Breathing, shooting and snorting fire, rolling, dancing and marching, Star Wars characters, deranged motor contraptions and, of course, the Mad Hatter and his tea partiers will hit the streets Saturday in what is arguably Vallejo’s signature event.
Berkeley had its How Berkeley Can You Be parade, San Francisco has the Pride Parade and Vallejo has the Mad Hatter Parade, now in its 15th year.
The event opens with a festival with all kinds of amusements, including a holiday market, a food court and unicorns, in the Unity Plaza area downtown at 2 p.m. The parade begins at 4:30 p.m., departing from Sacramento and Georgia streets and ending behind the JFK Library for a tree-lighting ceremony at 6 p.m.
This year, Vallejo Mayor Andrea Sorce, Grand Marshal Freddie Stone of Sly and the Family Stone and Community Grand Marshal Amanda Williams will do the countdown to the lighting of the 50-foot-tall tree with its 3,000-plus lights. Williams is a Vallejo heroine who saved a man’s life, intervening unarmed in a knife fight in August.
Longtime Vallejo residents show up for the event rain or shine, but happily, rain is not predicted for Saturday. Aficionados look forward to watching the Mad Hatter lead the parade along with other Alice in Wonderland characters, all six or seven feet tall.
The degree of whimsy in the parade is hard to overstate, given such phenomena as the Star Wars storm troopers led by Darth Vader, the Grinch Dance and the Burning Man steampunk vehicles. The parade also includes Santa Claus, maritime cadets in their blues, dancing groups of children ballerinas, hip-hop performers, a vintage dump truck from Recology, a Vallejo Fire Department fire engine and local cultural dance groups – more common elements of city holiday parades.
“It’s like the Nutcracker Suite,” said Mad Hatter organizer Frank Malifrando, referring to the classic Christmas ballet. “You have standard versions and then you have variations. It’s the same with holiday parades.
“They all have certain elements, like the celebrity who does the tree lighting, and then there are individual elements,” Malifrando said.
Speaking of individual elements, the accompanying festival in Unity Park offers fire dancers, an inflatable unicorn park, a holiday market with wreaths, books, pottery and crafts, rides, food trucks and a beer and wine pub in front of the JFK Library.
Also, the event feeds right into a lighted boat parade held by the Vallejo Yacht Club on the waterfront at 6:30 p.m., an element definitely unique to Vallejo.
The organizer came up with the idea based on a boyhood trip to Disneyland with his mother. He noted that thousands of people attend the event, both from the immediate vicinity and as far away as Sacramento and San Jose.
“One lady told me, ‘I was 12 years old when I first went, and now I’m 25 and I have kids and we go together,” said Malifrando, who puts his own money into the event and clearly considers comments like this payment enough.
Of course, one of the biggest draws of the event is the Burning Man mutant vehicles, or what Shannon O’Hare, master of one such fleet, calls “my armada.”
O’Hare runs Vallejo’s Obtainium Works with his wife Kathy, who has served as the event’s mistress of ceremonies in the past and is handling logistics for all the art cars, including those not owned by the O’Hares, this year. Obtainium Works is a group of tinkerers and artists who create art cars and other contraptions.
One of the cars in the Obtainium Works armada, the “cat of many colors,” seemingly having outlived its nine lives, has been miraculously resurrected and will be flashing a kaleidoscope of hues, he said.
Attendees may recall O’Hare as His Highness, the King of Hearts. For the last six years, he has walked on stilts in the parade in this guise. O’Hare also does a mind-boggling amount of work behind the scenes to get the 12 cars to the parade.
“They all have to be trailered to and from the staging area and from the staging area into the parade,” he said. O’Hare has to get the cars on the trailers, drive the trailers to the parade staging area, unload them and then do it all over again in reverse order after the parade.
The vehicles include Santa’s Rocket Sled, a motorized teapot, a pickle, a cyclotron and a snake car. O’Hare said he and his wife have no corporate sponsorships or grants.
“Kathy and I donate our time, our material, our lab, our labor and whatever we have to make this happen,” he said. “We get donations from people who love the parade. Just yesterday I got $200 from a gentleman who walked up and gave me an envelope and said, ‘This is the best I can do this year.’ These are not people who have a lot of money.”
Nonetheless, Vallejo has come up with one of the most spectacular holiday parades in the Bay Area, if not the state.
In a phrase that also seemed uniquely Vallejo, O’Hare said, “We run on goodwill and fumes.”