Festifools
When I showed up to the library yesterday, I saw 6 or 7 kids with cardboard boxes around their torsos and various circles and squares drawn on the cardboard with sharpie. Robots! I don't usually see this many child robots in the library. One or two, sure.* But 6 or 7? Something extra must be going on.
I asked the Internet Lady. I said, "What the fuck's with all these robots, Internet Lady?" And she said, "Oh! That's festifools!" She spoke it as a hyperlink*, which was alarming, to be honest. I didn't know anyone could do that. She said it was happening soon, just two blocks away.
So I checked it out. More kids dressed up as robots. Didn't see that coming at all. But then, wait a sec, is that a huge papier-mâché head, shoulders, and arms being paraded around by three people holding really long sticks? Yes, yes indeed it is. Just some random papier-mâché creation. No cultural figure that I recognized. Most of them were like this, actually. Giant heads, shoulders, and arms made of papier-mâché resembling no one I knew.
But then came Hakeem Olajuwon. I don't know Hakeem Olajuwon personally, but I know that he's a very good basketball player and that his face and shoulders aren't green. And that his hair isn't made out of streamers and that his teeth aren't piano keys. He did look pretty damn cool, though. I gotta say. And he was HUGE. Way bigger than the real Hakeem Olajuwon. Which is saying something.
Someone behind me was talking to someone else entirely about just how abstract these things were. And that's the perfect word to describe them. Abstract. It would be impossible to know that it was Hakeem Olajuwon if his name wasn't printed on the jersey. It honestly could've been Hillary Clinton. They weren't really going for accuracy here.
One cool thing I really dug was the Tyranorexicsaurus Rex. It was an 18-foot-long emaciated dinosaur that these ladies were jogging around with. That was extremely well done. Not abstract in the slightest, just downsized. But you know who was abstract? Mickey Mouse. Actually, no. He wasn't abstract so much as creepy. I could understand it if kids got upset and cried when they saw Mickey. It's not that he wasn't smiling. It's that he had no mouth at all. And he was glaring down at us menacingly. And yet he was not the scariest thing in the parade.
That would be Bullwinkle. Bullwinkle looked like Bullwinkle. Dumb and Cheery. Standard issue nose and ears. No abstraction here, either. However, unlike all the Bullwinkles I ever watched on TV, the one in the parade had a sawed off shotgun. And he was waving it around at the crowd. Openly brandishing it. I kept looking at his face, his handlers, other puppets around him, trying to come up with some explanation for why Bullwinkle was armed. Maybe he was afraid of being trampled by Hakeem Olajuwon.
Anyway. I stuck around for 45 minutes taking it all in. There was another hour to go, but when I saw the same wacko, abstract (yet cool, all the same) heads starting to circle around toward me again, I figured that it'd be a rerun. I was glad I went, though. And I'd totally go again next year. As long as they have different puppets, of course. Something in a Charles Barkley, perhaps.
*AUTHOR'S NOTE: I stretched the truth a couple of times in these first 2 paragraphs, because it amused me to do so. However, everything after that is unfabricated. All of the puppets in the parade existed as I saw them, without any embellishment from me.
I asked the Internet Lady. I said, "What the fuck's with all these robots, Internet Lady?" And she said, "Oh! That's festifools!" She spoke it as a hyperlink*, which was alarming, to be honest. I didn't know anyone could do that. She said it was happening soon, just two blocks away.
So I checked it out. More kids dressed up as robots. Didn't see that coming at all. But then, wait a sec, is that a huge papier-mâché head, shoulders, and arms being paraded around by three people holding really long sticks? Yes, yes indeed it is. Just some random papier-mâché creation. No cultural figure that I recognized. Most of them were like this, actually. Giant heads, shoulders, and arms made of papier-mâché resembling no one I knew.
But then came Hakeem Olajuwon. I don't know Hakeem Olajuwon personally, but I know that he's a very good basketball player and that his face and shoulders aren't green. And that his hair isn't made out of streamers and that his teeth aren't piano keys. He did look pretty damn cool, though. I gotta say. And he was HUGE. Way bigger than the real Hakeem Olajuwon. Which is saying something.
Someone behind me was talking to someone else entirely about just how abstract these things were. And that's the perfect word to describe them. Abstract. It would be impossible to know that it was Hakeem Olajuwon if his name wasn't printed on the jersey. It honestly could've been Hillary Clinton. They weren't really going for accuracy here.
One cool thing I really dug was the Tyranorexicsaurus Rex. It was an 18-foot-long emaciated dinosaur that these ladies were jogging around with. That was extremely well done. Not abstract in the slightest, just downsized. But you know who was abstract? Mickey Mouse. Actually, no. He wasn't abstract so much as creepy. I could understand it if kids got upset and cried when they saw Mickey. It's not that he wasn't smiling. It's that he had no mouth at all. And he was glaring down at us menacingly. And yet he was not the scariest thing in the parade.
That would be Bullwinkle. Bullwinkle looked like Bullwinkle. Dumb and Cheery. Standard issue nose and ears. No abstraction here, either. However, unlike all the Bullwinkles I ever watched on TV, the one in the parade had a sawed off shotgun. And he was waving it around at the crowd. Openly brandishing it. I kept looking at his face, his handlers, other puppets around him, trying to come up with some explanation for why Bullwinkle was armed. Maybe he was afraid of being trampled by Hakeem Olajuwon.
Anyway. I stuck around for 45 minutes taking it all in. There was another hour to go, but when I saw the same wacko, abstract (yet cool, all the same) heads starting to circle around toward me again, I figured that it'd be a rerun. I was glad I went, though. And I'd totally go again next year. As long as they have different puppets, of course. Something in a Charles Barkley, perhaps.
*AUTHOR'S NOTE: I stretched the truth a couple of times in these first 2 paragraphs, because it amused me to do so. However, everything after that is unfabricated. All of the puppets in the parade existed as I saw them, without any embellishment from me.