Parade FloatNo Truck You Can Make It Better

You are stuck. You have to make a float for the upcoming parade and no one will let you use their flatbed truck. What can you do?

Not having a truck could work in your favor. If everyone else has a truck and you do something creative and ingenious and plucky, the spectators will be impressed. If it is funny too, so much the better.

Consider that you have some distance to travel on a street; how do you transport yourselves? Typically this is done by feet, wheels or skids as in a sleigh or sled. If you choose feet, you could make your float in modules which loosely interconnect. Then you could choreograph your moves down the street, twirling and swaying, etc. You could dribble along the way and if your float has a hoop on it toss basketballs through the hoop and have them roll down a swimming pool slide (made out of wire) into someone`s hands.

You`ve seen Chinese dragons running around. You could vary that with a theme that fits the parade. If you have a sports team mascot, you could have each member of the float dress up as the mascot and figure out some interesting interactions.

If you, the float participants, are skaters you could all dream up some activity on skates. You probably all know mothers who have strollers. You could each push a stroller and have a light framework connecting them all to support a float.

Find someone who will drive their Volkswagen or square box Scion or some other small cute car and use it to support your float.

Get several lawnmowers and have adults drive them down the street with your float on top. (That?s not really a good idea, but it might give you a jump start on coming up with your own clever notion.)

Get a bunch of two-wheeled hand carts and take turns wheeling each other down the road. Wheelbarrows would do, but that is harder and probably a bit risky.

Anyway, think about anything that has wheels and you can rig up a real float. Soap box derby car, a hundred HotWheels cars, a bunch of basketballs held together in some sort of bearing race.

Or, get a horse.

Jack Wilson is a writer and artist in Tempe, Arizona:

http://www.geocities.com/galimatio/jackwilson.html