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 child might throw a shoe at a George W. Bush ringer under a tropical
December sky. ("We've never even had rain," Terry says. "God obviously loves us
big time.") But organizers of the Strut this year say they have handled enough
of the city's red tape to fashion a sticky bureaucratic noose. Not exactly good
vibes.
For starters, Terry barely raised enough money. "The city kept us on edge,"
he says. "I was preparing a press release to announce [the parade] wasn't happening." The
organizers of the event, which costs $28,000 to host -- up from
$3,000 in the Eighties - now have to "jump through more hoops" than ever, he
says.
art" contemplating whether next year is worth the hassle. "How can we keep [the
Strut] the way it is, if it costs so much money?" he says. "I don't know if we
can depend on the city anymore."
The $28,000 includes sanitary crews, barricades,
insurance and $10,000 for extra police (Or, as Terry puts it, cops
"hanging out, flirting with pretty girls.") All of this for a four-block, two
hour-long parade in arguably one of
could mean a couple things, he says. Either the founders will need
to start signing on commercial parade sponsors (potential corporate buzz kill?) or they may relocate to a park to skirt the rules. It's still up in the air.
Tom Falco, editor of the community blog Coconut Grove
Grapevine, says Grovites are no strangers to strict regulations and pesky bureaucrats. So at the parade, that's what he'll satirize. "I'm going as a zoning official and I'll be
handing out tickets," he says. "For breathing, you'll get a $2,000 fine."
