Like I said, none of the prevailing Valentine's Day baggage.
I'm trying to spread this new holiday, to make it an event for all people who are unwillingly single during this sap-drenched time of the year. Tell your friends. Put this site on your hotlist and distribute it. Tell all the internet magazines you can. Print this out and post copies around your school. Make this grow.
And just to be sure you can: This page is officially entered into the Public Domain. Now go out, and make it prosper!
I do hope, for 2004, to try to have greeting cards and such available, and perhaps even work on getting linked into the bigger Anti-Valentine's sentiment I understand is afoot on the web.
Go back to the Home Page.
Mark Kinney / alberich@iglou.com