A parade of blank asphalt, between bunches of waving people
5:18 PM
This afternoon's parade by SOP was certainly comprehensive. It seemed to include just about any group that wanted to be seen as allied with the LGBT community and that owns or could make a banner of some sort. And most of those groups had a dozen or so people walking behind the banner and waving at the crowds along the street.
There were church groups, affinity groups, employee groups, just about every ".org" serving LGBT Seattle, companies, city agencies. Several of them managed to put together some kind of entertainment for the crowds. Unfortunately, because of the conspicuous lack of parade monitors, most of those crowd-pleasing entertainments helped to create the huge breaks in the proceedings. There were even a few floats spread out among the seas of waving humanity.
But, oh, did it ever take a long time to get through all that.
So, if last night's parade/march on Broadway seemed fast-paced, energetic, and brief with a good mix of entry types, today's installment seemed the opposite of all those things. Today's parade seemed insufferably long and drown out. Anyone who actually managed to watch the whole stung-out affair spent most of the time waiting beside a blank roadway for yet another group to walk by.
We watched the endless delays mostly from a shady spot at Fourth and Blanchard which is only a few blocks from the starting point. We can only imagine how bad it must have been closer to Seattle Center. At one point about midway through the endless afternoon, there was break that stretched for five or six long blocks. Standing in the middle of the street, we could just barely see the gold banners of a group coming along to the south and could no longer see the last group that had passed on to the north.
Clearly it's a difficult thing to keep something like this moving especially because they chose to run this parade along a route that required frequent stops for bus lines to make their way through the paraders. But still... it seems like one of the basic responsibilities of parade management to keep things moving.
Imagine walking into a dance club and having the sound system go silent after every few mixes while the DJ searches around for the next mix. Wouldn't stay around for long, eh? But that's what the "organizers" of this parade did. It's rude to the people watching and it's rude to the people who agreed to be part of this travesty of a "parade."
Tags: Gay pride Seattle Pride Seattle Gay Seattle
There were church groups, affinity groups, employee groups, just about every ".org" serving LGBT Seattle, companies, city agencies. Several of them managed to put together some kind of entertainment for the crowds. Unfortunately, because of the conspicuous lack of parade monitors, most of those crowd-pleasing entertainments helped to create the huge breaks in the proceedings. There were even a few floats spread out among the seas of waving humanity.
But, oh, did it ever take a long time to get through all that.
So, if last night's parade/march on Broadway seemed fast-paced, energetic, and brief with a good mix of entry types, today's installment seemed the opposite of all those things. Today's parade seemed insufferably long and drown out. Anyone who actually managed to watch the whole stung-out affair spent most of the time waiting beside a blank roadway for yet another group to walk by.
We watched the endless delays mostly from a shady spot at Fourth and Blanchard which is only a few blocks from the starting point. We can only imagine how bad it must have been closer to Seattle Center. At one point about midway through the endless afternoon, there was break that stretched for five or six long blocks. Standing in the middle of the street, we could just barely see the gold banners of a group coming along to the south and could no longer see the last group that had passed on to the north.
Clearly it's a difficult thing to keep something like this moving especially because they chose to run this parade along a route that required frequent stops for bus lines to make their way through the paraders. But still... it seems like one of the basic responsibilities of parade management to keep things moving.
Imagine walking into a dance club and having the sound system go silent after every few mixes while the DJ searches around for the next mix. Wouldn't stay around for long, eh? But that's what the "organizers" of this parade did. It's rude to the people watching and it's rude to the people who agreed to be part of this travesty of a "parade."
Tags: Gay pride Seattle Pride Seattle Gay Seattle
Labels: Gay events, LGBTQ, Seattle Pride
2 Comments:
Those huge gaps were unbearable... we were at 4th & Wall and our block was nearly empty after one of the gaps, as everyone had thought the parade ended!
There's a flickr group with photos for those who packed up and left might have missed... http://www.flickr.com/groups/seattle_pride_2006
Indeed. The sidewalks where I watched the whole thing had thinned out significantly after a couple of those huge gaps.
There were a lot of folks walking toward the Center who would stop if something entertaining came by, but the people walking on the sidewalks were generally moving faster than the parade.
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