Coeur d'Alene, ID, has this weird and lovely tradition of grandmothers forming groups to dance in parades. We started out with the "Red Hot Mamas." When that group broke up, a lot of its members formed the "Blazen Divaz." Then the Divaz became successful and the woman who set up the Mamas reformed it. That group has disbanded again and its founder passed away of...well, probably complications from cancer because she had it a few times. One of the founders of the Divaz passed away and they split in half - the extreme Republicans in the troupe formed the "North Idaho Sparklers" while the rest of them stayed in the Divaz.
The Mamas specialized in "comedy" routines that I never really found to be humorous. The Divaz do all this precision dance stuff, a lot of it coming out of Field Manual 22-5, the Army Drill and Ceremony (D&C) manual. The Sparklers just march down the street wearing American flag-theme t-shirts, cowboy hats and cowboy boots.
Okay, so back to the point of this message. My managing editor at the paper knew I take really good parade photos and write well, so one day in February 2019 he called me in: "The Blazen Divaz are going to march in the Philadelphia Thanksgiving Parade. Would you like to cover it for the paper?" Of course I would! So he gave me a preliminary tasking: cover the St. Patrick's Day parade, which they will be in, and link up with the head of the Divaz to plot out everything between now and November. I did that. The week after that I went to my first Divaz rehearsal, which they did in an empty storefront at the local mall. About ten minutes after they started doing Army D&C maneuvers so badly a drill sergeant would have eaten them alive, I spoke up..."whoa, whoa, whoa, I was a sergeant in the Army for twelve years, let's get you guys squared away." So I did about half an hour of Army training, got them looking good...the lady running the group came up after rehearsal and asked "where have you been all my life?" I got them a PDF of Field Manual 22-5 and they were VERY happy.
Fast forward to November. I grabbed a night flight from Spokane to Seattle then the red-eye to JFK then the train to Philly. On Thanksgiving morning I woke up to a damn-near-Cat 1 hurricane that was belting the entire Northeast. I get out to the parade route, find a good place to photograph from (right in front of the Academy of Natural Sciences) and prepared to work. A very nice family decided to adopt me for the morning and were telling me all sorts of things about Parades of the Past...including that, like that day, the balloons had been grounded the morning of the parade due to wind. Apparently the helium is rented because they pump it back into the tankers and take it back to the gas supplier. It was pretty cool how they handled it - the handlers all showed up that morning to take their balloons down the street, but since they couldn't march with their balloons they got to march without them. I think they probably had more fun WITHOUT the balloons.
So, after the parade me, lunch and the 831 photos I took that day went back to my hotel room to pick out a dozen photos, caption them, write a story and send it in. I flipped on the news to have background noise while I worked, and they were talking about the utter disaster the balloons caused in New York City because unlike Philly, THEY flew theirs.
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