The Most Wonderful Time--Part II

So, if you remember my last post, I was mentioning the crazy TWO day affair we had this year in celebrating Halloween. You can click here to read the last post about visiting lovely Amish country in Pennsylvania on Friday.

Once we were done with the rural festivities, we returned in order to partake in the VERY New York City Halloween excursion known as the Village Halloween Parade. Some of you may not be familiar with the parade, although it has been covered on the Sci-Fi channel and other cable networks in years past.

The Halloween parade has been going on in the Village for almost 30 years and has quite the history, drawing people in from nearby states, and definitely the imaginative New Yorkers. The parade was started by several staff members from Theater For The New City, which is a well known East Village theater that hosts independent plays focusing on current social issues.

At that time, one resident puppet maker began creating puppets for a renegade Halloween parade, which started off small. Those same puppets, as well as the theater still exist today (in fact, we were going to their Halloween show after the parade!) and the parade has become a big massive costumed free for all of fun!

What I like about this parade is it differs from other parades in that ANYONE can join IN the parade--including those with floats, their own puppets, or just walking in full costume. So unlike, say, Macy's which provides their own floats for the Thanksgiving Parade--you can either be a spectator OR a participant. And that works out perfectly in the East Village, which was historically the beatnik and artist quarters in the 40's and 50's.

Anyhow...on with the story! We managed to get to parade central around 6pm. Under cover of dark, folks already had the party going in the streets: hundreds of costumed folks, costumed children, and even costumed dogs walked madly through traffic on the way to the parade. Devils, goblins, witches, cartoon and TV characters and more than one Octo-mom rambled madly along.

Here are some pics of our night (click pics to enlarge):

Even the buildings were "dressed up"! Here's front stoop of one of the brownstones we passed on our way to the parade.

We stood by the old church that had been converted to a library. Besides the beauty of its old clock tower, the reason for this is because there is a tradition that puppetmakers would lower a huge puppet spider down to signal the start of the parade. For some reason they lowered the spider a bit later than usual but...

As you can see on the right of the above pic, they finally do lower the giant spider down.

Here it is doing a little dance in mid-air!

...And more dancing. Yes, this really is a marionette puppet! You can see the puppet-handlers on the tower above!

Then the parade began! You can see some of the old Puppets from the early Halloween parades, below. They are the skeletons for the "Dia de la Muertos" section of the parade, below. They are included every Halloween parade:

Yikes, it was raining slightly for the parade...which made for a weird affect when taking pics!

More skeletons!

I SWEAR I did not realize this skeleton had a naughty bra on when I snapped this! The dead apparently have a sense of humor!

Here is a large skeleton. Notice all the folks underneath that have to hold him up!

Right after the skeletons, a bevvy of cool articulated snakes came by. The guy on the right is holding a yellow "bat" which has flapping wings!

After this, there was a group of folks who seemed to do a "water" themed display. The blue scarves are water. Some people held up model ships that "sailed" in the water. Others held sea monsters ( like the one on the left side of the pic) that looked like paper mache lanterns with lights in them....

Some of the carriers in this water section also had..umm, fish on their heads. Like I said, it gets crazy around here for Halloween!

Here's an ethereal, haunted ghost floating overhead. This was all floaty silk and the face looks like a Victorian print.

Another ethereal ghost. Notice how tall it is: you can see it above a streetlight.

For a sudden change of pace, how about these painted ladies standing next to the wacky painted car?

Or these guys, in their home-made "Where the Wild Things Are" costumes:



I like this picture, of our fellow Halloween revelers, too:

So then FINALLY, when the parade was over, it was time to go to the party AFTER the party! But--yikes--since this post is ALREADY so long, I guess I'll have to continue this madcapped story for yet ANOTHER post!

Which should be fun because on SATURDAY we finally reveal the finished works of art from our MONSTER SWAP!! WOOHOOO!