St Pat's 2005 (or How To Build An Award-Winning Float)

So for the last week or so, all (well most) of my spare time has been spent volunteering for our theatre company turning this unassuming low-boy trailer:


into this award-winning parade float:



Yes, it was my first attempt at designing a float for our city's annual St. Patricks Day Parade and Festival. And what a hoot it was. We were by far the smallest entry I saw as far as trailer size and money spent on fancy store-bought decorations, but what we lacked in size we made up for in spunk!

We actually had about 10 more volunteers and actors dressed up interacting with the crowds and handing out goodies, and we had a live accordion player on the back of the truck providing musical entertainment! I have a few more photos at my flicker page, but I got so caught up in jogging next to the float (this parade moved quickly!), and playing with the crowd as we went along that I didn't get around to taking photos of our participants who were on foot! :(

On the plus side, we were very popular. A lot of people recognized us from our performances (we've only been around for less that a year)...it's pretty cool to hear someone screaming your name out of a crowd of people lined up along the street!

We learned a lot of lessons in this parade. Most importantly, that it's a lot of fun and we can't wait to do our next one!

After the parade we gave two 25-minute performances on a stage outside at the Kids Carnival. Those went well, but were full of enough issues and problems to fill their own entry, so I'll leave them out of this one. We learned a lot about performing in outdoor festivals that day too!

Oh yeah, we were a little bummed at the awards ceremony when other groups won for best company, best non-profit organization, best band, most Irish, best school, etc. So we'd pretty much stopped listening when the last name they called was ours. It wasn't until we got our plaque that we realized what our award was:

Not bad for our first time out! :)