I Love Me a Parade

Saturday night after Thanksgiving is the time for the Audubon Fire Engine Parade.
Miles of brightly lit, obnoxiously loud emergency vehicles travelling small town streets.
Dozens of firemen uncomfortably far from their station house bars for entirely too long a time on a weekend evening.
Thousands of people lining the street, most with children, some without, all lost in the blaze and cacophony for 45 minutes or so.
Traffic intermittently halted on a major suburban thoroughfare.
Convenience stores making their monthly nut in one night on coffee and hot chocolate sales.
Fezzed Shriners slewing lazy slaloms in their tiny clown cars.
Well, alright, no Shriners, no fezzes, and no clown cars. But there should be.
People who once lived in the town but moved away to bigger, better places return like swallows back to Capistrano. Drawn inexplicably like Roy Neary to Devil's Tower.
Young hearts flutter from too much caffeine.
Old hearts flutter from, well, from old age.
Penny candy tossed becomes legal tender for a few minutes.
Old friends separated by time and space fall together again for a short evening.
Regrets are reversed and jagged grudges sanded smooth.

We can still be frustrated and petty, talk behind each other's backs, and let jealousy eat away at life's fiber like the irresistible corrosive it is. But not this night. Not until tomorrow.

So maybe we should do this a bit more often.

The early bird catches...what?

It's Thanksgiving afternoon. And yes, I'm typing on my computer, but that's only because I'm waiting for the rest of the family to get ready for our short trip to a dinner that's sure to be a gustatorial extravaganza.

And I'm looking out a nearby front-facing window, and I see a couple neighbors laboring over Christmas decorations. Or, since I love the way the British version of the words look in print, neighbours labouring.

I find I'm stuck in the middle of a race in which I have no interest in running. The Thanksgiving turkey hasn't even reached worm-free temperature yet, and people are outside stringing already-tested lights, driving stakes for those monstrous inflatables, and monkey-gripping ladder rungs 25 feet up while they vie to see who can mount the decorations most likely to alter holiday air traffic approach patterns.
And my wife, bless her heart, as soon as she's seen these pre-emptive efforts, will start to feel the itch. And that means I crawl into the attics, retrieving boxes and containers and well-stored (meaning, inaccessible) lighted structures and sundry decorations. And tomorrow, while it will have to suffice, still will not be soon enough.

I'll admit that, once the work is done and the last string is plugged in and no dead lights remain to obscenely sully the presentation, there is a certain feeling of, if not accomplishment, then contentment that the race is over. And sure, we didn't win, but we did at least finish.

And in roughly 40 days, on January 1, 2008, when the first neighbor steps into what I hope will be the brisk wintry air of the new year and unplugs the first electrical decoration, a new race will begin.

And I do not care that we won't win that one either.

McSlippery

This morning I'm watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade with my 16 month old daughter. The colors and music and choreography have her riveted, and while she watches from my lap, I try to sneak in sips of coffee and peeks at the newspaper.

Marching bands, Broadway shows, Sesame Street: they come and go in a flash, certainly noted more by my girl than by me. But then along comes one of the countless marketing portions of the Parade, this one McDonald's, represented by none other than Ronald McDonald himself.
And I couldn't help but notice that the world's most famous corporate clown seems to have undergone a bit of a make-over.
Now, his clothing still seemed to be the same, time-worn yellow and red outfit that I've been seeing all along. The shoes are still outlandishly large and floppy. Yes, these are close enough to unchanged to appear as such to my untrained, and admittedly cautious eye. (Clowns, I admit, freak me out.)

But I ask, what happened to his hair?
The Ronald I last remember specifically had almost Bozo-esque locks springing explosively from his head in a frightening blood red splat of combed chaos.
And now he sports a slicked-down, more contemporary, if caricatured, coif. Even the color seems re-cast, perhaps even more bloody now, but deeply nourished blood, rich and almost claret.

And the thing is, this morph is the result of millions of dollars of marketing research. It was instituted because the research found that people will find Ronald more homey, more huggable, and dare I say, more lovable.
And people, the research will have found, will respond positively not only with their hearts and minds, but with their wallets and purses as well.
Yes, Ronald's new 'do will prompt more people to more often muck up their digestive tracts and circulatory systems with the sludge the world's most adroit, successful food corporation peddles.

And in the end, I really don't care about Ronald's hair all that much. If I want McNuggets, it's not because the clown's tresses have changed. It's because, for those few moments of my life, I happen to care very little about my long-term health and I dearly crave whatever tasty drug it is they inject into their product.
But the New and Improved Ronald is, I can guarantee, raking in new adherents every day.
So while I applaud the humanist endeavors upon which McDonald's embarks, and the global Good they seem to want to do with what I will leerily grant might be altruistic intent, I'll say that the Old Ronald would work just as well in his ambassadorial role as does the New Ronald.
And that means the new locks on the block are there for one reason.
And rest assured, The Sheep are doing their best to make MickyD's research and marketing dollars well and wisely spent.

Meanwhile, clowns still freak me out. But lately, people freak me out even more.

Welcome...

I am prone to hyperbole.
I am sarcastic.
I speak before I think.
But it is a major holiday today, and time is short, so in time, just not today, I will begin.

Or something.