Pomp and Happenstance : Pageantry: Spectators cheer traditional Christmas parade in Hollywood while the tortillas fly at Pasadena’s wacky Doo Dah event.
Up to 1 million spectators cheered a cavalcade of marching bands and waving celebrities at the 61st annual Hollywood Christmas Parade on Sunday night, but the day belonged to the irreverent who doo-dahed at another wacky annual sendup of the staid and venerable Rose Parade in Pasadena.
At the Hollywood parade, a crowd favorite was Oscar De La Hoya, East Los Angeles’ 1992 Olympic boxing gold medalist who recently made his professional debut with a victory.
And in Pasadena, despite recent city ordinances forbidding the traditional, good-natured tossing of tortillas at participants in the 17th Occasional Doo Dah Parade, tortillas rained down all along the one-mile parade route through Pasadena’s Old Town.
The 3.2-mile Hollywood parade route was lined by a tightly packed cheering crowd that police estimated at between 750,000 and 1 million, thousands of whom trained cameras on the smiling, waving celebrities perched in convertibles. Fourteen marching bands and 18 motorized floats traveled along Sunset Boulevard, Highland Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard.
Wrapped in a pink ski jacket against the slightly chilly night air, Rosemarie Dement, 6, stood atop an ice chest and craned her neck to look at the passing spectacle.
“Hooray!†the girl shouted as the floats began down Sunset Boulevard about 6 p.m.
Like many other parade-goers, Rosemarie arrived with her mother, Kathy Dement, 30, hours before the official starting time. They drove from Torrance at 3 p.m. to get a choice street-side spot near the traditional beginning of the parade at Sunset and Van Ness Avenue.
Long before Santa wrapped up the two-hour event with his climactic appearance, celebrities such as Tony Danza, Morgan Brittany, Phyllis Diller and David Hasselhoff made the event a stargazing heaven for people such as Moreno Valley residents Dina Rodriguez and Robin Currivean.
As they have for the last four years, they brought their camera, extra rolls of film and a portable television to ensure that they did not miss any of the night’s action. As grand marshals Tom and Roseanne Arnold rolled past them in a convertible, Rodriguez said the comedian “looked very elegant†in her red evening gown, in contrast to her uncouth television persona.
In addition to the thousands who watched along the route, the parade was telecast to 154 cities nationwide and to more than 80 countries, according to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which produces the event.
Choice spots along the route disappeared quickly, prompting some latecomers to resort to innovative ways of getting a good view.
Tom Friedman and Hank Elenga perched their children on a board held aloft by a pair of 5-foot aluminum ladders on Sunset Boulevard.
“It was a lot of trouble getting into the car,†Friedman said as his daughter Maia, 6, and her friend Remty Elenga, 5, took in the band music and color of the parade.
Police said the event was largely trouble free. One man who sprinted into the street trying to collect autographs from celebrities was arrested after repeated warnings, Sgt. Brian Galbraith said. A second man was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving near the parade route. Neither was identified.
There were no reports of injuries, police said.
Two cars carrying celebrities and two floats broke down during the parade and had to be towed, said Bill Abell, a service patrol officer with the Automobile Club of Southern California.
“The horses don’t give us a problem, but the cars will overheat,†Abell said.
In Pasadena, the tortillas whizzed like corn Frisbees past the faces of the crowd-pleasing West Hollywood Cheerleaders, a contingent of mini-skirted, hairy-legged men doing a choreographed rah-rah routine. They flapped around the feet of speed skaters as they acted out a madcap version of the Los Angeles riots.
When George Vidal, a stern-faced Pasadena police officer, confiscated a bag of them from a parade-goer and then turned his back, a flying flotilla of tortillas sailed at him from the booing crowd.
“I think this is what you call police abuse,†said Vidal with a smile he could not suppress. Then he trudged up Green Street with his partner, issuing “no-tortilla-tossing†warnings. Police later reported no arrests or trouble among the estimated 40,000 parade-goers.
The parade, with a record 125 entries, started from Pasadena Memorial Park and wound its way up Colorado Boulevard to the cheers of a crowd lined five deep along the sidewalks. Some had been waiting for three hours, fortified with picnic lunches and forbidden beer.
As usual, whatever care had been put into bringing off a smooth-running, glitch-free event was quickly overrun by the craziness of it all.
Passersby freely joined in the procession and at some points a block of empty space--littered with tortilla fragments--separated one straggling entry from the next.
President-elect Bill Clinton, who had just left Pasadena a few hours before, missed seeing Doo Dah look-alikes sporting his trademark silver hair and kissing babies, as well as a portable toilet labeled “Arkansas White House.â€
Then there were the rather humorless advocates of various political causes striding along with un-doo-dah-like seriousness.
No matter. The fun was what the crowd came for, and it got its share.
Judging from the cheers and the scores flashed along the way by at least three sets of “unofficial parade judges,†a favorite was the Manhattan Beach group of speed skaters that spoofed the riots.
The group pushed along a wheeled building that represented “Kim’s Liquor Store,†a “Lootco†department store and a doughnut shop. At intervals, the rolling set would stop and skating “looters†would “set fire†to the structure and ransack it, while a skater dressed as a police officer stood by nonchalantly munching a doughnut.
After a while, men dressed as National Guardsmen moved in on skates to save the day.
Also popular were the New Supremes, a group of Orange County women and one “token†man dressed as U.S. Supreme Court justices, and carrying little pink hammers for gavels. They danced to the tune of Aretha Franklin’s anthem “Respect.â€
In a jab at the fiscally plagued Los Angeles Unified School District, a group of employees who called themselves “Twisted Sister Act†dressed up like nuns and prayed their way through the parade, because, one of them said, “we had to take a vow of poverty with all the cutbacks.â€
There was also “The World’s Largest Hairball,†a three-foot-high wad of variously colored cut hair assembled by employees of a Supercuts shop.
It drew a collective ugh from the crowd along the route.
Lee reported from Hollywood and Ford from Pasadena. Staff writer Eric Young contributed to this story.
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