Some Things I Like About The Doo Dah Parade, II

(Continuing from previous…)

…Then there’s the Disco drill team, which was really excellent.

Their drill? Some serious synchronized Disco dancing, of course. They did the “Hustle”, along with various standard Saturday Night fever moves, and the crowd were very appreciative. Inevitably they did “YMCA”… and just as inevitably the crowd spontaneously joined in with the arm movements. (I think that this is hard-wired into a whole generation – rather like the reaction you get from all the women at a party if anyone puts on “I will Survive”.)

You know that they did not have to make those costumes… they probably sit in wardrobes (closets) every year since being retired in the late 70s, waiting for their moment in the sun once a year:

There are a number of floats/groups genuinely interested in the younger part of the crowd, in case you were wondering whether all of the parade was ironic stuff for the grown ups. Here’s a Dr. Seuss reading group of some sort. They did a little drill too, but I did not catch what it was… (out of shot were the Cat in the Hat, the Grinch, and other characters I cannot identify):

In similar fashion to the Men of Leisure’s Nap Drill team (see previous post) there is the “Stogie Men” club. No drill here… just a flatbed truck with them sitting around smoking cigars and being generally slobby. They’ve got a giant cigar on the back – lit of course.

They are followed (always) by a women’s group the name of which I never catch, every year. They’re doing their own in-your-face celebration of leisure time, as a counterpoint to their sibling men’s group, I think. They’re usually dressed largely in purple, with purple hats and parasols. This year several of them had rather fetching bikinis, as you can see:

I was hoping to report on the Pluto funeral (from JPL), but two things happened when they went by. The first is that my batteries were dying, and so I lost shots by having to swop them around, but the second was that they did not do anything when they were right in front of my spot. They were sort of just walking along at that bit in some disarray, and only once they’d gone by did they arrange themselves in a way that I could even see what they were. They seemed to have various costumes representing the other planets, and they were carrying something I assume to be representing Pluto. I’m sure it was brilliant and funny and clever earlier on in the parade. I was nearer the end. If anyone has a photo of them, or finds one on the web, please point to it for us.

Missing this year seemed to be the Barbecue and Habachi Drill team… who are equipped with various hot grills, aprons, etc, and who are cooking as they go along. They launch cooked sausages into the crowd with catapults and rocket launchers. Even though they are wrapped in foil, I am not sure if anyone actually eats these “treats”. (Maybe I simply missed them… They could have gone by very fast, or after I left since I did not stay quite until the very end – but they usually are earlier in the parade.)

Here’s another of the annual favourites (for me … again largely not appreciated by the crowd)… the Bastard Sons of Lee Marvin. It’s just a bunch of people (men and sometimes women) dressed in various outfits of Lee Marvin from various movies of his. They’re just swaggering along ironically, some with huge cigars, etc. (Sorry about not having any closeups…. by now I kept getting obstructed by some standing people.) They used to have a beaten up old army jeep, but I imagine it died, since it was not here this year.

They did have an old car outside of which the driver was dangling his arm, at the end of which was an open bottle of bourbon (I presume fake). On the side of the car there was a poster that read “rent a Marvin movie tonight”)…

Again (as with some of the other old favourites I’ve mentioned) I had the sense that they’ve faded a bit, and are being lost among some of the newer, noisier things (which are largely not as clever or bizarre), but it might just be my own perceptions. Maybe it was always this way.

-cvj