Mike & Jenn: 4th of July

Every year my family participates in the 4^th of July parade. You see Jeffersonville may be a small town in rural Vermont but this community knows how to throw a party. Every year the celebration seems to grow bigger and bigger yet all the while keeping that small town charm. We are talking a parade, live music on the green, craft & food vendors AND a magic show -- It’s entertainment for all!

The day kicks off at 10am with a parade through the village. Anyone who wants to take the time to build a float and enter it in the parade are welcome to do just that, just be sure to be at G.W. Tatro’s (our local trucking company just outside of the village) by 9am. This parking lot is the only one in the town that is large enough to house the parade goers and their custom made floats. Now you have local & small businesses that advertise with fancy trucks and banners. You have local organizations that share their community spirit with flat beds decked out in red, white & blue. You have school marching bands, 4-H clubs & the boy scouts walking in groups tossing out candy to the onlookers and sugar deprived children in the crowd. Then you have the families like mine, the fun-loving, fearless, shameless, assholes who enjoy conjuring up a float of their own and marching to the beat of their own drum. Or in our case it was the B 52’s and the Locomotion.

It’s important to note that when my family does something like this we talk about it for months ahead of time, planning and collecting ideas, but the real magic doesn’t happen until the night before when we hustle about trying to put the damn thing together.

This year the parade theme was Yankee Doodle: red, white & blue. Well, we decided that our floats theme would be “think summer, red, white & blue.” With that in mind we decided that we would use my mother’s Toyota truck as our basic foundation for our idea. She has a rack that is built into the bed of the truck making it much easier to build & stabilize a scene.

Taking our building materials down into Mike and my basement we painted a cartoon underwater scene with red, white & blue fish, crabs, and even snails. Once the basic scene was completed we zip tied it to the rack in the truck. We then topped the rack off with a Kayak to give the impression that the Kayak was floating on this makeshift cartoon water. Haha! Add balloons, streamers, loud fun music and a couple of assholes who don’t mind making a complete fool out of themselves in a public place and you have our float!

My brother Sam rode inside the Kayak and tossed candy to the folks in the crowd. Liam rode in the bed of the truck behind the cardboard cartoon water scene and happily launched water from his water gun into the unsuspecting crowds, while my mother, myself, and two other friends walked along side this traveling band of idiots. Three of us, (including myself) were dressed up in mixed-matched attire of red, white & blue, with beads, flowers, balloons and such, while the 4^th person was dressed as the statue of liberty. For the two miles that this parade route traveled we laughed, danced, got rained on, and tossed candy to those to chicken to create a float of their own.