Portland Rose Festival

The Portland Rose Festival is an annual spring event in the Rose City. It involves an amusement park and live music in the Riverfront Park downtown. There are fireworks on the Willamette River at night, and in the river sit more ships than usual. I was a bit disturbed at sight of some battleships; it seems to me like a rose festival has a nonviolent connotation.

The Rose Festival also involves parades. During the heat wave of the last weekend in May, members of the Vegetarian and Vegan Meet-Up Group gathered in front of the Bombay India Chaat cart at Yamhill and 11^th Avenue, where we ate yummy Indian food before wandering a block away to watch the Starlight Run and the Starlight Parade.

The Starlight Run was not an ordinary marathon, because participants were encouraged to wear costumes. Some wore togas and I saw at least one wreath headdress; I saw numerous runners in fairy wings and/or pink tutus, and others dressed as prom queens or at least wearing a tiara (whether or not they were male or female). Characters from Pak Man and other video games ran past; the Pak Man characters were clearly made from cardboard. A tree ran past, as did a couple of shower stalls.

Shortly after the joggers finished, the parade itself began. It struck me as cheesy, which is to be expected from a parade. There were countless marching bands, at least some of which represented high schools, and at least two of which played the song “Louis, Louis.” I particularly liked the pirate float shaped of course like a ship and accompanied by many pirates in beautiful eighteenth-century-style costumes; their float advertised “Dress Like a Pirate” with the url, www.dresslikeapirate.com. A very impressive and large group of characters from Star Wars appeared, beginning with Storm Troopers and two Darth Vaders, continuing with Jedi knights and Princess Leah, and ending with other characters, including Chewbacca. While James stood behind me taking a picture, he made a sound exactly like Chewbacca.

The Rose Parade took place on Saturday morning during the first weekend in June. Like the Portland Rose Festival in general, the parade takes place every year. The floats are entirely made of biodegradable materials.

I was to meet up with the Vegetarian Meet-Up Group on the steps of the downtown central public library at ten on Saturday morning, in order to watch the Rose Parade. Since I had left before nine on my walk to downtown, I showed up at the library’s front steps twenty minutes early. I found a dry spot on a concrete bench and sat down to observe my surroundings.

Before reaching the public library, I passed two corners where people stood on scaffolding and talked through megaphones or some sort of sound system. The people on the scaffolding wore bright green jackets and asked the crowd trivial questions. Thus I learned that Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, is from Eugene, Oregon and graduated from Lincoln High School. I would have guessed that he was Midwestern, like from Springfield, Illinois or Springfield, Missouri.

Much like during the Starlight Parade the previous weekend, people sat in lawn chairs along the curbs of downtown streets, streets were closed to traffic, and people wandered down the center of the street. In addition, some spectators had set up blue pavilions at the curb, and in addition to lawn chairs they had small tables and food and beverages set up. The sky was grey and overcast and had been sprinkling and raining throughout my walk to downtown, so it’s no wonder people brought pavilions. They reminded me of the Quidditch World Championship of the Harry Potter world. Down the middle of the street, merchants pulled carts displaying sundry colorful items such as stuffed toy animals, balloons, cotton candy, and wizard hats. Streetcars on cross streets were still in business and rattled through the crowd; police stood at these intersections and made sure that pedestrians didn’t step in front of the tracks at inappropriate times.

Most of the group showed up a bit later than ten, but in Portland that’s normal. After everyone showed up, we talked and waited around at the bottom of the stairs and watched the crowd. In the middle of the street, children drew with sidewalk chalk and a woman blew bubbles at the kids. People blew bright blue plastic trumpets that were quite long, as if they were a cheap imitation of Tibetan trumpets.

It looked like the Rose Parade was starting when a group of walkers, many of whom wore wreaths of roses or silly hats, walked down the street, each wearing a number like in a regular marathon. I overheard they walk six miles total, and thinking of my walk from the Hawthorne district to downtown that morning, I said, “I could do that. It would take a while, but I could do it.” A marching band went by, along with flag wavers. And then we continued waiting for the parade to continue. People returned to playing with chalk and bubbles in the middle of the street. Others played with nerf footballs. But the parade did not continue. I said, “Gee, that was an awfully short parade!” One member of our group went off to investigate and found out that what we had seen so far was only the Walking Parade, and the Rose Parade would begin in ten minutes.

The ten minutes stretched on and on. Theories of floats breaking down and holding up the parade cropped up in discussion. The parade was supposedly going to pass in front of the public library at about eleven in the morning, but instead it wasn’t until twelve that the parade began to appear in front of the public library.

Cowgirls periodically rode by on beautiful horses, and on one occasion I also saw a couple of “squaws” in brightly beaded white costumes, also riding horses. My jaw dropped at sight of llamas, in an array of colors, some pulling small wagons. We clapped at sight of nineteenth-century-style wagons and people walking or riding in 1860s costumes, including many Reenactment soldiers and women in hooped skirts. Firefighters walked past, followed by an old-fashioned steam-powered fire “truck,” all shiny silver and red metal. A Fred Meyers float resembled an old-fashioned store front displaying real fruits and vegetables. “Throw me an apple!” a spectator called. Like at the Starlight Parade, characters from Star Wars passed us.

Perhaps the most impressive float included an enormous Beast in a blue jacket, based on the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast. Belle, in a yellow crinoline gown, stood waving to the crowd in front of the Beast, who actually moved a bit even though he was an automaton rather than someone in a costume. At the back of the float were other characters from the animated feature, including the Clock, the Candlestick, and the Teapot.

One perk to watching the parade was seeing Sam Adams, the mayor of Portland, riding a bicycle!  He wore a white suit, and a couple of spectators called, "Nice beard!" referring to his new facial hair.

After the parade and lunch, we went to the Gerding Theater, where we saw in the studio theater Crazy Enough, starring Storm Large as herself, in one-woman autobiographical play about her and her mentally ill mother. It was an intense, raunchy, and hilarious production, and Storm Large has a powerful voice. But before we arrived at the Gerding, we walked past more of the Rose Parade. We saw a Mexican float, quite a few people in traditional Mexican costumes, and Mexicans riding horses and some doing rope tricks while dressed in costumes reminiscent of Zorro. Before we left the parade, we saw Chinese dragons.

After we left the theater, we walked to Chinatown, where the Dragon Moon Festival was taking place. It involved several booths selling merchandise, including impressive dragon figures made of rope, hand-made soap, and other things relevant to the event. Some of the booths sold hot Chinese food, which would have been enticing if I hadn’t scarfed down a noodle lunch just before going to the Gerding and buying a half-price rush ticket. The Dragon Moon festival included a karaoke stand where a woman sang along with an eighties pop song. To me, the most interesting part of the mini-festival was the puppet show, which was a puppet version of an anthology of short stories. The first one we saw involved a cute little turtle that tended to stick its neck out, and a detailed and agile crane that was after the turtle.

All together, I spent an exciting and fun day in downtown Portland, a city where there is always plenty to do, whether or not the Rose Festival takes place.