Mayday

[naomikritzer]

I've written about the Powderhorn Mayday Parade before, and mentioned that Molly had decided this year that she wanted to be in it. We went to the Saturday morning public workshops during April. (The public workshops are held on Tuesday and Thursday nights, and Saturday mornings and afternoons.) Molly created a mask and costume to dress up as an orange frog with black spots. Her friend Emily was a green frog with blue spots. Emily's mother had a prior commitment, so I escorted both girls in the parade, dressed as a water lily.

The parade staging area is 25th Street, to the east of Bloomington Avenue and continuing into Cedar Field. Each section gets about a block to set up shop. They asked that people arrive an hour before the parade started, so that's when I had Ed drop us off.

The weather did not look promising. The forecast was for scattered thunderstorms, with a 60% chance of rain. Also, it was windy. In a parade full of stilters and giant puppets held up on sticks, high winds can be dangerous. I dressed Molly and myself warmly, and tossed mittens in my backpack just in case.

The Mayday Parade, for those who are not familiar with it, is not a typical parade. Nothing in it is motorized, and all the giant floats and puppets were handmade at the public workshops out of papier-mache and recycled materials. The parade also tells a story, created by the artists at Heart of the Beast Theater. They draw a storyboard which they explain to the participants who arrive at the public workshops, and which is then reproduced (with the addition of poetry and essays) as the program for the parade.

The storyboard broke the parade into five sections:

Water
All Life Begins in the Water
Water Works!
Are You Thirsty?
One River, One Bowl, Two Hands, One Soul

The "water" section had sketches of fish and sea creatures. "All Life Begins in the Water" had pictures of frogs and water lilies, and people with babies. (The sketch showed dressed-up moms pushing babies in strollers.) "Water Works" was the story of water as a public utility, and included drawings of people dressed as clowns using oversized toothbrushes, taking baths, etc. "Are You Thirsty?" showed water becoming privatized, first with bottled water being sold by evil capitalists, followed by a water-bottle monster. "One River, One Bowl, Two Hands, One Soul" showed The People reclaiming water, a giant river done with blue cloth, and drawings of people with bowls.

We were in the "All Life Begins in the Water" section.



Each section got a block for staging, I think, so we were one block back from Bloomington Avenue. We watched as people assembled the pieces of their costumes -- stilters strapped their stilts to their feet and legs, pulled stilter pants over top to create the illusion of weirdly elongated legs, and were helped up by friends. Our section also included a Father of Waters float (an Old Man River done as a boat), a Mother of Waters (a blue goddess figure), and a giant baby puppet. (Ed, on hearing that there was going to be a giant baby puppet, commented, "That sounds creepy." He was right. It looked kind of like a giant zombie baby. Which is too bad, because the section leader who was in charge of the baby was a very nice guy.)

Most of the individual people in our section were dressed as water lilies, lily pads, or frogs. Or they were in bands (we had five bands in our section). Or both. (The Friends School apparently has a frog marching band. Or else they had a marching band that dressed up as frogs for the occasion.) However, I also saw two people dressed as ducks with a trail of ducklings arranged on a skateboard and pulled behind them.

I had to go to the bathroom, so we walked back to Cedar Field, and saw a bunch of stuff being readied for the parade. Molly had helped to paint a giant purple bath tub for the Water Works section; we saw it being rolled over to join the people with giant toothbrushes, the people with a swimming pool slide on wheels, and the enormous pipes on wheels that extended for the full city block. We also saw a polar bear puppet and a startlingly realistic wolf puppet.

When we returned to our section, Molly commented that the wind had died down. Just as the parade started -- up ahead, we could see big fish on sticks leading the way -- the sun broke through the clouds. By the time the girls and I reached Bloomington Avenue, it was sunny out. It stayed sunny for the rest of the afternoon.

The wind was still brisk enough that I had to hold onto my water lily hat. I did have a chin strap, but it didn't quite hold it as securely as would have been ideal. Molly's mask (which she wore as a hat) stayed on pretty well, but Emily's got blown off repeatedly and I had to settle it back on. Both girls also had instruments that were supposed to make a "ribbet" sort of sound -- Emily's was a ridged board that hung around her neck, and the wind kept grabbing that, twisting it around, and dropping it behind her, so that I needed to untwist it and bring it back around to the front.

I apologize to anyone who waved at me and got snubbed. My mental process for most of the parade went like this: smile and wave. Check for the girls -- are they within arm's reach? Grab my hat. Check Emily's hat. Where is our section? Do we need to hustle to catch up with the other frogs? Smile and wave. Check for the girls. Grab my hat... I did see pegkerr, malachitefer, and haddayr, among others.

I did wave and shout "happy Mayday!" as I walked. (Molly yelled "Hoppy Mayday" instead and felt really, really clever because she came up with this all by herself. She is really fascinated by puns right now. If I were more into that sort of wordplay I could probably establish a bad habit that would stick with her for life, but luckily for her, I've never been any good at punning.) Molly and Emily were supposed to (a) try to hop or jump every few steps, (b) shout "happy (or hoppy) Mayday" or "ribbet", and (c) follow kind of a nifty but very simple choreography that we learned on Friday evening at the rehearsal. However, hardly anyone from our section had come to the rehearsal, and due to the five bands in our section, we couldn't hear the section leader's whistle anyway, so no one did the choreography stuff. Molly and Emily tended to forget to hop and just walk. My priorities for them were (a) stay close to me, (b) stay close to each other, and (c) don't get in the way of any of the stilters, so really, forgetting to hop was not a big deal.

Hardly anyone watches it in those first blocks. Residents come out of their houses, but people don't gather on the curbs the way they do further down. My family usually watches somewhere around 28th Street; we have to jockey slightly for a good spot on the curb by that point, but good spots are still fairly easy to come by most years. I don't know if I've ever watched the parade from much south of Lake Street. Therefore, I had not realized that those four blocks are where the crowds are. MOBS of people watch those last few blocks. Why some of those people don't go north for a better view, I don't know. The neighborhood is a little dodgy but it's not that scary.

There is a house on Bloomington Avenue with a big sign out front that says "HONK IF U LOVE JESUS." We wound up stopped right by that house; there was one young woman in the yard, watching with a somewhat stony expression. (It's a very Pagan parade, despite their conscientious use of terms like "Mother of Waters" instead of "Goddess.") Some of the girls from the band right behind me yelled "Honk!" at her, but got no response, alas.

The parade ends in Powderhorn Park. We paraded in, returned Molly and Emily's instruments, and then sat down under a tree so that the girls could take off their costumes. I stuffed everything but the masks into my back pack, and we walked over to a playground to rendezvous with Emily's father. It was up the hill, which meant that I could watch the rest of the parade while the girls played. I missed most of the Water Works section, but I got to see the water-bottle monster, followed by the Mississippi River, the polar bear, and the wolf.

The main parade is followed by a Free Speech / Join In section. They made two major changes to the Free Speech section this year -- they charged a fee, and they told the groups not to hand anything out. Some of the groups handed stuff out anyway, but far fewer (and most of them handed out much less). There wasn't any candy this year. I dislike the fee, though there may have been reasons for it that I'm not privy to. The paperwork ban, though, I'm all for. Most of these groups also have a booth in the park where they can distribute literature -- the thing about the brochures that were handed out during the parade was that it was easier to take the leaflets than to refuse them, and also you often don't really know what something is (and whether you're actually interested in reading it) until you've taken it. (And then you can't give it back, because the person handing out fliers has moved on.) The net result was that I would come home from Mayday with a huge pile of fliers that went straight into the recycling bin, and many got dropped on the ground. The number of trees that died for the PETA and Falun Gong leaflets always struck me as one of the weird ironies of Mayday (which has an explicit political and generally tree-hugging agenda).



Ed and Kiera found Molly and I at the playground. We bought snacks, then spent the rest of the afternoon at the festival in the park.

Pictures will probably be posted tomorrow sometime.