A Dyed-in-the-Wool City Boy Invokes the Spirit of Doo Dah

There’s a swell line in “Romeo and Juliet” about the “the sweetest honey” being “loathsome in its own deliciousness.” I learned the truth of that the hard way, from a surfeit of Girl Scout cookies at a tender age. It has been a useful assessment for many things since, chief among them the Tournament of Roses parade: too much sweetness and light for me. I was, therefore, grateful to the Doo Dah Parade--a more or less going concern for these 20 years now--for providing a little salt, a little sauciness as a counterweight.

The first Doo Dah I saw had a rollicking anarchic quality, with people costumed like birth control devices do-si-doing down Colorado Boulevard. But over time, even anarchy acquires a sort of regimentation, and I suspect that the Doo Dah, which I have not seen since it got tasteful enough for television, has become as orderly, in its own spoofish way, as the Rose Parade.

But you have to wonder about the kind of guy who conceived it in the first place, and what he is doing now. As it turns out, he didn’t go far--just to Pomona, where he is at the head of another kind of parade, the one that believes in real cities with real downtowns for real people, and to that point, he lives in the converted photo lab of the onetime Pomona Progress-Bulletin newspaper office, and commutes to work by crossing the street.

Peter Apanel was hungry. It was February 1995; he was waiting for breakfast at one of those South Pasadena hangouts that makes the difference between a neighborhood and a mere ZIP Code. He picked up a newspaper and began reading his future: an account of a young man named Ed Tessier who was trying to restart the charming downtown heart of Pomona, one storefront at a time.

Apanel had just done his last Doo Dah and was at loose ends. Pasadena, his town for 20 years, was going to the pedigreed dogs; its old downtown had long since lost the vigorous balance of old and new, of the genuine and the precious, and passed into retail restoration Disneyland status--”a neighborhood,” says Apanel, “on steroids.” The singular little shops and services once run by men like Tony the engraver, whose clients included the Vatican, had been squeeze-played out by the monotonous chic of chain stores.

It would be a couple of years before he would hook up with Tessier and become the “designated worrier” for Tessier’s grand plan for downtown Pomona, but Apanel was already and always a city boy. In New Jersey, the Apanels lived “between the railroad tracks and a meatpacking plant, in a brownstone next door to the wall paperers’ union with its two-lane bowling alley.”

“Something about a city,” he muses, “is far more appealing to me than a forest. I hate to say this--not that I’m against the environment--but it’s fun walking through different cities.”

Pomona is almost a tabula rasa for trying out a human-sized city life, a city that malled out so long ago that it scarcely remembers its downtown. Tessier’s project has a full occupancy rate for its domestic/work buildings, but “the big revelation for me is that even under the best of circumstances . . . you have to give it time. You cannot just put the buildings there and have people show up and have a neighborhood. You can have a collection of people, but that’s not a neighborhood.”

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There is, believe it or not, a vital live wire connecting Apanel’s gospel of downtown and the genesis of the Doo Dah Parade.

He and some friends wanted to make the Rose Parade version of the scene in Fellini’s “Roma” that shows that city’s roadside human carnival. They’d do their version on New Year’s Eve, on Colorado Boulevard, the night before the parade. But in 1978, Jan. 1 fell on a Sunday, and the parade never went off on Sunday, and there went that idea. But what the heck, they all said as they sat in the neighborhood bar, we might as well do our own parade. And so Apanel became Doo Dah czar, and an institution of sorts was born.

Twenty years after it began--after stupefying successes and embarrassing foul-ups, after hostility from local merchants and disdain from the Tournament House, after the PR disaster of tortilla-throwing and crotchety baby boomers still peeved that it isn’t just the way it was the first time--the Doo Dah is an object lesson in what Apanel has learned about neighborhoods and their singularities.

The Doo Dah spawned imitators from the get-go, but it was misread as something it was not. It worked for Pasadena because it grew organically, the way a downtown would, out of a place and an idea and a community of people. It stumbled when it came to be seen as a movable feast by “party animals who thought from the media coverage that here’s a parade where anything goes”--a kind of one-size-fits-all, shopping-mall parade, indistinguishable from any other in place or style or attitude.

Not so, says the onetime Czar Peter. “We wanted to have a good time, but this was about the community, and you know in your own head where the limit is because you live there.”