The 2016 Bourne On The 4th Of July Parade!

I thought that this was Johnny Quahog, but he's just the leadoff hitter for the Bourne In The 4th Of July holiday parade.

No expense was spared, we rolled hard on the Americana.... and a good time was had by all.

Much like a Fort Sumter neighbor, I was shooting at every Old Glory that I saw... of course, I'm using a camera.

Bourne's parade is pretty much what Red Dawn would have looked like had the people financing it insisted upon a less ambiguous ending... a parade of miltary vehicles rolling through a tiny village with gallons of 'Merica poured on top.

See?

One of the two shots I took today where I felt creepy.... but someone banging down Bloody Marys on the patio at Buzzards Bay  at 10 AM as a parade rolls by rules pretty hard, and deserves media attention.

I actually met this dog while researching an article that I wrote like 6 years ago. He's the Coast Guard's "water safety dog," and- in one of those faux pas scenarios that go down when people who specialize at working with boats dabble in public relations- he bears a name that might need some work. I think his name is "Drown," or "Riptide," or "Hypothermia" or some other nautically terrifying name. Either way, as you can see, Drown floats- at least when he's on a float. It's just like they said in Apocalypse Now... Never get out of the boat, kids.

Ladies and gentlemen... I present to you a Seabee... I'd make a joke about that French Tickler mustache or the dog food bowl on his head, but that is a machine gun he's holding. It looks like it was crafted for Al Capone to shoot, but I'd bet it could punch a rush hole in me pretty easily.

You say that you want a picture of a guy on a lawnmower doing donuts in the middle of the parade? Why, I just happen to have one right here! 

If that's a toy gun, I want to write the advertising copy for it.... "Watch your classmates cower in fear!"

You can't have a parade without the bagpipe corps, player!

Bourne Braves in the howwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwse...

Onset works their way over the border and into the Bourne parade with a fat red ladder truck.

Hot cars always get love in any parade articles I write.

More pics to come when I figure out the kid's tablet....

If The Right People Were Running Plymouth....

Plymouth has a lot going for it. They have miles of coastline. They are dripping with history. They have an active downtown area. They have hotels and tourist-type places.

Plymouth also owns Thanksgiving. Her rule there is undisputed. There is no number one contender to that title. Plymouth owns it outright.

They take advantage of it. Pilgrims and Wampanoags are used to advertise businesses, decorate homes, and to generally set the mood of the community.

Just this past weekend, I went to a wonderful Thanksgiving parade that brought in locals by the thousands. All of those people spent money in the local economy, and Plymouth was the happening spot for a day.

There's nothing wrong with that.

I'd like Plymouth to happen a little harder.

Nothing burns the frontal lobes of a writer with nada in the pipeline than an underutilized resource.

You might think that my feelings on this are greedy and perhaps even crazy. They are definitely not in tune with the spirit of the season.

Thanksgiving is about being happy with what you have, not about thinking "How can I make money?" and so forth. There admittedly are some errors in my argument when viewed from that viewpoint.

However, a rising tide lifts all boats that don't have a big hole punched in the bottom. You can always be thankful, but you can always also be More thankful.

Here are a few ideas I have that might get this town on a payin' basis. We have a lot of nuclear reactor money to make up.

Thanksgiving Football

Is there anything that compelling beaming out of ESPN on, say, a holiday Thursday? Why not make the Plymouth North/Plymouth South Thanksgiving football game be a national event?

A big part of Thanksgiving lore in America involves going to the holiday high school football game, either the one where you went to high school at or the one in the town your kids go to school in. I'm about five years from having to make a very painful Duxbury-to-Bourne switch when my kid finally gets School Spirit.

ESPN should show a game. Sure, if they get one from Texas where they have 300 pounders all along the offensive line and the cornerbacks run a 4.4, and that would get you a higher level game. However, a lot of the charm is lost if it looks too much like a pro game, especially if they play it at one of those Texas schools with the 50,000 seat stadiums and the History textbooks that end with Jimmy Carter in the White House.

I would instead radically re-design the football stadium for one of the schools, or perhaps even build a stadium on a neutral site. I'd put it near the sea, preferably near wherever the Pilgrims actually set foot ashore.

There are a lot of woodlands around the nuclear reactor (if you ever want to see a satellite view of suburban sprawl coming to a skidding halt on either side of something, do a Google Map of the Pilgrim nuclear power plant), maybe they could build it in there.



Thanksgiving Stadium (my idea, I'll name it) would have less than 50,000 seats, but would possess several interesting visual facets:

- A giant replica Mayflower III on the seaside wall of the stadium, craftily positioned so that it would look like it was floating with the right camera angles. When either team scored, it could wobble back and forth as if in surf, while Rock The Boat (Don't Tip The Boat Over) plays on the loudspeakers.

- A complete recreation of a Pilgrim and a Wampanoag village in either end zone.

- A much better version of Plymouth Rock. I would use the largest boulder that can be moved by modern machinery,and make it be the non-sea-side wall of the stadium. I'd use a Disney-style fake rock if moving a small mountain became problematic.

- This Plymouth Rock would be hollowed out enough that the "1620" can be lit with fire or plasma rays. If we could somehow project the 1620 onto the moon, I'd be a-ight with that.

- A completely functional and life-sized lighthouse, which admittedly may be redundant with the 1620 neon sign.

- A seven hundred foot Turkey Of Vengeance robot who bursts forth from the sea to seek dinner-related vengeance on the crowd. We'd stop him before he killed too many people, of course.

Once we have the stadium in place, we'd need to get the schools up to speed.

We don't need to have the kids playing pro-level football, but it can't look like a Pop Warner game. Top coaches should be brought in, players from other schools should be lured in and the phys-ed classes K-12 should be hyper-intensified. I would not be put off by Soviet Union/Red Army comparisons.

We'd have to re-mascot the schools, as well. North could be the Pilgrims, South would be the... OK, this gets touchy.

"Wampanoags" is sort of a mouthful. "Indians" seems almost like a slur. "Sachems" lacks brand name recognition, and I think Middleboro or someone may already be the Sachems. "Warriors" is a bit bloody-minded. "Squantos" has a ring to it, although there was only one Squanto and we'd be heading into Lone Rangers territory. "Natives" sounds like what the Tea Party would name a team if they had one.

I suppose we could go Team Standish vs Team Alden, for the Massasoit Trophy. To be fair, Team Metacom vs Team Wamsutta for the Mayflower Trophy also works.

We'd also have to get the cheerleaders to step up their game. I'm thinking this, and this.

In turn for pretty much handing them their holiday viewing (and  30 for 30 special, or whatever they call those) for every Thanksgiving, ESPN will see that Plymouth gets a little financial compensation.

Compensation would be in order. I'm not sure that "free publicity" means much to a town that is in the early chapters of every American History textbook, Likewise, nationally televised stadium advertising would be limited, as very few people in Chicago are going to be ordering delivery from The Pizza Factory on Home Depot Road in America's Hometown.

No, Plymouth will be requiring little green pieces of paper with Founding Father Faces.

America would adopt the game as their own. It might not sell out East where many are going to their own HS games, but it would be prime morning viewing for anyone a time zone or three over.

Thanksgiving Parade

Speaking of compulsory national Thanksgiving viewing, we could make some improvements to the Thanksgiving parade and get it up on the tube.

Macy's has a Thanksgiving parade. Philadelphia and Detroit also have prominent Thanksgiving parades. New York was an Algonquian trading post with 5000 Lenape natives when the first Thanksgiving was held in 1621. Why should they have the Thanksgiving parade?

F*** them.

The Thanksgiving parade held in Plymouth should be televised nationally. The Macy's parade gets 88 million eyes a year. It is a national tradition that the much smaller Plymouth has little chance of vanquishing.

Plymouth could work some odd angle for their parade, to distinguish it from the giant Macy's parade that we have no chance of defeating straight up.

The Macy's parade starts at 9 AM, and ends about when the North/South football team would be starting. We'd be fools to run opposite of that.

Why not try the night before, or even Thanksgiving night?

7 PM, either night. I like the Thursday night idea better, as we'd be trying to wedge in between the 4 PM NFL game and the 8:30 PM game. We'd have all of the vacationers in town already, as opposed to a Wednesday night event.

We'd have to weed out the weaklings among the parade attractions. We'd have to hunt up corporate sponsorship, which could be used to super-power the floats.

We'd have to consider altering the parade route. I like Benny's as much as the next person doesn't, but it's not the place for a Jump Off. I'm thinking of using 3A, maybe make the parade run from Plimoth Plantation to Plymouth Rock. That may also prove problematic. but we can sweat the details later.

The important part is the ending, which is also why Thursday night is crucial to the parade.

Plymouth is already the home of Thanksgiving. Why not also take the running-unopposed title for Black Friday?

That's right... go from humbly thanking the Gods for what you have to the Gimme Gimme Gimme of the Christmas shopping season. It's the most important day of the consumer year, and no one owns it.

Plymouth could take possession of Black Friday simply by already having the eyes of the nation on them already via the football game and the parade. End that parade at Plymouth Rock, and light a mammoth Christmas tree there.

A simple, symbolic act, lighting that tree. It will match the neither Rockefeller Center tree, nor even the Boston tree. However, what it lacks in prestige, it makes up for in timing. Tied to the Thanksgiving parade, at a slack hour between football games.... Boom.

Why let Barry steal our thunder?

Granted, I'm aiming high, with stadiums and new holidays and all. Plymouth should aim high. If we don't, someone might come along and take Thanksgiving from us. New York already has the nationally televised parade that by all rights should belong to Plymouth.

We can take it back, if we Think Big.

Whether that makes enough money to pay for the effort remains to be seen. I'm more of an idea guy than a bean counter. The bean counters would have the hard job.

However, if Plymouth has a chance to profit heavily off of a holiday that they already own, and if they have a chance to claim a second holiday, would they not be wise to look into the best case scenario?

Checking Out The Plymouth Thanksgiving Parade

Happy Thanksgiving From America's Hometown!!

We did the Pilgrimmy thing today, and headed up to America's Hometown to check out the Thanksgiving Parade.

We'll discuss this in a future article, but the Plymouth parade on Thanksgiving should be the premier Thanksgiving event in the country. I feel very strongly about this, like 10000 words strongly.

The football game should also be ESPN huge, but I'm near what my teachers used to call "getting off-topic."

Here's our vantage point. We posted up at the Mobil station, right where Route 44 meets Route 3A.

Once the parade started, I climbed up onto the Dunkin' sign by the road so I could take blurry pictures from a great height. The cop near me was in too good a mood to shoo me off of it, or perhaps he hoped I'd fall.

We parked at the Lobster Hut, which was a mistake that we'll end the story with.

In case you think that we're trying to pull a fast one on you by going to the Plymouth, Minnesota parade.... here's a line stretching 50 deep out the door for a gas station Dunkin' Donuts.

You don't get more Massachusetts than that, blogga....

Stop trying to think of a one-upper, nothing beats mad headz at a Dunkin'. Maybe if this shot was taken during a blizzard...

Turkey was going to be a prominent theme in this parade, as Thankfulness is an abstract concept or something, and is hard to put on a float.

Every year, they park this float under the Myles Standish monument in Duxbury, and every year, they find an empty plate the next morning.

Myles is like 200 feet tall, you see...

OK, next picture....

Thatched roofs rool.

If this magazine ever makes me my many millions, I want to buy a house on a hill in my old neighborhood, and pay the property taxes of everyone in the valley below if they all get thatched roofs. I think the Great Gatsby offered his neighbors that deal.

If the Pilgrims had invented a mobile house and developed some means of making it move, King Phillip's War would have been over in a week... unless the Wampanoags just walked 50 feet into the woods, of course.

It's not a parade until the vintage cars come out.

If the right people were running this parade, these two guys would have went first, and raced. Benny's to the Mayflower. I can't tell you how much I want next year's parade to start like that, folks.

I don't know the top speed of a Model T, but I'm sure that the elderly and infants could cross the street fast enough if the dice came up on them.

If not, Deathrace 1620!

I apologize for the blurry pic, but as I was shooting it, I froze up and went "Is that a f***ing basketball in the horn o' plenty?"

Somebody should have stepped in there, and maybe used a turnip or some celery or something. That looks like a cork... shaped like a basketball.

There are a few blurry shots in here, I plan to joke around any further explanations. I'm a genuinely rotten photographer who sometimes gets pressed into action because I'm tall enough to shoot over crowds.

They should have borrowed the pirate ship from Bourne's July 4th parade, they had cannons on that ish. There was some gunfire at this parade... of a celebratory nature, of course.

While they most likely had a few among their numbers who had the English shooting at them, not many Wampanoags had seen guns in action by 1621. A good Musketry display would be like a fireworks show for them. I bet the Pilgrims let off some Happy Fire, partly to entertain, partly to intimidate.

I'm not picking on the Wampanoags as being rubes. Not many naturally occurring noises are louder than right-next-to-your-ear gunfire.

I read a story about Pickett's Charge, an event that went down almost 242 years after Plymouth's feast, which said that the bombardment that preceded the charge was the loudest sound ever heard by anyone on the battlefield who hadn't been directly next to a lightning strike or who wasn't nearby when Krakatoa erupted.

These dudes were letting off shots, as well. Much like the militia at the New England Patriots games, I'm imagining that they don't use live ammunition.

I may be oversensitive and a bit of a party pooper, but should there be gunfire at post-Paris or even post-Columbine public gatherings? You can only see the militia if they are right in front of you... otherwise, you just get a sudden burst of out-of-context gunfire.

You just need one person to panic, and a few hundred will follow. The next thing you know, it's like that Who concert that Andy and Johnny Fever gor Mr. Carlson (I forget the guy's name) to go to. General Admission. Mass Hysteria. Bad News.

You just need a France float, to put the word "terrorist attack at a public event" into your mind before the militia empties the clip, Thank God nobody made one of those, huh?

Aw, merde!

Floats That Should Have Been In The Parade But Weren't:

- The Smallpox Float, with an English fisherman coughing on a healthy-no-more Wampanoag.

- The float for the Dissident Wampanoag faction, with a big broken treaty on it or something.

- The North Plymouth float, with a dozen Brazilian dishwashers and landscapers in the bed of a F-350.

- A float that shows Samoset and Squanto learning their English by watching Monty Python movies.

- The float from Entergy, with the oddly-glowing nuclear reactor.

- The Thomas Granger buggery float.

- The float for what you know had to be 5% or so of both the Pilgrim and Wampanoag population who are down with GLBT .

We did have the Overcoat/Top Hat guy parade contingent.

I wasn't looking when the guy with the sign that explained who they were went by.

They could be up to something nefarious, as at least one member in the crowd was caught on my camera throwing the Heil Hitler salute.

Blurry picture, but I wanted you to understand that my Game even works with colonial women. You can't blame the girls, I ooze a machismo that women of any era find becoming. It even makes the camera blurry now and then.

1620s women living in a primeval forest know how to ham it up for the photographer, you'll notice.

My charm even bewitches women of the modern era. Notice that all of the WCVB Eye Opener morning news team girls are waving to get my attention. Shoot, even Randy Price is waving.

After I shot the pic, Randy threw me what I hope was Cindy Fitzgibbons' hotel room key. It's all good (this column is very pro-gay for one penned by a crude, no-filter humorist with a steady girlfriend), as long as whoever answers the hotel door knows that 1) I'm pitching, and 2) I like french toast for breakfast..

S'up?

I'm not sure how WCVB gets exclusive parade rights.

You'd figure that every local channel would be there. What other Thanksgiving parade matters? It'd be a better parade if some float competition existed between WCVB, WBZ and so forth. We'd have some excellent floats.

I bet FOX would have an anti-immigrant float, but that would be fun on a sunny day in Suburbia, USA.

Either way, it wasn't happening.

I thought that this was one of those little M&M guys from the commercials, but it actually is a very rounded-off Plymouth Rock mascot.

They should probably take the real Plymouth Rock out of the portico and put it on a flatbed truck for the next parade. Have the Homecoming Queen from both Plymouth North and Plymouth South ride with it. You could throw a few John Aldens onto the float to make it more Pilgrimatic.

It needs some sort of gig, it just sits there otherwise.

Hey.... who invited these guys?

Oh yeah, the Pilgrims were English, kinda. Their militia didn't wear the redcoats, however. Those colors were reserved for Regular Army. Our militia dressed like Davy Crockett or someone.

No, I don't think (I may be wrong) that King Phillip's War was fought by people in those Quaker Oats-looking Pilgrim hats.

I just want it on the Internet somewhere that the big Loyalist town around here in the American Revolution was Marshfield.

Pikes were a prominent weapon in that era, although muskets soon made them obsolete.

They say that Stonewall Jackson ordered pikes, and that he would have used them on Little Round Top... a battle which was saved by a desperate bayonet charge that worked like gangbusters against a foe who had a 7 step musket-loading process, but which would have failed against someone with bigger spikes.

No one had to be impaled at Plymouth today, at least when I was around.

I like the lighthouse float, especially that Gurnet Point-ish lighthouse up front.

That's not light from the lighthouse. I just had  bit of trouble with reflections from car windshields at the rival gas station across the street. Sometimes, stuff like that works to your advantage.

I couldn't really shoot around the gas station. My perch, while effective vertically, had a sort of peripheral issue with a streetlight pole on one side of me and the gas station prices sign on the other.

You gotz to have a Mayflower in your Thanksgiving parade, or your Thanksgiving parade is wiggedy wiggedy wiggedy whack.

Bonus points if you have a cool ocean under the Mayflower.

The Mayflower was supposed to be in a Virginia holiday parade, but it was blown off course.

This float obviously spent all of her creative energy on the thatched roof house.

The back of it looks like a Liberace set. You almost expect to see a Pilgrim version of Merv Griffin watching from a nearby desk.

"Ready serve, entertain like Merv..."

I didn't stay for the whole parade. I started needing a drink after this float went by.

I started needing a drink more after leaving. I managed to trap myself. I thought that I was a smart guy, parking at The Lobster Pot. I was actually the dumb guy.

Seeing as the parade went from Benny's to somewhere around the Court, the police blocked off 3A on either side of it. Anyone who parked between 3A and the ocean was lit outta shuck until the parade was over. I got as close to Kingston as I could get, and was on 3A heading north about 2 minutes after the last float went by.

Happy Thanksgiving!!