When Glenn Terry started King Mango Strut to
protest getting snubbed from the Orange Bowl parade in 1981, it was an easy place to
poke fun at politics and society. The old hippie and his band of misfits
slapped two cardboard boxes at the ends of a four-block stretch with signs
reading: "Street closed for parade." And it was that simple.
Lately, though, The Man has been getting Terry down.
Sure, the Coconut Grove parade is still as irreverent as ever. It's the type of
place an (aging) flower
Besides going to the DMV, doing taxes is the part of being a grownup that Riptide hates most. So we usually wouldn't be thinking about it this early, but it seems some good folks in Coconut Grove have an extra-special reason to hate April 15 this year. They're paying more taxes on their homes than ever, thanks to too-high housing assessments -- a result of mortgage fraud in past years.
Yesterday, Tom Dixon -- who served on the Miami-Dade Mortgage Fraud Task Force -- told us one more way old f
"Sarah Palin" at King Mango Strut.​For the last two decades, the brilliant lunatics who run the King Mango Strut parade have been a happy little family. Their meetings -- which were speckled with old hippie types -- felt more like a showcase of standup comedy than a community planning board. Strutters sometimes had to hoop-jump for the city, but they never let The Man bring them down too far.
Now the family is going through an awkward divorce. Founder Glenn Terry and Treasurer Antoinett
Peacock Park​Riptide has a question for all of those crazy Coconut Grovites. In the past year, what spectacular little spit of land has been used as the dumping ground for a large dead goat, the home of a five-foot-long saltwater crocodile, and a bum fort turned junkyard. The answer: the mangroves around Peacock Park.In the 1970s, the coastline forest didn't exist. Miami Herald Neighbors columnist Glenn Terry tells Riptide: "When I arrived, the shores of Peacock Park looked like the
