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I woke up still sick but less sick than I'd feared. The instructions said to line up at noon, but I ignored them; the parade starts at 1 p.m., we were in the very last section of the official parade, and we weren't doing any sort of group choreography, so there really wasn't any reason we needed to arrive that early. Ed dropped us off at 12:45. I think we finally started moving at 1:35, and we reached the corner of 25th and Bloomington -- the actual beginning of the parade route, as opposed to the blocks where all the sections line up -- at 2.
When I first came to Minneapolis, I spent several years ignoring the Mayday Parade because "parade" made me picture motorized floats with big corporate logos on the sides. This is, in fact, the antithesis of Mayday. The Mayday Parade is pretty much all human-powered (there are a few motorized wheelchairs), and it's an enormous procession of people in handmade masks and costumes, carrying giant puppets, etc., telling a story about the Power of the People to defeat the evil corporate overlords (the specifics vary but that's the general storyline every year).
The final section is always a sort of celebratory, "look, the people will be victorious and all will be well!" sort of section, and this year it had butterflies and mushrooms. The girls wanted to be butterflies, and I decided I'd rather be a butterfly than a mushroom so we put together three sets of wings. To make the wings, you cut wing shapes out of cardboard, cut air holes, used papier-mache to cover the edges, and then painted them. (Alternately, you could use colored paper for the papier-mache and just decorate them that way.) Then you stapled them on to a piece of cardboard to cover your back, and then stapled on straps to make that into sort of a back pack. When I had finished cutting Kiera's wings, I realized that the remaining cardboard could be turned into a set of very nice wings with enormous air holes. I wound up covering my cardboard with fabric and then filling in the open space with netting. They looked really cool until they fell apart midway through the parade, after which I imagine they looked kind of goofy, despite my attempt to hold them together.
The weather was absolutely perfect Mayday weather: sunny, warm but not too hot, and very little wind.
I spotted (/was spotted by)![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
haddayr, batikpuma, eyelid (she was actually in the parade, along with her husband and her adorable little boy in his beautiful pink and purple butterfly wings, which he was extremely proud of), amabaku, various friends who read this but don't have LJ handles, several of Molly's classmates, and if anyone else waved and I blew you off, I apologize very much; we were right near a band so it was hard to hear people shouting, and I was trying to keep track of Molly and Kiera while also making sure we stayed in generally the right spot (with the butterflies, rather than the mushrooms).
One of the things that really struck me this year is how random the parade is. I swear there are people who make a costume at home of whatever the hell they want, turn up on the Sunday of the parade, and look for a section they can just attach themselves to. Our section included Spongebob Squarepants. A homemade Spongebob Squarepants. We didn't have an underwater theme going or anything (last year we were in the "All Life Begins in the Water" section; Spongebob would've made a lot more sense there) so I have no idea why there was a Spongebob, but whatever. Spongebob was accompanied by a pirate and a person in an amorphous pink costume that I'm guessing was Spongebob's sidekick the starfish.
There's a pageant after the parade, but it's honestly kind of a pain to try to watch it with kids; it's kind of long, difficult to hear, and difficult to see if you're arriving late and don't get a good spot on the hill. You also never know when it's going to start. Anyway, we've skipped the pageant for several years in a row now and I think we'll keep skipping it for the forseeable future. We did wander around the park; the girls played on a playground, went for a free canoe ride (there's a group that offers free canoe rides during the festival each spring, and Molly now considers a canoe ride part of the standard Mayday experience), and had corn dogs for dinner. (Because if it's a festival in Minnesota, there MUST be corn dogs. And Molly would like one of the foot-long ones, please.)
Now I'm home, attempting to rehydrate, and feeling utterly wiped out.
When I first came to Minneapolis, I spent several years ignoring the Mayday Parade because "parade" made me picture motorized floats with big corporate logos on the sides. This is, in fact, the antithesis of Mayday. The Mayday Parade is pretty much all human-powered (there are a few motorized wheelchairs), and it's an enormous procession of people in handmade masks and costumes, carrying giant puppets, etc., telling a story about the Power of the People to defeat the evil corporate overlords (the specifics vary but that's the general storyline every year).
The final section is always a sort of celebratory, "look, the people will be victorious and all will be well!" sort of section, and this year it had butterflies and mushrooms. The girls wanted to be butterflies, and I decided I'd rather be a butterfly than a mushroom so we put together three sets of wings. To make the wings, you cut wing shapes out of cardboard, cut air holes, used papier-mache to cover the edges, and then painted them. (Alternately, you could use colored paper for the papier-mache and just decorate them that way.) Then you stapled them on to a piece of cardboard to cover your back, and then stapled on straps to make that into sort of a back pack. When I had finished cutting Kiera's wings, I realized that the remaining cardboard could be turned into a set of very nice wings with enormous air holes. I wound up covering my cardboard with fabric and then filling in the open space with netting. They looked really cool until they fell apart midway through the parade, after which I imagine they looked kind of goofy, despite my attempt to hold them together.
The weather was absolutely perfect Mayday weather: sunny, warm but not too hot, and very little wind.
I spotted (/was spotted by)
haddayr, batikpuma, eyelid (she was actually in the parade, along with her husband and her adorable little boy in his beautiful pink and purple butterfly wings, which he was extremely proud of), amabaku, various friends who read this but don't have LJ handles, several of Molly's classmates, and if anyone else waved and I blew you off, I apologize very much; we were right near a band so it was hard to hear people shouting, and I was trying to keep track of Molly and Kiera while also making sure we stayed in generally the right spot (with the butterflies, rather than the mushrooms).One of the things that really struck me this year is how random the parade is. I swear there are people who make a costume at home of whatever the hell they want, turn up on the Sunday of the parade, and look for a section they can just attach themselves to. Our section included Spongebob Squarepants. A homemade Spongebob Squarepants. We didn't have an underwater theme going or anything (last year we were in the "All Life Begins in the Water" section; Spongebob would've made a lot more sense there) so I have no idea why there was a Spongebob, but whatever. Spongebob was accompanied by a pirate and a person in an amorphous pink costume that I'm guessing was Spongebob's sidekick the starfish.
There's a pageant after the parade, but it's honestly kind of a pain to try to watch it with kids; it's kind of long, difficult to hear, and difficult to see if you're arriving late and don't get a good spot on the hill. You also never know when it's going to start. Anyway, we've skipped the pageant for several years in a row now and I think we'll keep skipping it for the forseeable future. We did wander around the park; the girls played on a playground, went for a free canoe ride (there's a group that offers free canoe rides during the festival each spring, and Molly now considers a canoe ride part of the standard Mayday experience), and had corn dogs for dinner. (Because if it's a festival in Minnesota, there MUST be corn dogs. And Molly would like one of the foot-long ones, please.)
Now I'm home, attempting to rehydrate, and feeling utterly wiped out.
