"Aging hippies... a blessing and a curse," Celery said. Boy, they really came out of the woodwork for this one. It was nice, honestly, to see that they hadn't all sold out or become embittered. The May Day Parade was a showcase of hippie values, with barefoot marchers, flowers, birds, and peace and love all around.

The floats were giant and whimsical, appealing to adults and children alike. There was a giant metal pig that ate little children and pooped out missles. There was a rolling forest, a Family Tree, and at the conclusion the Sun rowed across a lake. The only part of it that wasn't perfect was their weird designation of the free speech section.

I guess they were trying to solve the problem of who could be in the parade by opening it up to everyone but setting them aside. It was just odd that they had a huge banner that said, "END OF PARADE," and then another that said, "FREE SPEECH SECTION". Not that there were any views in the section that the hippies would have neccessarily objected to. There were water-birth advocates, born at homers, community radio, anti-deportation advocates, witches, pagans, and heathens, gender blurrers and aztec dancers.

Then came the Scallywags, mostly on tallbikes. But they had one bike that just blew the crowd away. It was a small BMX bike with two front brakes. Running from the rear axle up over the rider and to the head tube was a circular bar with rubber treads, making the whole bike a wheel. The rider would speed up, slam on the brakes, and FLIP! He'd land on his wheels, keep on riding and the crowd would go absolutely nuts.

It was by far the main attraction of the day. The kiddies screaming, "Do it again! Do it again!" The sound of two hundred people sucking in their breath as he sped up. Then the click-BAM! of his flip and screaming, screaming and cheering as he circled back by the crowd to smack some high fives with the kiddies. Even though I'd seen the bike work back at the house, I found myself screaming like a teenage Beatles fan. As an encore he would usually do two flips in a row.

After the parade everyone hung out in Powderhorn Park, but it was getting drizzly. The Black Label tradition was to sit on the hill and get trashed, but I guess the weather had people itching to go inside somewhere and get trashed.

Oh yeah- the night before I was taken on a tour of some of the choice local dumpsters. We hit a bakery, a juicemaker, and then they took me to a fortune cookie factory! As I jumped into a dumpster full of fortune cookies, I couldn't help but feel like Short Round, in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, as he walked down that hallway full of bugs. Remember that scene? "Feels like I step on fortune cookies!" There were two types in there, Scripture Cookies and the usual. I imagined someone sitting and cutting up a bible line by line for the former. I grabbed a bag of the latter to send back home.

They say that somewhere around here there's a magnetic poetry dumpster.