The Parade Goes on.

Did you catch the Macy’s parade this year?  It could have been the most exciting 4 hours on Thanksgiving television. I know the Lions game wasn’t. I got to watch the instant replay of the play that the officials would never officially watch, repeated, over and over. Nope. Not the parade. The parade replayed nothing. The parade didn’t cost the Lions a playoff seat.

It just took two lives and gave out personal information.

Yup. A killer parade.  You didn’t get to see that part on TV though. You have to live the parade to find out about these things.  It seems that the networks wanted the only Thanksgiving carcasses to be on the viewer’s table and not on the network’s plate.

“I’m Thankful…I’m not that guy!”

“Amen!”

There were two separate incidents, but both were fatal. One was a clown. The saddest clown ever.  A 67-year-old man and his wife dressed up to make kids smile: fuzzy hair, balloons, the works. The parade had barely started. The guy was shaping balloon animals for happy kids. Somewhere between squeaking ears and shaping legs, he fell over in the street: a heart attack.

His wife was quick. She dropped down and almost immediately started CPR. Five compressions, a breath, repeat, repeat, repeat till she’s out of breath. No good. One ambulance ride and now Thanksgiving will never mean the same thing.

We never got to see that. We didn’t even hear about how the man had signed a petition to get Neil Sedaka into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. For me, that’s enough to get the man a shrine.

“…I hear laughter in the rain…”

It’s not clown laughter.  It’s not the dead cop either.  He was just doing his job directing parade traffic, and right there, had a heart attack.   

I don’t remember any of my kid shows readying me for this.

Dead man in street as Mickey Mouse flies overhead. “And that’s one to grow on.”

No.  “You live, you get by until you die and the parade goes on” was not the message. And yet that’s what this Thanksgiving reminds us.  It also reminds us to do something important. Not necessarily like walking on the moon or discovering uranium, but something that makes your time make sense: love somebody, live for others, share the joy.  Don’t make balloon animals though.  That’s just silly.

Don’t work for the Nassau County Police Department either.  They helped with the parade confetti. Thousands of shredded chits from department documents rained down on the happy crowd.  One teen found somebody’s social security number by wiping shreds from his sweater. Now he’s got himself a new car.

“Thanks NCPD!”

Ok. This kid was honest, but not everybody is, and you’d think the police would shred their documents better than that, and maybe find better ways to dispose of them.  I’d love to give a funny metaphor for what this is like, but they are the metaphor. “It’s like a government agency giving all your private information to the public.” What’s more metaphoric than that?

…And the parade goes on.

Arrest records, inner office memos, some people found out about Rommney’s New York motorcade.  If it happened at the NCPD, the news is on the streets.  New Yorkers, little bits of your private life just rained down on Santa Clause.

“Merry Christmas!”

One thing’s for sure, once reports got out of personal information and SSNs littering NY streets, that parade route would have become the cleanest streets in New York.

And that’s just the Thanksgiving Parade. I can’t wait till Christmas.