Doo Dah Parade!

How could I blog on a day like today? It was in the mid-70s with clear blue skies and the Doo Dah Parade was on! If my photo album is any indication, the last time we went to the Doo Dah parade I was 3 months pregnant with my oldest. So, when I found out that the cancelled Doo Dah parade was back on, I knew that Jan. 20th where I would be.

It’s been so long since I’ve gone to a parade that I forgot the main rule: Bring a chair. Ack! We got to Old Town around 11am and the parade was set to start around 11:30. I usually watch from the beginning, but since we parked near the end of the route, we went for something new. The first thing that alerted Alton to the fact that this wasn’t just a regular day was the requisite fighter planes flying over the parade route:

That got their attention. The planes flew over the route doing tricks probably 4 or 5 times. The kids thought it was cool. I was waiting for plane bits to rain down on my head. Speaking of the kids:

Too cute! Oh, before I get into this, you can see more of my photos in my Doo Dah Parade set. My blog loads too slow already, so I’m not going to load this down with too many photos.

The Doo Dah Parade is in Pasadena, which seems to be synonymous with “liberal” to many people, I’d have to agree. In fact, I always thought “liberal white guilt” was some stupid right wing phrase before I actually hung out in Pasadena. Those Boomers…wow! Anyway, it is pretty liberal and the politics do come out in the parade. The parade opened with lots and lots of people on bikes:

One of the first entries is the Los Angeles French Quarter Synchronized Baguette Brigade. It was pretty funny, they all had bread, drawn on moustaches and unlit cigarettes:

Soon we saw presidential candidate Frank Tambanelli:

Reverend Billy and Savitri D of The Church of Stop Shopping were co-Grand Marshalls of the parade.

Sigh…yes, that’s Code Pink behind him. Code Pink was repped hard in the parade. They were everywhere.

So, we’re sitting on our corner and nothing is happening, though you could just hear lots of cheers. Curiosity took hold and this is what I saw:

Standing ovations all around! It was insane. They had the Chain Gang with them, which always a crowd pleaser:

Not a crowd pleaser:

His sign says, Demoncracy is my kinda goverment.

Now, what’s funny is that this guy and Lady Liberty got into a scuffle over the Constitution. He snatched it from her and started to pretend to stomp on it. I started yelling at him to leave my civil liberties alone and people were cheering on Lady Liberty. A few minutes after this photo was taken, Lady Liberty ran back over to me and gave me gift:

I told Lady Liberty, that I’m raising my kids to defend their rights and to defend The Consititution. She took off before I could get a photo of her with the kids.

Then the Wild Bunch of Hollywood came along and got more cheers:

I’m so bummed this came out blurry, my camera battery was slowly dying. But 4 guys dressed as old ladies in motor wheel chairs were there:

Each guy represented a letter in the word ‘VOTE’ and each had poster with 2 sayings on it like, “A vote is a terrible thing to waste” or “‘Tis better to have voted and lost, than not to vote at all.”

There were more social commentary in some of the entries, but I won’t post photos. The best were these zombies who had things like laptops, Xbox’s, iPod’s or widescreen TV boxes chained to them. They all had signs that looked like Visa’s logo with pretty clever sayings on it. I told one lady, “Don’t worry, Bush wants to give you $800 so you can go shopping again!” And everyone started laughing and talking about how incredibly stupid our president thinks we are.

Oh…duh! So, I’m all into politics and crap, but I was with the parade by myself with the two kids. I say this as an explanation of why I was unable to get good shots of the Kucinich and Obama entries. Oh and there was this bitch in a wheelchair and some dick in a brown jacket who kept standing right in front of us. The best I got was this:

The sign says: Kucinich is 4 U, Are you 4 Him?

And this one:

The Obama entry is behind the bees.

So that’s that and I’m a liar, because this is picture heavy and long. Oh well. You’ll live.

Thanks for looking!