Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious May Day

[dreamshark]

The weather was GORGEOUS! Not suprisingly, the place was packed - we had to walk several blocks from the park before we found a place we could squeeze in at the side of the road with our one little folding camp chair. The parade was fun, but not one of their best. The theme (other than Mother Nature good, Capitalist Materialism bad) was "A New Bridge." The big Broken Bridge set piece came early in the parade, with a large pack of child-size cars swarming on and around the doomed freeway bridge and an impressively huge pale monster (representing rampant consumerism?) stomping around, dangling a giant carrot (??). It was pretty cool, if a little incoherent. After that, things got a bit attenuated with a few too many local drill teams and such pausing the parade every couple of hundred feet to do an act, leading to long stretches of dead air time downstream. There were a few more large costumes and floats (impressive but increasingly incomprehensible even if you read the program) interspersed with extremely cool things like flocks of blue and yellow swallows and hordes of stilt walkers with totem poles on their heads.

The parade was fun, but I got tired of sitting on the ground with my feet on either side of a bush and left a bit early, picking my way through people's yards and alleys to get back to our picnic site by the piney woods, staked out by minnehaha sometime before noon. The picnic was a great success, with so many friends dropping by that I couldn't begin to enumerate them all. I could have done with a little less drum jam from the group right next to us, but they eventually had to stop when a quiet little music act started up in the water pavilion nearby, which gave us some relief. (The drummers were actually very good, just a little loud.) We ate lots of fresh fruit, crackers and cheese and hummus, and sausages grilled on the minnehahas' hibachi. Peg and Delia shared their soul collage cards, we played with minnehahaK's new hippie tarot deck, and Richard did his pied piper routine with his giant bubble kit. A good time was had by all.

And, as always, once the Tree of Life was raised from the dead the leaves burst forth on the trees, flowers leaped into bloom, and all the birds sang.

Comments

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

which was....?

[soarhead.livejournal.com]

Yes, it was a great day! As a newbie (I have no idea how I could possibly have missed this given how long I've lived here) I was not sure what to expect, but I have to say it was quite entertaining. The costumes were great and the spontaneous happenings were pretty cool. The picnic was very pleasant as well.

I shot over 500 frames watching the parade and in the end I was actually getting a bit fatigued from the constant stream of of 'oohh! Look there!' I was experiencing and trying to capture and finally wandered off to the picnic before the parade ended.

A wonderful day.

beat me to the newbie

[ssussminh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Dreamshark chattered all the way to work about how
neat May Day was, and I started wondering why I had never
gone in all these years? Maybe next year, (when I'm off
the crutches), I'll give it the old college try!

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I would have enjoyed the drummers a lot more if they'd been on the other side of the pavilion from us - as it was I couldn't hear what anyone in our group was saying, until pegkerr came and sat down right next to me.