Parade Day

I went to the Rose Festival parade on Saturday. It was great seeing all the people. The parade was entertaining, too.

Even though it’s free to watch the parade on the street, I think they must have some admission criteria.

(1) You must weigh 100 pounds over your ideal weight.

(2) You must sit in a flimsy aluminum lawn chair with legs bowing under the strain

(3) When you struggle to your feet, the lawn chair must remain attached to your bottom until someone pries it off

(4) You must wear a very loud printed top one size too small.

There are more horses in a parade than you see on any farm, many of them with rodeo queens. Quite a few of these ladies met the same criteria as (1) and (2) above, except substitute the word “saddle” for “lawn chair.” The horses of the biggest gals were stopping and snorting and trying to walk backwards. The queens tried to make it appear that they were manipulating the horses on purpose, but I knew these horses were putting up a fight. They were thinking, “There is no freaking way that I’m walking on this hard pavement when my back is bowing so much that my belly is practically scraping the ground. I am backing out of this situation right now.”

These robust queens were nothing compared to the dance teams tromping by. Who on earth picks out those stretchy polyester dance uniforms? Listen up, dance uniform picker outer, If the majority of your dance team is made up of girls in the plus to jumbo size range, there must be some other fabric that will camouflage their insatiable craving for Moon Pies and Big Gulps. Look for some corset-like material that will smooth them out rather than those gaudy things that accentuate their every layer of rolls.

In stark contrast to your American dance team, you have the ones coming from Portland’s sister cities in Korea and Japan. These wisps of girls sport bright, NON-STRETCHY uniforms that make them look toned and healthy. They practically float over the ground along with the colorful flags they wave. You could package a dozen of these girls in one of our dance uniforms and still have less bulges.

The size of these kids used to shock me, but I’ve gotten used to it. I look for other things to shake my head at, and I was not disappointed this time. I witnessed something at this parade that I could not for the life of me figure out. When the horses walk by, there is a cute golf cart decorated with signs like “Pooper Scooper” and “Road Apple Patrol.” One such cart lost sight of its purpose and went IN FRONT of the horses. As luck would have it, a horse decided let loose a thunderous amount of baseball sized steamy green chunks in the middle of the street right in front of us.

The crowd groaned and looked around for the Pooper Scooper, but then we remembered it had already gone by, so we thought another one would be along soon.

In the blink of an eye, a mom to the left of us prodded one of her little boys to run out in the middle of the street and stand by the steaming cluster for a photo op. He didn’t want to, so she offered him $5. He slowly walked out there and stood beside the heap while she trained her camera on him. Then she wanted him to interact with the pile – pretending to step in it, fall in it, be surprised by it, etc. He dutifully complied. His littler brother ran out as well and they pretended to push each other into the pile. Most of the crowd sat with our jaws hanging open at this supreme white trash display, but some, the biggest and brightest dressed ones, encouraged the boys to dance around the turds and really whoop it up.

About that time the Marine Band came around the corner toward us. They were all grim-faced discipline. “Do you think they’ll step in it?” I asked my daughter. “No, surely they’ll move over,” she said. “Don’t call me Shirley,” I snapped.

The marines kept their eyes straight ahead and tromped right through the pile, the cuffs of their pants dragging turds along as they marched. The crowd moaned. I felt my cereal rising up like mercury in a thermometer. Not one marine flinched. There could have been a dead possum lying there and they would have squished right through it.

The rest of the parade was anti-climatic after this. The Boy Scouts came next, and they dodged the pile like it was a nest of rattlesnakes, parting like the Red Sea until they got around it. Same with the rest of the groups. Those turds lingered through the whole parade, taunting everyone who passed. My biggest regret was that I gawked at those two boys rather than whipping my camera out and taking a picture, because who’s going to believe that really happened?