Parade’s End Offers a Different Drama

Though he was still walking tall, Joel Schnitzer wasn’t smiling anymore.

The red painted grin on the clown’s face had all but faded by the time Schnitzer hobbled down Sierra Madre Boulevard on a pair of stilts that had him towering 10 feet in the air--stilts he had worn for more than two hours along the 5.5-mile route of the 1997 Pasadena Rose Parade.

“I’m pretty tired,” said Schnitzer, 18, as he faced the last of his long strides down the parade route.

When the millions of home viewers tune into the Rose Parade every New Year’s Day, they are bombarded with the smiling faces of people excited to be walking Colorado Boulevard. Television cameras placed strategically at the start of the parade route capture the freshness of the recently touched-up floats, the bright-eyed cheeriness of the marching bands, the eager excitement of the Rose Queen and her court. The marchers smile brightly and wave vigorously to their audience.

But about four miles down the road, once the pageant turns the corner onto Sierra Madre Boulevard, after the television crews have packed up their equipment, the whole face of the parade changes. First a drum major will stop smiling. Then a clarinet player takes on a limp. Soon the color guards start to wince and roses start to wilt. And no one can fake it anymore: They ache.

“I feel it in my calves,” said Schnitzer, ducking beneath a street sign.

Tuba player Joe Dombrowski, 17, of Ohio felt it in his shoulders. A grimacing clarinet player from Geneva, Switzerland, said she felt it in her legs. And the entire color guard troop of Pittsburgh’s North Allegheny High School felt it in their feet.

“We all have holes in our shoes,” said Sarah Nibert, 15, lifting her heel to reveal the damage to her ill-padded jazz shoes.

By the time they reached Lambert Drive, parade participants were relying on a second wind and some muscle memory to get them through their fifth and final mile. Egged on by spectators who held up signs reading: “One More Mile” and “You’re Almost There,” most of the marchers willed themselves to the end of the route.

The floats, however, did not enjoy this same luxury. Several motorized bouquets stopped, stalled, sputtered and finally had to be towed up Sierra Madre Boulevard across the finish line on Paloma Street.

“If a float goes past the cameras at the start of the parade [without malfunctioning], it is seen as a success,” said tournament mechanic Chris Link as a tow truck pulled a stalled float past him.

Even if they didn’t make it past the cameras, the float fans at the end of the route would not have cared. Forgoing the zoom-lens advantage of television viewing and the relative comfort of grandstand seating for the theater of failure unique to the final stretch of the route, parade-end viewers are looking for good drama.

Altadena resident Dorothy Blakesley, 65, who has staked out the same spot of grassy knoll along Sierra Madre Boulevard for 45 years, said the end of the route is where true pageantry occurs. “We’ve had some people [in the parade] pass out,” she said.

Also hoping to catch a glimpse of the oft-overlooked, flawed side of the celebrated tradition, Arash Sadighi, 15, of Canoga Park spent his second New Year’s Eve camping out at the parade’s final stretch.

“Usually the band is tired. Especially the fat guys,” he said, grinning. “And they’re all sweaty and nasty. It’s better than out on Colorado Boulevard.”