by Joyce Menyasz

Created on: May 28, 2009

If a parade goes down the middle of the street and there's nobody there to watch it, are the clowns still scary?

Saturday I needed to do an errand that involved popping downtown to Bridge Street in our sleepy little downtown area in the wilds of Ontario, Canada.

I usually take the highway to High Street, and cruise through my favourite neighbourhood in town. This neighbourhood houses the oldest mansions, the three-fireplace-houses-with-upstairs-screened-in-por ches that scream of stories and history. I have a fantasy that one day I will be able to see inside one house in particular. Until I do, I will just drive by and daydream.

Anyway, Bridge street was closed off at High Street. There were volunteers that let no passers through, their look determined and a little too enthusiastic, as if they were waiting for a reason to turn on vehicles that didn't want to heed the big blue barriers that blocked the road. There was no traffic either way, so I decided to park at the barrier and walk downtown, it being such a nice day and all.

That should have been the first sign - convenient parking.

I stopped at the barrier and looked left, looked right. I saw no reason for barriers. There were no crowds, nothing. I asked a volunteer, "What's up?"

She looked at me as if I should know already, and said in a tone that chastised me just a bit for not knowing "It's the Shriner's Parade."

I was slightly stunned by her haughtiness. You'd think the Queen was coming.

I looked again, wondering if I'd blinked and missed this parade she spoke of.

Oh, there were some police officers on bikes approaching. One officer waved at the group of four of us on the corner and laughingly told us I'm the parade!

Well there you go.

If I listened carefully, I could hear the parade band tuning up. So, it was a parade after all. But where were all the people? Where were the children? The parents with harried expressions and the impatient toddlers?

Had I stepped into some weird anti-parade dimension?

I walked on, struck again that I could only see about 30 people sitting up and down the street, most of them local vendors out to see what was going on, or people like me, who just happened to stumble on a ghost-town parade.

It was kind of eerie, probably a little embarrassing for the community and charity conscious Shriners, shameful for our town and frighteningly hilarious to me.

My one errand on Bridge Street netted me a 'closed' sign (for the ginormous 'parade' no doubt), so I turned back,

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