Medieval March : Ventura: Thousands turn out for the County Fair Parade. Participants from Brownies to beauty queens embrace the Camelot theme.

Ken Cummings didn’t have to leave home to enjoy Saturday’s Ventura County Fair Parade. It came to him.

From his front yard, Cummings could see it all: marching bands, drill teams, beauty queens in convertibles, cowboys on horseback and fairy princesses dressed up for the fair’s Camelot theme.

The problem was, it came all at once.

Cummings lives across from the parade’s staging ground at Ventura High School, which provided him with unique opportunities early Saturday--such as the chance to hear five high school bands warming up at the same time.

“I’m usually up early anyway, so it doesn’t bother me,” Cummings said, lounging in a lawn chair as a cacophony of drums, flutes, trumpets, and trombones rose in the background.

“Parking, that’s the only problem,” said Cummings, who had to leave his car a block away when he returned home from breakfast. “Other than that, it’s no nuisance.”

Such good humor was the prevailing sentiment as the county’s biggest parade of the year marched down Main Street, to the cheers of thousands of onlookers. But like Cummings, some participants had minor crises to resolve.

Melissa Scott, for example, noticed a few problems as she led members of the Newbury Park High School color guard through a routine. “They just learned it last night,” Scott explained. And with 40 flag-waving girls--almost twice the size of a typical color guard--”it’s harder to synchronize,” she said.

As his Santa Paula High School band practiced the “Miss Liberty March” nearby, Ed Roina said he felt lucky just to have assembled an entry for the fair’s parade.

“You can’t get a full band during the summer,” Roina said. “You just do what you can.”

Roina should know. He has conducted the Santa Paula band for 43 years and has entered it in the fair parade every year since 1952. Like many longtime parade participants, he said he liked it better when the fair was held in October.

“The conductor could put his best players in,” Roina said. But if he lacked 76 trombones for the big parade, the 40 musicians he put together Saturday offered “good balance,” Roina said. “And we have an outstanding trombone and trumpet section.”

Even the fair queen, Ashley Basquin, 17, had little problems bugging her.

“Halfway here, I started finding ants in my dress,” Ashley said. “I must have stood on an ant hill.”

In a royal runaround, she had to rush back to her home in Moorpark and change gowns, arriving in Ventura less than an hour before parade time.

It was an inauspicious start to a long day for Ashley. After waving to parade spectators for 1.6 miles, she was scheduled to hand out trophies and ribbons to winning entries. Then came the fair’s diaper derby, followed by the floriculture awards, followed by dinner with fair officials. Topping off the queen’s schedule was an evening of midget-car racing.

“I love it,” Ashley said, before stepping into an open-topped red Thunderbird to greet her subjects.

Not far away, another queen was practicing her cupped-palm waving technique. “This is the figure-eight wave,” said Melissa Fair Drouillard, dressed as Queen Guenevere in keeping with the Camelot theme.

With King Arthur and Merlin at her side, Drouillard was seated at the back of a float touting Ventura’s St. Patrick’s Day. “It’s fun to see the little children,” she said. “They think you stepped out of a fairy tale book.”

The parade, organized by members of the Ventura Elks lodge, started precisely at 10 a.m. and the last entry left the high school about noon. Among the first-time participants was a group of Brownies and Junior Girl Scouts from St. Anthony’s School in Oxnard.

“We applied a few months ago,” said Maureen Gomez, one of the parents accompanying the 20-member group. She said it was a way for the future Girl Scouts to get a much-coveted patch for their uniforms.

The girls, ages 5 through 11, dressed up in medieval costumes. “I’m going to be a princess,” said Gomez’s daughter, Diana.

As it turned out, Diana and her friends took first place in the parade’s “miscellaneous-novelty” category.

“What a blast!” said Margaret Schettler, another St. Anthony’s parent, when she learned of the girls’ triumph. “They were so excited to be in that parade. They were laughing and singing the whole way.”

FAIR SCHEDULE: B4