I Love a Parade

(PLEASE NOTE! I have updated this blog post with photos of the inaugural FABRIKATEFEST INDOOR PARADE AND FESTIVAL OF FOLLY/costume contest/swing dance. After I spent a day mourning the loss of the Parade of Lights this year due to a blizzard my friends boosted me up, rallied me and helped me birth what turned out to be a joyful few hours of magnificent ridiculousness, community and pure joy. I'm already scheming for next year, I started a GoFundMe to help offset costume cost, live music and event insurance to grow this event for next year. Stay tuned, and I always need new recruits for the Mystik Krewe of Fabrikate and dragon handlers....)

When I was around 6 or 7 I was in a Halloween parade. I wanted to be an elephant but when we got to the fabric store they had no grey fleece. My genius mother persuaded me to choose pink fleece and added some crisp shiny pink tulle to the cutting table I was currently sitting under. 

I always sat under the cutting table in Mr. Destro’s teeny, overstuff

ed fabric store. I loved it there, I loved the smell, the vantage point it gave me to view the shop. I would sit there and eavesdrop on what the other shoppers were intending to make, listen to the conversations and exchanges of sewing tips. Scanning over the disheveled shelves and bins, looking over everything and daydreaming about what I could enlist my mom to make, mind racing with the unlimited combinations of print and texture. The smell of creativity and endless possibility. 

I loved Mr. Destro and his cheerful, easy-going way, so incredibly excited when my mom came in (probably partly because he knew she was going to help him pay his rent with her huge stacks of fabric.) This was not a JoAnn’s type place with wide aisles and sections of crafting supplies, prices clearly marked. Looking back it was remarkably similar to the places I frequented in New York’s magnificent Garment District decades later. I am a lot like my mom when it comes to fabric, always getting a yard or two of something awesome that I have no idea what I will do with it, waiting for the right project to use it. She would have lost her mind in New York’s Garment District. I deeply wish we could have experienced that together before she died. 

I found a lot of friends in the Garment District. The years I frequented those shops were incredible, and left me with much more than miles of fabric.  I would bring the button guy an espresso in his closet of a store and we would sit and talk. Sometimes I watched for him while he got more coffee or ran to do an errand. When he counted out my buttons from one of his thousands of tall drawers (it was so much like Ollivander’s wand shop, but with buttons) he would always slide 2 or 3 extra into the teeny ziploc bag, sometimes whistling and looking skyward. He sent me a few postcards when he retired to Florida.

Another of my all-time favorite fabric stores was on the corner of 39th and 8th. It was so much like Destro’s, its tight aisles crammed with bins of rolls of fabric, total fabric explosion, not at all organized in any way. Full of possibility, each trip there was like a treasure hunt that you had to just take time and wander through. The guy whose family owned it would literally quote me completely different prices per yard than the person in front of me, shrug when they protested. Then he would start counting the yardage I requested and do things like exclaim “oh my gosh did you see that??” turn his head, and measure out 2 more yards of fabric.  I would occasionally bring him a few chocolates from my friends’ Brooklyn Chocolate Shop and we would also sit and talk. I never got to sit under the cutting table there because it was so insanely crowded and so much more dusty than Mr. Destro’s, but boy I would have loved to.

Out of that pink fleece my mom created the most hilarious pink elephant costume for me, complete with wings, poofy pink classical tutu and silk flower covered pink ruffly parasol. So, so, SO over the top, ridiculous and labor intensive. Light years away from all the other store-bought costumes. Halloween was unseasonably hot that year and it was incredibly sweaty in that all fleece costume with a full face mask and heavy poly filled trunk with a bright pink bow on the end. for the parade. But I literally didn’t care. I remember thinking how lucky I was, so proud of my mom and what she had made, giggling gleefully as I spun in that tutu, twirled my parasol and swung the trunk back and forth. 

The exclamations and laughter I heard from the crowd were incredible. I’ve been self conscious my entire life, definitely had my fair share of bullying. But this time I was certain there was no malice in the laughter. It filled me up, half seeing the people through the slightly askew eye holes she had painstakingly appliqued girly black felt eyelashes over. I won first place in that costume contest. My mom completely rocked it.  It was truly ridiculous in all the right ways. The prize should have gone to her and efforts. I wish I had a photo of that costume, it is one of my earliest memories and I think maybe what started this whole parade fixation.

So what is it I love so much about a parade? 

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. It isn’t all parades, to be honest I am a bit weirdly selective. No military or 4th of July parades for me. I do love a Halloween Parade, a Christmas Parade, (Macy’s floats are usually a little big and commercialized for my tastes and so much lipsyncing but the balloons are AMAZING feats of design) Pride Parades are the absolute best, and I’m told the Do-Dah Parade in Kalamazoo, Michigan is awesome, joyful and weird. One shopper I met at the art show I was doing there described it as “A Freak Show,” “Really anything goes,” the absolute best parade ever. Count me in, lady. 

I have wanted to go to Mardi Gras most of my adult life and have never had a willing group of pals who are brave enough to navigate the crowds want to attend with me. I should probably get on this life goal soon. The costumes, the music. SWOON.  If I had another life to live I would 100% move to New Orleans and be one of the lucky artists who spend all year building floats, and spend an entire OTHER life going to design school so I could make costumes for the Opera or another Game of Thrones, Gilded Age style show. 

A marching or brass band just does it for me, never fails to reduce me to tears. Points if they belt out a rousing version of “Don’t Stop Believin.”

When we first moved to Champaign we took the kids every year to the Parade of Lights. It’s smallish and we always froze our butts off but it was also always so full of joy. The lights, the kids dancing around with glow sticks. Night time may be a factor for me when it comes to parades. I think I just really like the lights. One year when I skated derby we got to walk with the League and I will forever have my son’s red cheeked, dollar tree reindeer antlered and shimmery silver garland covered, candy cane striped gloves, wide eyed face in my memories. Seriously, when I die I will be thinking of this little twinkly eyed kid peeking out the window of a truck a friend boosted him into when he was finally too tired and cold to walk. He may have even been on the front page of the paper that year. Such a joyful moment, his eyes so full of wonder, the whole teeny parade probably seeming so big to him. I teared up walking next to that truck. It was a perfect, truly beautiful moment and I often think of it when I’m down and need a boost or some hope to carry me through. 

With the current state of the world I think we all need a few moments now and again that give us something akin to what my kid may have been feeling for those moments he rode in the truck, tossing candy to other kids, marvelling at the lights and the delicate flakes of snow falling, music and laughter. It was a moment of magic. I definitely need a little magic to take my mind off things for a while. So I will continue to daydream, create absolutely over the top, ridiculous costumes and dragons and wait for the next parade that will have me.

Happy Holidays! Stay safe, healthy and warm. xoxo