Never fear. Due to the way the holidays fell this year, the "official" New Year holiday is tomorrow, January 2 since today, January 1, falls on a Sunday. Everything you were looking for happens tomorrow, not today, bucky, because tomorrow is most folks' official day off.**
Right, you may have missed yesterday's exciting Chick-fil-A Bowl game, because you were too busy partying. But you won't miss the Tournament of Roses Parade and game if you and your buds gather in front of that brand new 360-inch flat screen TV. Tomorrow. (Details below.)
Meanwhile, now that we have some time to relax, how about a little Rose Bowl history?
The first Tournament of Roses Parade was held on January 1, 1890. One hundred and twenty two years later, it will happen again tomorrow, January 2, 2012, just like we promised. The theme (and there is always one) of this year's parade will be "Just Imagine." (As in, "just imagine" how many people are torqued off that those much-anticipated Tournament of Roses events aren't on TV today.)
In the winter of 1890, members of Pasadena, California’s Valley Hunt Club were searching for a way to promote tourism to the West Coast. At one club meeting, Hunt Club member Professor Charles F. Holder announced, "In New York, people are buried in snow. Here our flowers are blooming and our oranges are about to bear. Let's hold a festival to tell the world about our paradise.
The Tournament of Roses Parade committee has authorized the protest which will occur after the floats have passed and local police sweep the route, but before the crowd is released from the bleacher seating. “The city and the Rose Parade organizers have been fully supportive,” said Daniel Niswander, who led an educational “summit” for the community on New Year’s Day at the progressive All Saints Church, another OTRP-sponsored event.
This doesn’t mean that anyone outside the people physically at the parade will see the march. Typically post-parade marchers never hit the airwaves, as the broadcasts cut off their productions once the floats pass. The fact that the giant Constitution, which activists are calling “the 44th float” (there are 43 Rose Parade floats this year) will be the first part of the OTRP event, this has led some organizers to hope they will break through. “If Middle America gets to see that, they will have a different image of the Occupy movement,” Niswander said. “But we’ll see – traditionally they cut it off.”
Others predicted that the sound and fury will signify little. Bonnie, a member of the local Occupy Pasadena chapter (which has not given their endorsement of the OTRP event), said that “the city is well-prepared” for such after-the-parade disruptions, typically made up of religious apocalyptic types or other protesters, and they know how to control them. By giving the Occupiers a fig leaf of access, organizers can have a successful parade without disruptions, and not alienate their corporate sponsors.
But the activists have been media savvy enough to garner a good deal of attention for the action, including notice from the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times. They also have a contingent of relatively well-known activists appearing, including antiwar Gold Star Mother Cindy Sheehan (appearing as the not-Grand Marshal), public banking advocate Ellen Brown, musician Michelle Shocked and three-time Congressional advocate Marcy Winograd. “The Occupy movement has done something the Democratic Party hasn’t been able to do, to shift the focus of the dialogue from deficits and taxes to wealth and inequality,” said Winograd, who now believes she can do more from the outside and through work on the local economy than through working from within the Democratic Party infrastructure.
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