Jun 022010
 

memday10-2Can I get a “Fuck the police”?

Sunday night, I had the audacity to speak disparagingly about the annual Memorial Day Parade in front of four of my neighbors at the chintzy cookout.

“WHAT THAT PARADE IS GREAT” Ruth exclaimed while Mark hung his head, thoroughly shamed by my remark.

“Girl, if you want something bigger, you’re in the WRONG CITY,” Toya scoffed.

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Hot Naybor Chris was too busy examining his can of Straub while Henry glowered at me. We had just become semi socially acceptable to the neighbors and here I come ruining it.

Lame as the parade is, I never miss it. However, if I had to do anything greater than step out of my front door to see it, this would probably have been the 10th straight year of missing it. Some people actually GET IN THEIR CARS and drive over here with parade chairs and camcorders! What fucking schmitts!

Henry actually GOT IN THE CAR to go pick up Alisha and Bonzi so they could dine on a breakfast of mediocrity with the rest of us here on Pioneer.

Before the parade started, a man and his son came to my house and handed me a ziplock bag full of candy and literature for SUMMER BIBLE CAMP. Alisha was real rude to them (she doesn’t even have to open her mouth to be rude! She has a gift), so the man ended up just directing his spiel at me. He said he was from the church down the street (honestly – do you guys see the irony in me living across the street from not one but THREE churches?), and if we wanted to walk our asses down there later, we could get our hands on one of the FREE HOTDOGS they were handing out. I don’t eat meat, but I considered walking down there just to see what kind of religious shenanigans I could find myself in. But that would have required donning my bathing suit to swim through the humidity.

There were no big surprises this year in the parade, aside from the addition of even more army people which promptly gave Henry a patriotic erection. They were driving desert vehicle things and the one dude was wearing Ray-Bans and smoking a cigar, he was so hardcore. The same crappy Lutheran church puttered past in their maroon van with puppets hanging and waving out the window; I waved back with the same high-energy, faux-enthusiasm as I do every Memorial Day. There were the same high school marching bands, only this year I learned that Alisha has like, all this respect for them. She even taught me some stuff about “character shoes”, which I always thought were just called “beige footwear for dorks.”

Excitingly, and not surprisingly, there was a troupe of young girl dancer hoes who had major audio malfunctions, so we never got to see them flail around in various styles of the uncoordinated, but I still got to make fun of them. I laughed uproariously and Alisha was like, “That’s mean,” while Henry simultaneously said, “That’s fake.”

memday10-3Coolest part of the parade and he wasn’t even in it! I bet he listens to Mudvayne.

When a car idled past bearing the US Airforce insignia, I pretended to be all excited for Henry. This is my favorite part of Memorial Day – getting to put on a show of complete and utter disrespect for my country-servin’ boyfran’.

Some of the parade participants will chuck handfuls of candy at the kids sitting along the street.

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We kept trying to coax Chooch to sit with Hot Naybor Chris’s grandson Josh, but Chooch was being a complete jerk about it. Finally, he took the extra chair and dragged it a ways down from Josh. He’s only 4 and already he understands social hierarchy. If there were four-year-old cheerleaders nearby, he’d probably have dragged his chair next to them.

Chooch would catch something stupid, like a Tootsie Roll, and spend ten minutes opening it while Josh plucked every last piece of candy off the sidewalk and grass. I don’t know why Alisha, Henry and I were so adamant about Chooch collecting more candy than the rest of the kids, because after he ate two pieces from his collection, he morphed into His Royal Hyperactivity and I wanted to chuck him back at the candy-chuckers.

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But he snagged one of those butterscotch rounds that me and the elderly love so much, so I was pacified.

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Turns out one of my local Twitter friends was watching the parade a block up from me! She replied to one of my tweets and said that if I wanted to be in the parade next year, SHE COULD ARRANGE THAT.

ME! IN A PARADE!

Since this is Brookline, not Brooklyn, I’d probably have to behave myself, but I’d be willing to compromise my true inner asshole to BE IN A PARADE, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!

I hope she wasn’t kidding. I was thinking I could lay across the hood of the Shriner’s big rig.

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I never thought I’d say this, but I sure hope I’m still living here next year.

  6 Responses to “Hey, a Parade.”

  1. I would love to see you across the hood of the Shriner’s truck! How awesome would that be??? I can’t wait until next year’s post! :)

  2. oh, the best part of ANY parade is always those creepy little shriners in their creepy miniature vehicles — excellent picture.

    this made me laff: “Some people actually GET IN THEIR CARS and drive over here with parade chairs and camcorders! What fucking schmitts!”

    because my last name is “schmidt”. fucking schmidts!

    • I used to work with a guy whose daughter’s leg got run over by one of the Shriners on a scooter! I’ve always kept that in mind and make sure I stay away from the curb during parades, ha!

  3. “There were no big surprises this year in the parade, aside from the addition of even more army people which promptly gave Henry a patriotic erection.”

    OH so much Tolhurst!!!

  4. Not sure if I’ve mentioned it before (or if Bill has) but I have an undying love of marching bands. When we attended the Steelers game last year I was all about half time. Bill thought it was funny that I was the only one in the stadium who could give a fuck, with the exception of the band geek parents. I was far less interested in the football game and got up and danced when the band played. It started the catch phrase “marching bands are NO JOKE!” that I coined during the game, which Bill reminds me and taunts me with to this day. He’ll often ask if other things are “NO JOKE,” and if they are, are they as “No Joke” as marching bands? It’s the basis of comparison and has now set the scale for things that are awesome or difficult.

    BTW, probably not surprisingly, I was in marching band in high school. I spun flag and rifle in the color guard. I was the fittest I’d ever been and love to talk about how challenging and fulfilling it was. I still have my practice flag and love to pull it out and show my lingering skills when the opportunity arises. Nothing would thrill me more than to one day have a kid in marching band and be a band booster, not unlike Bill’s dreams to teach junior Dungeons and Dragons some day. Our kids are destined to be HUGE dorks.

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