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The float we stood on was exactly the right height, raising us some three feet above the crowds that lined the four sides of the town square. Ours was not the only float in the July 4 parade. Nor was our town's parade unique. In this most chauvinistic of patriotic cultures, it was an unwritten tradition that every small Midwestern town should occasionally offer its citizens a parade to celebrate the birth of the nation.
We had decorated our float: pompoms of coloured tissue paper and twisted ribbons of stretchy crepe paper. We were all students at Marilyn Smith's dance studio. Every small town had a dance studio run by a woman who had herself studied at a small town dance studio and maybe even in some big city. If she was lucky, she might have had a minor career dancing in road companies or summer stock. And now, married and living in another small town, this dancer would abandon her dreams of fame and fortune and would open a dance studio to foster other little girls' dreams of dancing their way to fame and fortune.
There were eight of us in this class. We had been with Marilyn since we were pre-pubescent, and we were now fifteen and sixteen. Accomplished dancers all. (I can still do awkward plies and releves in all five positions. And I can show you the opening moves of our recital piece choreographed to "Cruising down the River." But you might not want to see that.)
The theme of our float that year was Hawaii, which was at that time a candidate for statehood, not that we landlocked innocents had a clue as to the politics and wider implications of the issue.
In honour of the occasion Marilyn had taught us a hula dance. We wore grass skirts from a costume emporium in the state capital. Around our necks were colourful leis of plastic flowers that prickled the back of our necks. We wore halter tops and it's safe to say that we wore shorts under our grass skirts for modesty's sake.
The record player on our float repeated "Lovely Hula Hands" throughout the length of the parade route, and we hula'd as sexily as we knew how (some of us knew more about this than others).
The photo of us on the float in our grass skirts resurfaces about once a year when I'm scrabbling through the photo boxes in search of something entirely different. And there we are: the Crosby sisters, tall and beautiful, with black hair and bright blue eyes; Glenda Weckerly, who moved to Lafayette the year after the parade and who died young, I heard; and me. I'll have to wait for the next appearance of the photo to remind me who the others were. It's sobering to remember that any of that group who are still alive are now eighty years old. Do we still know how to hula?
We loved being on that float, even though, powered as it was by someone's tractor, its progress was jerky, not smooth. The needle skipped on the record and the jolts occasionally made us stumble, ruining our fancy hula footwork. We were the hit of the parade, innocently showing off our nubile bodies to the whole county. I say we were the hit, but I have no memory of what the other floats looked like. They might all have represented Hawaii in one way or another, but ours was the only one with real live authentic hula dancers, even if we were, as Nancy White used to sing about Joe Clark, welded at the hip.
Happy Fourth of July (coming on Tuesday).
A retroactive Happy Canada Day (yesterday).
And let's have a big round of applause for small-town parades everywhere!
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