Coney Island's "denizens of the deep" came out to play again this year at the start of summer. This year's Mermaid Parade began in the rain, but that didn't matter: mermaids don't melt!
They did, however, carry umbrellas and walk a lot faster than in previous years.
Before the parade began, I headed into a bar to use the facilities. There was a long line and I got talking with a gentleman wearing his hair in two pigtails, complete with teal streaks. He also wore a skirt fashioned from a transparent plastic tablecloth adorned with flowers. This was a clever way of keeping his legs dry in the rain, which was coming down pretty hard at that time. In the bar, I spotted Jennifer Miller, the bearded woman who runs Circus Amok (another one of my favorite entertainments).
We met Ferdinand on the bus heading over to the parade, but he was so intent on finding a good spot to stand that he got too far ahead of us. So we didn't stand together this year. However we met him again at the end of the parade.
I recognized a lot of the same faces from last year's parade. We saw the Elvis impersonator, the Parrot Man, the painted ladies, and of course Marty Markowitz, the Borough President, telling us we are all "meshugah" (crazy) and that this was the most undressed parade in town. (I've seen a lot of seminudity at the Pride parades too, though). The Polar Bear Club was there, along with the Rude Mechanical Orchestra, the Brooklyn Bombshells, and so on. There was the usual contingent of pirates, men in kilts, and mermaids with seashell or sea star pasties on their breasts. The costumes were up to their usual standard of wild, wacky, imaginative and sexy.
This year, Barnum and Bailey was there, but I wasn't so thrilled about that. The ASPCA has a lawsuit against them for violating the Endangered Species Act, and the circus's job application asked whether the applicant "is or has ever been" a member of PETA, The Humane Society, the ASPCA and other animal protection organizations. It smacked of the McCarthy Era and when I brought Jason's attention to it, he decided not to apply. Therefore I wasn't so happy to see the circus in the parade, even though the clown noses so many people wore were pretty cute. (Clown mermaids?)
The rain stopped after a while so that made it easier to take photos, but we had competition from the photographers who seemed to stop right in front of me every time a parader stopped and posed. There were so many photos I could have taken if they hadn't blocked my view. Still, I managed to take 930 photos and ruthlessly (!) chopped them down to a mere 291. Onward to the parade in 2010!
