As was the case last year, I’m sending EMUTalk on a summer vacation, one that more or less corresponds to my own summer “break” from that pesky professor job, which isn’t a complete and total vacation but definitely a work slow-down interrupted with some travel here and there. You get the idea. If something really interesting happens, I’ll go ahead and post about it, and I might spend some time here and there trying to tweak with/mess with the layout and functions of the site. But other than that, don’t expect much here until early August.
But before I go, I had to post briefly about the annual July 4 parade through Ypsilanti.
In most ways, the parade was pretty much the same as it ever was: floats mixing the metaphors of patriotism and religion, a couple of area high school bands, some various local groups kind of marching/kind of wandering down the street, a very old John Dingell riding and waving, etc.
What made it a little more weird this time was it went down Michigan Avenue instead of the usual route on Cross, which is messed up (especially in Depot Town) because of construction. Now, I’ve seen this basic parade a lot– probably 10 times now– and it always seems to suffer from a lack of decent spacing between parade participants. It’s common to see a float, a group walking and waving flags, and some kind of antique car all scrunched up next to each other only to be followed by a five minute break in the action.
But the median strip in Michigan Avenue threw things for an additional confusing loop. The parade started down one side, and then it shifted to the other side of the median. And then it shifted back, and then shifted back. At one point, the parade was going down both sides of the street at the same time, a sort of parade racing with itself. My wife and son and I tried crossing the street a couple of times to see the shifts, but we eventually gave up on that. It turns out sitting in the middle of the street with a swivel chair would have afforded the best view.
The other weird thing was that Susan Martin was marching in it. Not that it’s weird that the president of EMU would be in a parade, but just the way she was in it seemed kind of strange to me. First off, she was alone– no other suits, no board members, no cheerleaders or whatever, no nothing, just her. Second, she was kind of stuck in-between groups, some group of people waving flags and some political candidate group on the other side. So because of that, if you didn’t know better, you’d wonder why a woman wearing an EMU t-shirt and waving at the crowd was in the parade at all.
I mean, I give her props for being in the parade– I think she was the only one there representing EMU in any fashion– but I would think that she could have convinced a couple other people to go with her. Maybe next year, someone in marketing or communication could throw it out there for EMU folks to march along, pass out some flyers, stuff like that?
