People often ask what the benefits are to joining an alley and I would say one of the benefits is being able to do parades with a group of clowns. I’m sure there are many WCA members who do a parade as an individual clown but the impact of a group of clowns doing something coordinated as they move down the street is just awesome. It’s bigger, and funnier, and makes much more impact on the watching crowd.

My local alley always enjoyed preparing parade skits to do as we moved down the street. One of my favorites was called The Garbage Can, and it consisted of a large 30 gallon metal trash can on a wheeled platform being pushed down the street by one of our tramp clowns. Taped around the inside of the can at 2-3” intervals were “whistling chaser” firecrackers. On the back of our parade float or inside the hatchback of our parade car were water fire extinguishers. We filled these with water and aired them up at the gas station prior to the parade. The tramp clown would push the can down the center of the street, then take a broom and dust pan and move away from the can to pick up some trash. Another clown would light one of the firecrackers which would smoke and whistle and finally pop. The tramp would notice the smoke, begin to yell “fire, fire” and other clowns would grab the fire extinguishers and wildly spray water everywhere but on the fire. Other clowns would be running around yelling “fire, fire”.   After the firecracker popped and went out, all would return to normal, put the fire extinguishers away, and the tramp clown would check out his trash can and begin to push it on further down the street.

Another one of my favorite parade skits was called The Chicken Hunter. The 3 main clowns walked in a straight line down the center of the street, about 15 feet apart. The first clown carried a large fishing net, the second clown was dressed like a hunter and carried a shotgun with blanks and had a bag on his shoulder that said “chicken bag” but it had no bottom in the bag so the chicken put in would just fall through and out. The third clown carried a soft rubber chicken. All the other clowns would be calling “here chicken, here chicken” and looking around for a chicken. About once every block in the parade, the 3^rd clown would yell “There’s a chicken” and he’d throw the rolled up rubber chicken up into the air over the head of clown 2, aiming for the net of clown 1. Clown 2 would shoot it in mid-air, clown 1 would catch it in the large net. Then clown 1 would pass the chicken to clown 2, who would put it in the bag. It would fall through as they all kept walking and clown 3 would pick up the chicken so the skit was ready to do it again in the next block.

The chaos and yelling and running around as a large group of clowns did either of these skits were so much fun. We always had great crowd enthusiasm, lots of clapping when we finished the skit, and always took home a trophy for our parade unit.

Our alley is now over 30 years old. Today we use a trailer rather than have our older members walk, but many in the group still walk and do parade skits, and now we also incorporate the parade theme in some actions for our trailer. We have had people fishing over the sides, catching joke items and funny props. We have had everyone flying a kite on a wire from the trailer. We have had bubbles galore coming from the trailer.

It’s always fun to try to come up with a skit or bit around the theme of the parades. The 4^th of July is always a patriotic theme but many parades in our area are more of the festival variety and those themes change from year to year.