They Never Promised Him a Rose Garden
In one of the classic murder mysteries, it turns out to be the judge who done it. The author obviously played on the surprise generated by the fact that judges are presumed to be innocent.
Judges may assign guilt and innocence right and left, but up there on the bench they are understood to be themselves blameless and without sin. Not true, of course, and, as I should have realized before, there is a certain delight being able to sit in judgment on a judge.
Judging the Miss America contest sounds like heaven to any healthy male, until he realizes that he has found a sure-fire way to make dozens of gorgeous women angry at him with a flick of the pencil, and in the process has convinced millions of equally healthy males that they could have chosen better than he did.
When I agreed to be one of the three judges of this year’s centennial Tournament of Roses parade, it did not occur to me that we could be second-guessed by half a million on-the-spot witnesses and an additional 300 million or so elsewhere on the globe.
But one newspaper, after canvassing a handful of parade-watchers, quickly concluded that we and they must have been watching different parades. The fact that the curb-side watchers could not agree among themselves on the worst mistakes the judges had made was some slight consolation.
What also hadn’t occurred to me was what hard work judging 55 flower-draped floats was going to be. The Tournament of Roses is fiendishly well-organized, with a century’s worth of experience codified into do’s and don’ts, as the recent series in The Times indicated. The tournament could probably give organizational lessons to Ma Bell, IBM and the Masons.
Our hosts gathered us up at 6 a.m. on Saturday for a 12-hour tour of the construction sites, which stretch from Glendale to Downey and which were damp and chilly last weekend. We took a second look Sunday on another 12-hour day, again beginning at 6 a.m., noting the progress as the floats flexed their animated muscles and thickened with blooms.
We’d hardly finished when we were picked up again at 2:30 Monday morning for a final look at the floats, now in their parade positions in the eerie, floodlighted darkness along Orange Grove Avenue.
Six hours later, when the parade passed our sleepless eyes, we three judges winced a couple of times (at least) for the floats we wished we could have honored.
You’d think with 18 trophies to be spread among 55 floats you’d surely be able to salute all the deserving entries. But like any art form--and designing floral-decorated floats is an art form, however you rank it with sculpture and needlepoint--this kind of design does not stand pat; it progresses. There was a lot of good work to choose from.
Computers, advanced hydraulics and miniaturized motors are now part of the float vocabulary. The Casablanca Fan Co. float (out of competition because of its immense size), with skiers doing midair loops, is a very far cry from the flower-covered carriages of the first parade.
Yet, technologies aside, the shaping hand of the designing artist is still what matters, and the best floats, so we concluded, were not necessarily large or costly (although they could be both) but were simply very beautiful. The parade theme, “Celebration 100,” was broadly interpreted and one of the most striking floats celebrated the whale and other endangered sea species.
The surprise, I think, was how much of its originating impulse the Rose Parade still retains. Despite the fact that the tournament has become a very big (if nonprofit) business and that the grandest floats represent corporate investments of $100,000 easily, there is no substitute for the thousands of hours of volunteer labor. (The volunteers at the commercial firms are paid but are often earning money for their churches, schools and charities.)
There are still the modest self-built entries from the surrounding cities like Burbank, Sierra Madre and La Canada Flintridge, and it was a special pleasure to be able to honor one of those floats for its spritely wit.
The danger to the parade, as to many aspects of American life, is the distending, distorting pressure of commercialism and television.
The television coverage began with a 15-minute mini-revue before the grandstand that struck me as television at its variety-show dreariest, awkward, corny dialogue and all, despite the fact that the attractive young singers and dancers were locals--from Cypress College. It wasn’t Pasadena and it wasn’t the Rose Parade, and while some sort of kick off moment isn’t a bad idea, another year it ought not to suggest “Follies” on an off night.
The parade reprises some of the elements in American life now deemed to be in short supply: community spirit, collaborative effort, the beauty of natural things (when they have not been completely chopped, ground and reworked for purposes of illustration) and a sense of innocence and good humor, silly as the jokes sometimes are.
At their best, the floats are worth a fervent “gee whiz!” and there are not as many honest “gee whizzes” around as there might be.
My fellow judges, Pasadena artist Helen Pashgian and C. Wade Roberts, chief horticulturist at the Sherman Gardens and Library in Corona del Mar, have doubtless been reminded, as I have, of the biblical injunction “judge not, lest you be judged.” We should probably have thought of that sooner, but then we would have missed a remarkable experience.
