Depth Takes a Holiday in June

June is sorely lacking in days your employer will give you paid time off to celebrate. But that doesn’t mean it’s without its notable holidays and anniversaries.

We honor the flag on June 14, fathers on June 18. And June 19 is Juneteenth, which marks the day in 1865 when African Americans in Texas learned of the Emancipation Proclamation--more than two years after Lincoln signed the document ending slavery in the United States.

You can celebrate on June 17 at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Griffith Park, which will have a daylong Juneteenth program that includes an appearance by the New Buffalo Soldiers and an afternoon lecture on black westerns.

But June is also rife with holidays that exist only because someone made them up and submitted them to Chase’s Calendar of Events, a fat annual compendium of the world’s special days, weeks and months.

Open Chase’s and you’ll discover today is the 260th anniversary of the birth of the notorious Marquis de Sade. You’ll also learn that the Third Annual Mustard Family Reunion is coming up June 11-13 in Mount Horeb, Wis. Some 150 Mustards are expected to attend; people surnamed Moutarde (French for the yellow condiment) and Senf (German for you know what) are also welcome.

Some of these holidays are serious and some are decidedly not.

Among the former: June is Gay and Lesbian Pride Month. The month was chosen because June 27-28 is the anniversary of the 1969 riot at the Stonewall Inn--a Greenwich Village gay bar--that launched the modern gay-liberation movement.

But June is also National Accordion Awareness Month, only because a San Francisco musician felt his preferred instrument was being dissed.

“You know the Gary Larson cartoon--’Welcome to heaven. Here’s your harp. Welcome to hell. Here’s your accordion,’ ” says Tom Torriglia, explaining over the phone what people who play the unwieldy instrument have to put up with.

How did the accordion become the Rodney Dangerfield of musical instruments?

“Is Lawrence Welk the biggest problem?” Torriglia is asked.

“Not anymore,” says Torriglia, who begins cataloging the accordion’s virtues without further prompting.

“In Europe, it’s a revered instrument,” he points out, and it also inevitably makes people smile when they hear it.

“Hey, I think the accordion needs a little positive spin put on it,” Torriglia told himself 11 years ago, and the rest is history.

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Torriglia sells accordions and other instruments and music-related services through a virtual music store. He also has a new polka band called the Squeegees.

“As an accordion player, you have to have a sense of humor,” says Torriglia, who obviously does. His store’s Web site is www.ladyofspain.com.

On June 10, thousands of turkey vultures will return, much as the swallows do to San Juan Capistrano, to Makoshika State Park in Glendive, Mont. Locals have dubbed it the Buzzard Days Festival. June 16 is Bloomsday, when admirers of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” gather to retrace the peregrinations of Joyce’s fictional Leopold Bloom through the actual streets of Dublin on June 16, 1904.

The record for making up holidays is held by Tom and Ruth Roy of Lebanon, Pa. Tom began dreaming up new reasons to put on a party when he had a radio talk show. He and his wife have since added 60 special occasions to the calendar, all of which have two virtues, according to Ruth: “They’re free to celebrate and they’re a hoot.”

Thanks to the Roys, today is Yell “Fudge” at the Cobras of North America Day. As Ruth explains, the idea is to go outside at noon and yell “Fudge.” This will cause any cobras in the vicinity to both gag and skedaddle (the Roys’ terms), ensuring that North America continues to be free of the venomous snakes.

Among the other holidays instituted by the Roys: Answer Your Cat’s Question Day (Jan. 22) and No Housework Day (April 7--”that’s mine,” Ruth says proudly). But perhaps their most widely observed holiday is Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Day (Aug. 8).

“That’s incredibly popular,” says Ruth, who recommends sneaking some zucchini onto the seat of your neighbor’s car, if he or she has no porch.

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I won’t be throwing a party on the June 19th anniversary of the birth in 1897 of chief Stooge Moe Howard. And I’m going to pass on Sit-on-the-Front-Pew Sunday, which is June 25th this year, an occasion created by a Kansas Christian radio station to improve clerical morale. But I do plan to revel on June 27--National Columnists Day.

This laudable holiday was started in 1988 by Jim Six, a columnist and now city editor of the Gloucester County Times in Woodbury, N.J.

Six says his columns tend to change direction in the middle. He began promising readers that National Columnists Day was coming up in columns on other subjects, then realized he was going to have to deliver.

“I picked the fourth Tuesday in June because my column came out on Tuesday,” he recalls.

Next Six wrote to every columnist he could think of, urging them to endorse his new celebration of their profession. He got responses from Dave Barry, Russell Baker, Erma Bombeck, Jack Anderson and William F. Buckley, among others. The only naysayers: “Dear Abby thought it was a scam,” Six says, laughing, and Joyce Brothers returned his letter with a note written on it, saying something like: “You need an act of Congress for a holiday. Goodbye.”

Six says he got a great column out of the responses of his fellow scribblers. He has yet to receive a gift, he says. But he did design a fitting flower arrangement for the occasion.

“It was a stained coffee mug mounted on a dirty ashtray,” he recalls. “There were cigarette butts and swizzle sticks from Artie’s International House of Go-Go, and some flowers, of course--don’t forget the flowers.”

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Spotlight runs every Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.