For Those of You Who Missed the Parade...Memories of a Home-made Dragon Costume

Queen Victoria might have described Sunday's small-town experience as "No pudding and no fun! " (as the grand lady was wont to say), but surely even she would applaud the dedication of coming out to the Victoria Day Parade in the pelting rain.

If you happened to be sensibly snug and dry in your bed that holiday morning, you missed:

* an ear-splitting array of fire-engine sirens, Sparky the Fire dog, and the sight of me waving and yelling to my friend Bridget in one of the fire-trucks. I earned her two points...she was having a little competition with her male fire-fighter friend to see who could get the most women to wave at them. She won. :)

* An entry by the Holy Chicken Performing Arts society featuring costumed stilt-walkers, hula-hoopers, fairies, and sinister-looking hooded medieval types

* Six, count'em, SIX pipe bands playing the two songs that bagpipes seem to play at parades. One of the pipers had a leopard pelt of some description over his shoulder. Are leopards traditionally Scottish?

*Hordes of children on decorated bicycles. I did this when I was a kid but I doubt I would've been dedicated enough to ride in the rain. It doesn't take that much work to tie the pom-poms on after all.

* A little black car with hand-painted flames on its hood which would lurch backwards and then gun the engine forward to produce a smoke show , instantly triggering a flood of memories from when my friend Tai used to do parking-lot smoke-shows in her Dodge Charger. Ah, those were the days....

* A parade of politicians in vehicles heavily advertising Dodge Chrysler Jeep. That's fine and all, but on many of the cars they'd forgotten to put the little sign up saying which politician/ very important person was inside. "So it's kind of like watching really slow traffic go by", observed my friend, who, like me, comes to these parades solely out of childhood nostalgia.

* And finally, two people valiantly trying to fill out a dragon costume. It was a favourite entry of mine. It may not have been spectacular, but Kim and I immediately shouted when we saw it.

You see, once upon a time, long years ago, but in this very village parade, the childhood selves of Tai and Kim and I wore a dragon costume too. It was dreadfully clever for something made from cardboard boxes and green garbage bags.

We worked long hours on it, and I've been looking around my house trying to find the old faded photograph of ourselves in all our reptilian glory, but perhaps it's better, gentle readers, if you use your imaginations.

Its cardboard mouth was open and lined with cardboard teeth. It had a long spiked back and a tail that could swish around if we were careful not to trip. The dragon wore a flowered lei around its neck, our sole concession to the Hawaiian theme of the parade day.

Iif I'm remembering correctly (ah, those fuzzy-edged happy memories) we'd stop walking along the parade route every so often to do a little marching-in-place Dragon Dance .

It was hot and dark inside the beast :if you think about it, that's very authentic for being inside a dragon under any circumstance.

Tai was the brains behind the head of our lizard, Kim walked in the middle, and I was the tail-swisher. It was a long parade route to walk, hunched over and two out of three of us mostly-blind. I had a lovely view of our sneakers and the pavement.

But I remember our jubiliation when we won the ten dollar prize for Best Costume in our category (whatever that was). Back then, with a twenty-five cent a week allowance, ten dollars was big money. Even split four ways. You see, my other best friend in the world, Pol, helped make the dragon, even if she wasn't inside.

When we saw that dragon in this weekend's parade, we were thinking of that stuffy but nostalgic walk down the main street twenty years ago.

Watching this year's dragon, Kim's comment was: "They need a third person inside. Then it would have been great."