Run your fucking parade better next year!
Posted
on Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 11:12 AM
I was looking forward to watching a certain holiday parade this past Saturday. I had a group of friends taking part, and I was lucky enough to have a pretty good vantage point - right on the main downtown strip of Barrington.
As you can imagine, it was super busy in this area. There were tons of kids, and they all looked happy and excited. The weather couldn't have been better for a parade. And then we spotted the first floats! The crowd went wild for that float, and the next group, and the next, and then...
Five minutes went by, and no parade.
Then a couple more floats!
Then five more minutes of emptiness.
And so on, for the whole effing parade!
I found it intolerable, and I'm an adult! You should have seen the faces of the poor little kids. So disappointed. And I'm not even talking about small gaps, there were times where you literally could not even see the next group/float coming down the street. And it wasn't just a few times. It was a lot.
Anyway, it really pissed me off. I've seen many parades in my life, and this was the worst. And it shouldn't have been! The participants put a lot of work into their floats and costumes and they looked great. I felt bad for them when the audience enthusiasm began to wane after the fourth five-minute gap.
As the cherry on the poop cake, I've since found out that the root of the problem was probably the fact that the newspaper which is the main sponsor for this particular event had cameras set up somewhere early in the parade, and were encouraging people to stop and do something entertaining for their video. I mean, come on. I understand that in a large parade some gaps are going to happen, but actually stopping people once the parade had begun? That's just shortsighted. It's not like this was the first year for this event. —Geek Chick