I’m not sure that everyone loves a parade but I do–as a subject. I wrote two columns about the parade that kicks off the Illinois State Fair each year. This one appeared in our paper of August 20, 1987.
“I gotta tell the guys in New York about
this,” I said to myself. New Yorkers are pretty vain about the zaniness of
their street life. But when, I planned to ask them, was the last time they had
seen grown men and women wearing brown trash bags marching behind a portable
outhouse bearing the legend, “U-Dump-It” smack in front of their
house?
I admit that this is livelier stuff than I usually see on my
block, which on most Wednesday evenings is filled with raspy-throated Baptists
heading home from choir practice, people who if they wear trash bags, do it at
home. On this night, however, my block, like a dozen or more like it on
Springfield’s downtown east side, had been commandeered for use as the staging
area for the preview night parade which kicks off the Illinois State Fair. The
staging has become an annual inconvenience. Kids pester you to use your
toilets, and the stink of horse manure is never quite removed from your
curbside by the street sweepers; two years ago I came home from work testy and
tired, looking forward to dinner and quiet conversation, to find a drum and
bugle corps blaring away within fifteen feet of my living room window.
To many of my neighbors, the use of our residential streets
to stage the parade is another instance of being (literally) shit upon by city
hall. I lived for twelve years practically next door to Governor Thompson; had
he asked to borrow an egg, I would have been happy to oblige him. But when the governor
asks Mayor Houston—the governor’s neighbor, governmentally speaking—if he can
borrow a neighborhood, he counts too much on our good nature. Even my
Republican neighbors get testy when they find a baton troupe among the
marigolds.
Usually I have a high tolerance for organized childishness.
I still occasionally vote, for instance, and eat in restaurants. As a boy I
watched uncounted parades, my father then being in the marching band business.
I thrilled to the sounds of a brass band for years, until the public schools
began cutting back on music instruction. But I am a grown man now, wise enough
about the world to have drafted Krohe’s Rules of Promotion, one of which is
that any event which needs a parade to drum up interest probably shouldn’t be
held in the first place. This rule applies universally to wars and circuses,
and to state fairs when they are held in the Midwest.
I did not in truth have much time to study this year’s
marchers comprehensively. I was too busy dodging sheriffs deputies in golf
carts, and preparing my evening’s escape to a ball game. I had noticed in the
paper that the parade theme this year was “A Trip Through Candy
Land.” Considering the parade route—up Ninth Street, through two dozen
blocks of cityscape so drab, so ugly that a tornado might sweep through it and
qualify for a beautification award—the choice of theme went beyond irony into
the surreal.
The parade’s route, however, had nothing on the entrants
themselves. One category was won by a White Hen Pantry, another by an upstate
Chamber of Commerce which chose to represent hometown pride with a riverboat
called the Pride of Ottawa—a craft which no longer exists on the Illinois,
practically speaking. David Byrne would have loved this parade, I thought; the
next day I was convinced that he had judged it. The Lincoln Award was presented
to a walking Crimestoppers demonstration for what the papers called “the
best characterization of the romance of Illinois.”
Being the state capital, Springfield has endured more of
this kind of thing than any Illinois city save Chicago. (I was having lunch
this spring at a sidewalk cafe on Michigan Avenue when the Greek Independence
Day parade passed by, in costumes which were as resplendent as the political
slogans were bloodthirsty. In Chicago, you don’t go to parades, they come to
you.) As long ago as the 1850s torch-light processions complete with German
bands led people to political rallies. In 1907 we saw a parade of a more
sinister sort, when white trash marched through the old black belt and used
those torches to burn down homes and businesses. Passion for processions of all
sorts seems to have spent itself, however. The typical parade these days
consists of a handful of shuffling old men barely able to hoist the flag they
once were willing to die for in wars which baffled passersby don’t remember.
Parades will be a little passé, of course in an era when
pre-teens while away the hours between visits to the orthodontist watching
cable movies like Bachelor Party, whose party scene featured a sprightly bit of
pervertus interruptus when the donkey with whom the hooker was intended
to have sex died of a cocaine overdose. This would explain why the only people
who seem to actually enjoy parades are either very young or old.
Parades have, however, recently acquired a certain camp
appeal among us jaded thousands in between. In what we might call the New Wave
parade, self-parody is conscious and deliberate. I have not researched the
point, but I suspect the style began in the 1970s among Ivy League marching
bands. Yale, for example, would typically visit Harvard and announce a musical
salute to the Crimson homecoming queen— then spell out the name, “Sue
Pine.” According to one report, the Yale “band” which once
visited West Point included percussionists beating on teddy bears with sticks;
a quick-witted cadet was overheard to ask, “These guys don’t look like
music majors.”
Whatever its genesis, that spirit is alive in central
Illinois. The state fair parade included a lawn mower drill team, and Citizens
United for the right to Bare Arms, who carried the limbs of mannequins. (I was
not there to see it, but I would have cried tears of delight had those marchers
lifted their arms in salute—”Arms, left!”—as they passed the
prosthetic clinic located a bit west of Ninth at Carpenter.
I saw the best of that bunch warming up a half-block from my
front door. They were the Earle Clements Jobs Corps drill team. Dressed in
spiffy military garb down to their combat boots, the unit performed a deft and
witty parody of military drill exercises incorporating moves borrowed
everywhere from hip-hop to slap dancing. In the process they did what any good
parody is capable of: Immensely pleasurable for its own sake, the dancing made
it impossible to watch another military drill, with its sodden cadences and
robotlike routines, without being reminded that war is all about organized
mindless-ness.
As I drove slowly past police barricades trying to leave my
own block for the ball game, dodging militant Christians and midget horses and
cops on horseback, I wondered again why next year’s parade couldn’t be staged
on, say, Glenwood Avenue, where the mayor lives. And I recalled—again—that
Glenwood is much too far from the fairgrounds, and besides that, the west side
has rather more dedicated vandals than does my neighborhood, and some bored
freshman-to-be would probably BB the drum majorettes or something.
I decided further that this year I would not give way to
irritation, but would contrive a constructive suggestion to my and my neighbors’
problem. There are whole blocks in the downtown business district where one
could park tuba players by the bunch and not disturb a living soul. This
probably would be resisted by city fathers. (It is one thing to have a loved
one die after an expensive illness, quite another to use the bier for a ping
pong party while the body is still warm.) However, there are enough acres of
parking lot along Ninth and Eleventh streets downtown to stage another Battle
of Bull Run, much less a parade. Each of these lots is as empty as a
commissioner’s book bag by four minutes after five every day.
Until I hear news of such a relocation, I intend to console
myself with the thought that hosting this year’s preview of the preview parade
could have been worse. Ernie Banks was the parade grand marshal. In his
enthusiasm he might have said, “Let’s have two!”
This article appears in Aug 11-17, 2016.
