As a kid I used to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. It was fun to watch the floats, balloons, marching bands, dancers, clowns, etc.
Today it looks to be one long parade of Broadway show dancers and singers, complete with plastic carbon copy smiles, professional singers lip-synching to Broadway tunes. Gone are the days of seeing real people in the parade, from balloon handlers to high school kids from the hinterlands estatic that their high school band made it into the parade.
So have I just grown up and reality has set in – meaning the parade has always been this way – or has the parade itself really changed and it’s all schlock?
There were balloon handlers and bands in the parade this year. My hypothesis is that this was written during the first hour of NBC’s telecast, which always has Broadway casts singing songs from their musicals and the Radio City Rockettes to pass the time as the parade makes its way from Central Park to Herald Square.
Although there were a lot of singers on the floats, but that’s nothing new.
Apparently they can’t get any real singers for the Macy’s parade. Who the heck were those obscure pop singers they had today? I didn’t recognize a one.
CBS carried the Miami Beach Thanksgiving Day Parade just before the Macy’s and the people in that one were having so much more (unscripted) fun. It could well have been the 65 degree temperature difference, but they (the people in the parade in Miami) seem to want to be there and seemed to enjoy being there. From the dance groups with nine-year olds woefully out of step to the middle-aged cross dressers with their feather boas, they all made me say, “Hey, they’re having a good time. I’d like to be there.”
I definitely did not feel that way a few minutes later when the broadcast came from New York City.