A day to fool around in Occidental

Gary Avreim of Sebastopol does his best to blend in at the 2011 Occidental Fools Parade in downtown Occidental. (Kent Porter / Press Democrat)

There was the Walking Hot Tub, a retro ’70s-style redwood spa made of cardboard and filled with happy fools in swimsuits, soaking in the good life.

Then there was the Flock of Fools, a giant bird’s nest commune pulled on a piano dolly and occupied by a dodo, a flamingo and a pelican, who at the end of the parade laid giant eggs filled with treats for the kids.

And who could forget the Lampshade Brigade marching and singing that detestable earworm, “You Light Up My Life?”

The Occidental Fools Day Parade, pushing off at 1 p.m. Sunday April 1st, is all about being silly. The joke’s not on you. Leave your cranky pants at home and come wearing your wacky hat. Just be prepared to discard your dignity and play the fool, whether you join the rag-tag parade of funsters or hoot and holler from the sidelines.

View a slideshow of past years’ Fools Day Parades

“The April Fool’s Parade is not about pranking people. It’s about bringing forth that place of inner foolishness,” declares organizer Kate Price in all sincerity.

Dan Bosch, a landscape contractor who heads up the Hubbub Club grass roots guerrilla band, a parade mainstay, said it’s kind of a mean-free zone.

“It’s much more about being supportive of each other’s whimsy and differentness … pranking can take on a harder edge,” Bosch said of the modern April Fool’s Day tradition of pulling one over on targeted victims.

That doesn’t mean you won’t be fooled. Steve Fowler, president of the board of the sponsoring Occidental Center for the Arts, used to rent a police uniform and stand at the corner of Coleman Valley Road and Bohemian Highway after the parade had gone by, misdirecting traffic into nearby parking lots and side streets.

“It was safe to send them up the streets of Occidental, which don’t go anywhere,” said Fowler, now retired from the fake one-man once-a-year police force. “They’d just make a circuit and get back where they started. Occidental only has like four streets.”

Price, lamenting that she wasn’t getting to know many people in town, dreamed up the Fool’s Parade eight years ago as a way of drawing all the creative Bohemians — the artists, writers, musicians and more — out from the woods and down into town at the same time.

“I’m a pretty extroverted person. I’ve always been a performer and was a professional clown at one point in my twenties,” she said. “I was active in community theater through junior high and high school.” Now she juggles two careers — doing office work for an integrated medicine clinic and performing and recording odd ethnic instruments like the harmonium and the Swedish hummel (a cousin to the dulcimer).

Price was unwittingly reviving a variation of Occidental’s old “Clown Day,” a time-out for goofiness started several decades ago by professional clown Ramon Sender Barayon.

“In those days, the format was, if you were caught not smiling you could be given a ticket,” said Fowler, “and then had to go before a judge to explain yourself. If somebody could get you to grin, then you’d be released.”

The parade seems to relentlessly defy any efforts at organization. But then, that would be unclear on the concept.

“Over the years I’ve encouraged people to pre-register so I have some semblance of who is going to show up, but it’s like herding housecats,” Price conceded. “Fools don’t RSVP. They show up if they feel like it and don’t know until they wake up in the morning if they feel like it.”

It’s always a surprise to see what absurdities materialize for the parade, which gathers around noon at the community center and by 1 p.m. starts marching up one side of the main drag and then back down the other side. It ends up at the Occidental Center for the Arts for a small celebration and more entertainment. Arrive on time. Downtown is only three blocks long, so the spectacle is over within a half hour.

This year, Price and her friends are putting together a Mop and Flow Drill Team.

“It’s still in creation,” she explained. “But it will be some coordinated drill-team type of thing with the women alternately mopping and blowing bubbles.”

One of her favorite entries, she allowed, was the Hokey Pokey Polka Dots, a team dressed in polka dots that performed the Hokey Pokey in the street, drawing scores of onlookers into the dance. Oh, and then there was the umbrella ballet corps and the group of middle-aged women who made up the rear of the parade wearing plastic bottoms on their backsides.

Regulars are the lamas in tutus and the Lunapiller, a kinetic sculpture made for Burning Man decorated like a mini-train with a rotating Mount Rushmore of fool’s heads that takes kids for rides.

Fowler’s favorite part is the ceremonial crowning of the King and Queen of Fools. Contenders have to compete for the crown by entering a bright red porta-potty on a trailer — carefully cleaned out ahead of time of course. Their challenge is to pull the royal plunger out of a bucket of muck. Sort of a fool’s variation of the Arthurian legend.

“In literature the fool is the wise one who has the king’s ear,” Price declared. “With all the creativity in the Occidental area, it just seemed like this is the right image to bring people together.”

That and the practical fact that it’s an otherwise festival-free weekend. No competition. It’s all good.

For more information, visit occidentalcenterforthearts.org.

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com or 521-5204.

Occidental Fools Parade 2010

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Jessica Barrilleaux, right, with Canela and Kalima Rose, left, with Santana during the annual Fool's Parade in Occidental, April 3, 2010. Crista Jeremiason / The Press Democrat