A Day in Rock City: Parade

There are certain moments in my life that have caused me to reevaluate some part of my concept of who I am. I start to wonder who this person is who made the decisions that put me in this situation. I had such a moment when I tried to sneak out of my Turkish dorm room and found myself hanging from a windowsill over a 12-foot drop onto concrete; another just before jumping out of a plane with a parachute strapped to my back.

Both of those incidents of minor physical peril pale in comparison to what I was doing at a little before 11:00 on Saturday morning, though: namely, rollerblading alone past small-town Midwesterners who'd gathered outside to see a parade. In addition to the rollerblades, I was wearing white fishnets, a short, yellow, sequined skirt and skimpy top to match, long black gloves, huge sunglasses, a wig, and a cardboard car.

The first decision that led me down the road to this moment of public weirdness was coming to A Day in Rock City, a festival put on each year to celebrate the founding of this village of 300 near the Illinois/Wisconsin border. Each year friends of Nell, a friend from my Ithaca days who's from Rock City, converge for the occasion, and this year I thought I'd see what the fuss was about.

Nell and another Rock City Day veteran picked me up in Rockford on Thursday in the midst of a shopping trip. As we drove between craft and thrift stores hunting for costumes and float decorations, Nell explained that the theme of this year's float would be Gas Guzzlers for Global Warming, and she ran down the available roles: the Arab oil sheik, George Bush, gas station workers, the oil company worker, the Texas oil tycoon and his wife, ghoulish dying people. The role of a polar bear drowning in a wading pool was already taken. "And if you have any interest in rollerskating, you can be a car," she said. The cars would skate in front of the float in a traffic jam; each would have a designated color and a costume purchased by Nell in Thailand.

This didn't seem like the best option, given that I hadn't roller skated in years, and had no roller skates. But when I found a box full of $2 roller blades to choose from at Goodwill, I became more receptive to the idea. I bought a pair and practiced skating around the bank parking lot that night, but I grew worried when I saw the costumes, which I thought would look fine on a six-year-old at a dance recital, but not so great on me.

As far as I could tell, nothing got done on the float on Friday, including my own goal of finding someone else to be the yellow car. Work seemed to begin in the middle of the night; when I woke up in the morning, Nell was already hard at work on the seemingly impossible job of getting the float ready for the parade's 10:30 commencement. I went to work on my car with the over-worked hot glue gun, quickly resigning myself to driving the most pathetic car of the group. That was the point of no return: having built the car, I had to drive it.

We were late to the parade, and being accomplished skaters, the other cars reached the starting point blocks ahead of me. Which was how I came to be all alone on my $2 blades, behind the other cars but ahead of the float (ably pulled by G.R. as the Arab sheik on a three-wheeler), on a later stretch of the parade route where the spectators were already gathered.

We had a great time, though. If you don't believe me, believe G.R.'s Picasa album.