I Love a Parade

Every year my small little hometown throws a big party. They call it "Old Timer's Day." We block off main street, and for four days the village is filled with rides, games, booths selling confederate flags and Dale Earnhardt memoribila. The mardi-blah festival culminates in a nine-and-a-half hour parade featuring antique cars, church floats, fire trucks, marching bands, and shriners. Horses are brought in at the end to place homebrewed manure on the roads.

In 2000, I played a small role in the parade. I had a job with a pizza joint at the time, and they needed a volunteer to wear the Big Tomato Costume. I had never been a big tomato before, and I liked the idea of parading through my town in disguise. This may be why I trick-or-treated until I was 17.

The tomato suit consisted of red tights and a red ball bigger than my torso that I wore over my head. I could fit my hands out the side, nothing more.

Pre-parade, everyone meets at the old high school (it's the elementary school now, but we still call it the old high school) to recieve their numbers and get a rundown. As usual, several churches were submitting floats. And every single one of those floats had a Jesus. I lived in a town of 400 homes, with 12 churches inside ten miles.

That's a lot'a Lords.

There were Jesuses of all shapes and sizes: fat Jesus, tall Jesus, blond Jesus, real beard Jesus, teenage Jesus. No Jesus looked Arab or Jewish, of course. They were all very comfortably Anglo-Saxon protestant Christs (we have one Catholic church, which thankfully didn't recreate any stages of the crucifixion).

Have you ever seen a motley band of Christs chatting together? Watching this through the sweaty red cloth of a ten-pound tomato costume, I was a little intimidated. Here were these men of deep faith, with cheap fur glued to their faces, who had an absolute conviction about their lives.

To their mind, wearing a bedsheet and a wig mean that someone could escape eternal suffering. Think of that: somewhere in the heavens, an eternal war is waging between good and evil, and they are a part of that.

I never even made the basketball team. Not with these skinny little tomato legs.