A few days ago I mentioned my loathing of parades. It may make me appear to be something of a curmudgeon. While this is certainly deserved in some other cases, my lack of love for parades comes from a lifetime of experience.
I was six when I was in my first parade. It wasn’t so bad, I thought. I got to ride in a car. I had won a model building contest. Everyone in my family did, actually, because the judge was the owner of Maryann’s Toy Store, a friend of the family.
Fast forward to high school. I was in the marching band and that, of course, required marching and playing in parades. It was fun, too, primarily because I got to play my French Horn. Marching and playing it was definitely an art form, largely because it was tough to balance and keep step without knocking your teeth out.
I still liked parades then. I would see one on occasion as a spectator. It wasn’t until I was a Seafair Pirate that I began to actually dislike parades.
My friend Mike and I were tallying up the score recently and we figure that we were in roughly 250+ parades during our time in the group. The Seafair Pirates were, after all, first and foremost a parade group. During Seafair alone we would be in 10 parades, sometimes two or three in a single day.
After a while, they all became a blur. Small community parades with a couple hundred people, Seafair Torchlight with 100,000 or more – didn’t matter. They were all the same from our perspective. The time would come for us to take our place. We would run down the street dragging our swords, scaring kids, mucking it up for the crowd… then BANG! BANG! Siren. BOOM! The shotgun would fire, the siren would blare to warn of of the impending cannon fire. At the end we headed for the nearest bar to toast our success with clowns, bagpipers and royalty.
Some of the parades were fun. Mark Christopher came up with the idea of water skiing behind the parade vehicle, which was a WWII amphibious landing craft, a DUKW to be exact. Animal (Mike) would pull it on occasion, chained to the front of it like a maniacal madman. Me, I would go a range of things, including my very favorite, Spike the Wonder Dog.
Spike was a battery operated mechanical pooch. You know the ones. You could get them in import stores. He would walk a bit, sit, bark and then stand up and do it all over again. I decided to pirate-tize him, giving him an earring and eye patch. A gimmick for parades was born.
I still remember the University District parade. I would run along with Spike hanging by his tail from my mouth. From afar it looked like I had a little puppy. I woud sit him down on the street and say, “Sick ’em!” Spike would dutifully stand up, walk toward them and bark loudly. This particularly time, however, he went rogue on me. When it came time to stand up, the cannon fired at the same time. Instead of his usual routine, he rose up on his haunches, sat straight up, fell over and stopped moving; the batteries came loose. It looked as if he had been shot. End of Spike. We never worked together again. I wasn’t about to let the little bugger upstage me.
Now that I am through with parades, I’ve had time to think about them logically. They still don’t make sense to me.
When Torchlight came around in Seattle each year, people would start finding their favorite place on the street at about 2 p.m. The street, mind you, was still open for traffic. The parade was still five hours away. People would bring chairs and coolers and even sofas down to 4th Avenue, which ran through the heart of downtown.
It’s still odd to me. People arrive up to five hours early just so they can watch a bunch of vehicles and people pass by them (In some corners of the world, this is known as “traffic” by the way).
They would brave crowds in the tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, and traffic that would make New York gridlock look like a walk in the park, all to see people roll by in bands, on floats or in convertibles.
And it was always the same, too. First the motorcycle drill team. Then the grand marshal, followed by princesses on floats, elected officials in cars, the obligatory clowns, people on horseback, Shriners, cowboys, marching bands, small children waving with bewildered looks on their faces and pooper scoopers to pick up after the horses and dogs. Then, at the very end, just so there was no doubt the parade was over, on came the firetrucks and their blaring sirens followed by the garbage trucks. After five hours of waiting and two hours of paraders passing by, it was time to sit in traffic for another two hours to get home.
I simply don’t get it. It has to be one of the strangest customs we have in our modern world. If aliens were to invade our planet and a parade was going on at the time, I think they would just high tail it back to the planet from whence they came, thinking we’re either too primitive for them or certifiably insane.
Having been in them, having known the people who participate in them and having watched a few, I can tell you that the level of quality entertainment doesn’t warrant sitting on a sidewalk for a couple hours, let along seven to watch the Torchlight parade. If you did this at any other time in Seattle, you’d be arrested for loitering and vagrancy by the way. Try it sometime.
But somehow, on this one night, or on this one day in any small town U.S.A., we put all sensibilities aside and decide that we voluntarily want to fight traffic, fight crowds, argue over seating spots, sit on a filthy street corner, and get absolutely giddy when the guy with the shopping cart rolls by with plastic horns and inflatable unicorns.
It is uniquely a human thing to do, I guess. I’m just still not sure why.
Parading around in my house somewhere on the Treasure Coast,
— Robb