Parade the Circle

Ben and I took Sofie to Parade the Circle on Saturday morning to watch the parade. Neither of us had ever been to it so we weren't quite sure what to expect. It ended up being really cool and something I'm sure will become a tradition for our family as long as we're in this area. The parade started 20 years ago with just 1000 spectators and although it has grown to include 2000 parade participants and 70,000 spectators it still has a very community-ish feel to it. Anyone can participate in the parade for the small sum of $5 and, as I'm sure you might imagine, that means there's quite a variety of very creative spectacles. I took about a million pictures. Here are some of my favorites...

The only proof that I was, indeed, present!

Some of the 100 Marilyn Monroe's that were dressed to imitate this famous Andy Warhol painting. They paraded through singing Happy Birthday Mr. President and blowing kisses to the audience.

This group included several Pez dispensers, my favorite of which was of course our Pez-ident Barack Obama.

An underwater adventurer pushing a machine that's creating enormous bubbles and a pretty neat squiddy-looking thing in the background.

There were many very cool, very tall, puppet-like contraptions, each manned by a single parade participant. I chose to share these ones with you for no other reason than I like how the picture turned out.

There were also many many participants walking on stilts. These ones were particularly cool because they included this giant see-saw type contraption in their performance. Every so often they would stop and hoist each other into the air to perform tricks.

Here are some very elaborate painted papier-mache creatures.

And of course, I had to include a picture of the ear. This was actually one of the most interesting displays. It was the beginning of a production of sorts that was several "floats" long. At the beginning, a few wadded up paper balls were tossed into the ear canal, followed by several floats demonstrating how the paper balls set up an extensive chain reaction, and ending with a few wadded paper balls shooting out of another ear on the other end. Very neat!

Sofie really enjoyed herself. Here she is dancing to one of the many bands that performed along the way.