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..
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| 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.
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| Happy Thanksgiving!! |
