There is good news and bad news here. On Thanksgiving, Neph and I fulfilled my bucket list item of balloon wrangling in the Macy's parade. I will say the minimum because that's what Macy's would like. It is a huge honor and a great experience to participate in this event. Oh my gosh.
We got up super early and headed to the Hammerstein Ballroom. First you stand in lines on the sidewalk organized by call time. Then you are directed to where the costumes are for your balloon or float, and you start getting dressed. The costumes fit over your clothes. Our costume consisted of big coveralls, a hat, gloves, spats to go over your shoes, a dickie and a tabard. The tabard goes over your coveralls, and ties on the sides. Imagine a small tablecloth with a head hole, with side ties. That's your tabard.
Then they take you by bus up to the Upper West Side to get the balloon. You crawl under the net that is holding it down, and grab a rope line. There are many of you under there, along with a vehicle that is in the middle, bearing most of the weight. Weight -- wait? Yes, you wait for an hour or so until it is time to go. Winds were 22 mph, so we weren't going to fly very high that day. The previous year it rained on Thanksgiving, so we lucked out.
Once underway, we navigated a turn onto Central Park West. That's where you get the first inkling of how many people there are out there. But you're also closely following the directions of the balloon leader. There is a lot to remember. Keep your line kinda taut but not too much. Eyes on your leader. Side streets are where the gusts happen, so stay focused. Then there were chants we were saying.
People filled the sidewalks and cheered for us. On the other side of the fence, people filled Central Park, often standing on those boulders that I photographed in the last post. Every window had a face in it. People in high up buildings looked like tiny excited ants.
There were only two problems during our journey. At one point someone lost their line. It got caught in a tree and in that case you stop the balloon and someone cuts that line. Online somewhere there is a video of a point in which wind caught us and the balloon went sideways and the crowd screamed. I have no recollection of this.
This experience, my friends, was fantastic. I could say it was magical, but it's magical on tv. An entire city comes together to make this wild thing happen for the entire world, and on the ground, you can see how many people it takes to manifest the spectacle. It's so darned cool. It's so much bigger than I even knew, and I feel proud to have been a very small part of it.
Once you're at 34th Street you can see the tv crew high above (while trying to make your float look as under control as possible). There was a dance number right before us, and that was the point at which we could pause and reflect on the miles we'd just walked. Once past 34th, you put down your balloon on blankets, deflate and roll it up. It goes to storage until next year, and we go back to the ballroom to return our costumes. I could barely bend after all of that. Someone else had to remove my spats.
We walked as short a distance as humanly possible until we saw a restaurant. I ate matzoh ball soup, rye toast and some cottage cheese. People of many backgrounds surrounded us. It was lovely.
It was 11:38am on Thanksgiving.
