Before the Parade Passes By

Why are Broadway songs about parades always so good? Parades themselves are often long, boring marches filled with occasional snatches of hokum and surprise, but as a metaphor for life, Broadway has used them to good effect.

In earlier times, a parade with carefully-coiffed beauties, local celebrities, big brass bands, uniforms, and girls in cute little costumes marching through town was probably the biggest, flashiest, most exciting public spectacle around. The combination of so many forms of visual and aural splendor and entertainment all in one long line, passing by so quickly, too flashy and fast-moving to keep up with, must have caused a fevered excitement in the crowd, and a true sense of loss and disappointment when it disappeared around each corner.

Jerry Herman's "Before the Parade Passes By," Stephen Sondheim's "A Parade in Town," and of course, Jule Styne and Bob Merrill's "Don't Rain on My Parade" are all thrilling songs, partly because of the element of anxiety in each one, as well as the singer's determination not to go back to her dull pre-parade existence. There's the expression of lost opportunities as well as the belief expressed by each singer that this time things are going to be better, that this is my chance and it's all up to me to make it happen. Sort of a Tony Robbins-style self-help seminar rolled in each big, brassy song.

When I was a kid in the San Francisco Bay Area of the 1960s, I remember random unplanned parades wending their way past my grandparents' home. These were just practice sessions for the local high school; a line of kids in ill-fitting uniforms announcing their approach from blocks away with booming brass and rat-a-tat drums, then snaking around a corner all of a sudden, marching earnestly past me as I sat on the curb in front of Grandma and Grandpa's run-down duplex and presenting me with a free, personal parade. Other, older kids were all at school, dads and a few mothers (like mine) were working, and the housewives left at home had no interest in trotting out to their driveways in their housecoats and wire-and-brush curlers to watch some high school students march around, so I was usually the only spectator. The kids nodded my way when they could afford to take their eyes off the music, which made me feel even more important, like a queen serenaded by her own personal troupe of troubadors. Then off they'd go around a corner, and I would watch after them, their green and gold costumes only a memory but the melody lingering on until they had marched too far from my grandparents' neighborhood to be heard.

Marching bands were always worth running out of the duplex and slamming the screen door for, as were ice cream trucks and sonic booms. Running outside after a sonic boom was sort of like shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted, but there was always a hope that there'd be another window-shaking CRACK in the atmosphere as a jet broke the sound barrier, and I didn't want to miss it if I didn't have to. When none came, I'd lie in the grass and look up at the cloudless blue California sky through the leaves of the stately old trees in our slightly down-at-the-heels neighborhood, think about my inevitable upcoming career as a brilliant and famous actress and singer, and sing earnest little songs of my own composition. I remember singing melancholy little "they just don't understand me" sorts of songs as early as age three and four, but realized that adults found my lyrics cute rather than insightful, and I found this condescending attitude so insulting even at that age that I mostly just kept them to myself.

Parades usually conjure up images of old-style, small-town America for me: Flag-wavers, Shriners in funny cars, ersatz clowns, and convertibles filled with big-bellied local politicians and shiny-faced beauty queens, cops on horseback and little crepe-paper-covered floats. On the other extreme is the big Macy's Thanksgiving extravaganza filled with giant floating balloons representing icons of American popular culture and marching bands from across the land featuring majorettes wearing almost nothing in New York's late-November chill.

Seattle's Solstice Fair, which runs through the center of the city's wonderfully funky Fremont district, does it right. This year's parade began with over 100 nude bicyclists zooming up and down the street, showing off their painted bodies, feathers, and finery not just once, but multiple times as they drove up and down the main drag while waiting for the rest of the parade to show up, then reappearing at various times, mixed in with the Caribbean-themed float decorated by a local elementary school or among people on stilts or men in drag. Little groups of nude bicyclists infiltrated the parade years ago to much consternation and threats of arrest by the Seattle police, but locals have welcomed them and cheered them on over the years, scoffing at local authorities' half-hearted threats to stop the public indecency, and now they're the true stars of the parade, riding unhassled and seeming to the cheering crowds as wholesome, family-friendly, and right as the funny-cars and beauty queens of my childhood parades did to spectators then.