Thoughtless for the Day

Part of me (albeit a very small part of me…no, not that part, wiseasses) feels somewhat bad for writing about the Dracula Parade. This is because I not everyone is fortunate enough to live in Philadelphia and I know that many of you will spend the next several weeks weeping and gnashing your teething in abject misery at the realization of what has been denied to you by sheer geographic happenstance. Still, I have a duty - nay, I sacred obligation - to report the Truth (or, at the very least, my version of the Truth - Truth 2.0) to my reading public. Do you think I actually like posting Blair's Iiiiieeeeaaa-Letters? Of course not; but I do it because you need to know about whatever petty shit Blair happens to be doing at that moment.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah, the Dracula Parade.

This year Vienna and I managed to gather together a contingent of about sixteen people for the parade and after-gig party back at the ol' Anonymous place. Anyhoo, so I'm standing on the sidewalk chatting with Dean's wife, Melissa, when the little girl in the picture above walks up to us and begins waging a verbal land, sea and air campaign to convince us to volunteer to man the costume of the Demeter, the ship that carried Dracula from Istanbul to England. Oddly, the map carried in the parade directly before the ship depicts Dracula taking the "overland" route.

To hear the little girl tell it, the entire parade would be a monumental failure if we didn't join her, the bough, in the boat. Look, if you'd had been there you wouldn't have been able to say no to her either. So Melissa was given the task of being the ships stern while I was assigned the duty of holding the Demeter's main(and only)mast.

Now that doesn't look so bad; does it? Well, what you can't see are two harnesses that I fitted out with: one to help support the boat and another, terminating in a soup can, which supports the mainmast…which, I forget to mention, is about fifteen to twenty feet high and weighs a good thirty pounds.

Under normal atmospheric conditions, marching that mast from Delancy Street, around Rittenhouse Square and back again would've been a laborious task for a man half my age. Saturday night's weather, however, was anything but normal. It was windy. It was very, very windy.

We had barely gone fifty yards when the wind found the sail and decided that it would make an excellent kite. By the time the parade hit Locust Street the full force of the wind upon the mast had gotten so bad that harness snapped and I was forced to support the mast with my leg. "I think we're entering Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner territory" I yelled to Melissa It was becoming obvious to even causal observers that the Demeter was serous danger of capsizing and perhaps taking a few souls goes with her. And at this point the ranks of the parade had swelled pretty impressively.

The only person who seemed oblivious to the ensuing chaos (although we were getting to brunt of the gusts, the Demeter wasn't the only thing in trouble: small children + large bat wings x gale-force winds = unintentional comedy) was the little girl at the bough of the boat. For the entire course of the parade, she would take four steps then dip and rise back up and take another four steps before dipping again. This made the ship look like it was actually weathering a storm at sea: Merryl Streep couldn't have done a better job.

And that's when it hit me. This little girl chose Melissa and I because she could tell that, no matter what, we're the kind of people who aren't going to abandon our posts and let a little kid down. If that little girl could go the entire length of the parade with braking character, then I could keep the wind from ripping that mast (now bent nearly in half) from my hands. That's why when one of the volunteers from Spiral Q Puppet Theater ran up to me and suggested that I chuck the mast I shouted "You can have this mast when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!"

Happy Halloween