It’s strange to think that, in the age of the internet, there is still some kind of taboo (or pseudo-taboo) attached to wearing red during Thanksgiving Day parades. Especially when those parades are held in communities that have become so tech-obsessed that it’s hard to recognize an actual person in any of the personas one can create on Facebook. Regardless, I didn’t go out of my way to attend the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York on Thursday morning — mostly because it’s a poorly executed, two-hour paid for distraction from my horrific Twitter feed. That’s why I couldn’t help but be pleasantly surprised that I spent time at Times Square while walking by Macy’s — where, it turns out, there’s some value in dressing up.
A few years ago, after a small crash, I decided to dress up like a goth and marched along with the #GothFight, a group of parade attendees who ceremoniously scratched under their foreheads and made scary faces during the procession in celebration of under-developed mental-health issues. That was fine with me, at least. While on the eighth annual parade route, I noticed some people were wearing shirts that read “Restart Your Body.” I needed a quick back-up costume, so I went home and changed into one of those shirts — becoming one of the animated dancers I saw earlier that day. I quickly figured out that I was going to get a lot of crap from friends for wearing the costume, but I was in mourning for a small stretch of my life, so nothing could hold me back from making fun of my own pathology. “Restart Your Body” emblazoned with a cartoon naked guy is ultimately not a good idea to go out in the daylight — especially on a day that includes incessant police harassment, more artists who try to piss off Macy’s executives (like Rex Stout, who painted a sword on the parade route in 1989), and hundreds of other miscellaneous performers, just like me.
Then I saw some particular sections of my family who would ride on the subway and celebrate Thanksgiving like they do every year. Their first option is a trip to the pumpkin patch; their second is seeing their favorite celebrity and creating a meme using…whatever that was. Between waiting for the train, this year, I actually experienced a slightly different kind of post-holiday “frenzy” from my own family — one that put a smile on my face and made me feel like not a single person was wondering who this “new” you is — “Restart Your Body” or not. It was that kind of day, truly. By the time the parade passed, my family members were in the mood to text back-and-forth jokes and lyrics to some cult classics. That’s right: “You talkin’ to me, Gertrude McFuzz?” The parade is great, and it’s the way I feel about everything that might be threatening my sanity. It’s not giving up — I’m just making use of it to help me from going to Dr. Phil and reenacting the Waco-Bundy standoff.
Read the full story at LATimes.com.
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