Riotous Humor : Doo Dah Parade: Nothing is sacred when a group of skaters spoofs the police, looters and the National Guard. They hope spectators agree that the serious subject merits laughter.
Just for a moment, picture this: looters removing cases of merchandise and liquor from a mock store as National Guard troops leap out of jeeps in pursuit. A bored policewoman watches from a nearby squad car, eating doughnuts.
Now picture them all on roller skates--a portrait of urban unrest, California style.
If laughter is the best medicine, then a South Bay roller-skating club believes it has the perfect cure for riot-weary Los Angeles residents with its entry in Sunday’s Doo Dah Parade in Pasadena: a Keystone Kops-style skit spoofing the April riots.
The Doo Dah, now in its 17th year, is a takeoff on the more staid Tournament of Roses Parade, and is famous for entries that border on the bizarre. However, the Manhattan Beach-based Southern California Speed Skaters hope to be the most outrageous of at least three separate “riot acts” expected in this year’s parade.
Club organizer Steve Pestano, a 40-year-old part-time real estate developer from Manhattan Beach, describes the entry as consistent with the parade’s emphasis on “current events.”
“America has a long history of laughing at itself on serious subjects. It’s how we release our tensions and get on with our lives,” Pestano said.
“It takes a lot of guts to pull off (our skit) in front of 50,000 people who may feel kind of funny laughing at something like this,” he added. “But we try to put a lot of humor into it . . . and Americans love a chase scene. Once the crowd sees that it’s just humor, it’s OK, especially since we’re going to have a cross-section of ethnic people in the parade. It’s not like we’ve got a bunch of blond-haired, blue-eyed people doing this.”
The club drew rave reviews from spectators last year with a similar political hot potato: a spoof on the Rodney King incident, also on skates.
Last year’s Rodney King impersonator, 47-year-old Hermosa Beach resident Bill Brewster (in real life a manager with Westin Hotels), will be one of several “looters” who will skate in and out of a 10-foot-long, 4-foot-wide and 7-foot-high wheeled “float” designed to look like a strip shopping center. Other club members Sonny Portacio, a 28-year-old Tarzana elementary schoolteacher, and Jaime Lozano, 33, a wholesale food salesman from Hawthorne, will help carry some of the “loot”--empty cartons that once held television sets, videocassette recorders and liquor.
The looters will be pursued by skating National Guard troops, among them Redondo Beach hairstylist Gina Larsen, 31, Manhattan Beach carpenter Don Iven, 37, aerospace researcher John Cobb, 53, and IBM service representative Stan Clark, 46, both of Hermosa Beach. Besides their camouflage fatigues, toy machine guns and plastic riot batons, the troops will have camouflage “jeeps” constructed of painted plastic plumbing pipe and fabric, which the skaters carry the length of the parade route.
Still other skaters will occupy a “looter wagon” decorated with pompon fringe and fuzzy dice. Manhattan Beach resident Wendy Yonofsky, 30, normally an intensive-care nurse, becomes a doughnut-munching police officer in her “squad car” complete with working siren.
To vary the action, the looters may turn around and chase their pursuers, or pop open cans of beer from the “looted” cases and share them with the troops; or try to steal policewoman Yonofsky’s doughnuts. As in previous years, the script continues to be revised up to the last minute as club members think up additional stunts and sight gags.
If this year’s parade is typical, they can expect to be pelted with guacamole- or salsa-coated tortillas from spectators along the route, who also cheer and boo the paraders, often at the same time. Since most of the skaters are also competitive amateur racers on their in-line skates, generally known as Rollerblades, their mobility adds another dimension to the already wild antics.
Moreover, their efforts to top each previous year’s exhibit have resulted in ever more elaborate props, requiring hundreds of dollars’ worth of materials and hundreds of hours of labor.
Club members predict most people will accept the skit in the spirit of the parade.
“It’s just a spoof, so I don’t really feel funny about (doing) it,” Lozano said. “It’s nothing to take seriously. My girlfriend doesn’t like it, and she doesn’t want me to be in it. But in all the parades, we go out there to have fun. And we’ll be the best.”
“People will be out there to have a good time, and it’ll be like the rest of the parade--pretty far out--but it’ll be in good taste,” said Brewster, who claimed that even police officers observing last year’s parade didn’t seem terribly offended by the King skit.
“Of course, they didn’t applaud either,” he said laughing.
