DeSoto Parade

Following the morning and early afternoon at the car show, I ended the first day of my 63rd year by taking my folding chair and decamping from the Chevy dealer and moving my flag to 9th Avenue West in Bradenton for the De Soto Grand Parade. And grand it was, for one hour and forty five minutes of marching bands, dignitaries in convertibles (some from as far away as a sister city in Spain), emergency vehicles, boats, blatant commercial ploys ("sure, if you give me beads, I'll tell you I have a Sprint phone"), a motorized outhouse, and the cry of "beads, give us beads" from the assembled multitudes on both sides of the street. Now, I'm not so sure of this fascination with beads, and various pirate "crewes" marching alongside or riding high above the street in parade floats of various shapes - often ships, but too many variations to describe here.

There was a real estate float with a large inflated balloon, and behind that logo adorned balloon an actual hot air balloon "basket" where the pilot would periodically hit the gas and blast a fifteen foot flame into the night air. There was the Rough Riders float, with a group from Tampa commemorating Teddy Roosevelt's famous charge - however I do believe he was not throwing beads to the Spanish army in Cuba. They did have cool "uniforms" however. There were literally hundreds of pirate ladies in tight clothing with impressive decolletage. Men dressed as Hernando DeSoto adorned many a float, but the music was hard to reconcile with the period of his discovery of Florida. If he had come ashore blasting high amperage disco, the native Indians would have moved north to Georgia immediately. Maybe this "theme" explains the Seminole Hard Rock Casino in Tampa, however.

Now, there is a similar parade in the Tampa area, called the Gasparilla, and it's even bigger I'm told, with more floats, more skimpily dressed pirate wenches, and tons more beads. And of course, then there's Mardi Gras celebrated everywhere, with even more plastic beads. I did not see any obvious signs of debauchery, although some wag in the crowd was heard to yell at the Hooters waitresses "show us your tips".

They say that Rome was destroyed by the masses demanding bread and circuses. Here we are, neighboring the Circus City of Sarasota, and the crowd could only get small packets of McDonald's animal crackers (another corporate float) and plastic beads. How far we have fallen. As for DeSoto, Chrysler stopped making HIS namesake in 1960. I didn't see a single one of them in the parade.