Doo Dah Parade brings a cast of eclectic characters

Give us your bohemians, your barflies, your cross-dressing cheerleaders yearning to breathe free.

The Doo Dah Parade rolls through Pasadena once again on Saturday, uniting a colorful cast of characters for a semiannual street party that evolved from a 1977 barroom lark into a reluctant cultural institution.

“You know how everybody has that crazy uncle? Everyone’s a little crazy if they let themselves be, and more than anything else, Doo Dah is license to let yourself go,” says Tom Allard, who teaches theater and film production at Pasadena’s Polytechnic School.

On Doo Dah Day, Allard transforms into Howdy Krishna, drawling out his folksy mantra in a yellow robe, cowboy hat and Oklahoma Sooners T-shirt. Past parades have also featured an Afro-wigged Hairy Krishna group as well as actual Hare Krishna, who smiled blissfully while crowds along Colorado Boulevard pelted their shaved heads with tortillas — a sign of Doo Dah affection.

Perennial participants also include the hot-dog-launching BBQ & Hibachi Drill Team, Men of Leisure Synchronized Nap Team, a completely hairless Uncle Fester, scary clowns, the herb-sustained Count Smokula, a giant robotic cat, a motorized pastry brigade and dozens who march as The Bastard Sons of Lee Marvin.

The 35th Occasional Doo Dah Parade (it can happen more than once in a year or not at all) is the third to take place on the city’s east side, away from the bustling Old Pasadena shopping district where the parade was born and raised. Organizers say the move was necessary to attract new revelers and keep the tradition from becoming too traditional. As the parade aged, so have many of its hardcore enthusiasts — except perhaps Pasadena’s eternal house band Snotty Scotty & the Hankies, who have played every Doo Dah.

“Our ultimate fear was that we’d be marching, or rolling, around the senior center in 20 years. Now we’re getting a wide range of homespun entries who maybe didn’t feel comfortable in Old Pasadena because it was getting too stagey,” says parade Czar Tom Coston of the nonprofit Light Bringer Project, an arts education group that also produces the Pasadena Chalk Festival.

Though often billed as a lampoon of the Tournament of Roses Parade — Doo Dah has its own queens, grand marshals and other “unofficial” dignitaries — the parade isn’t entirely satirical or really even a parade at all, says Coston.

“It’s not supposed to be an entertainment event. It’s a creative happening,” he says.

This year’s happening starts at 11 a.m. at the corner of Colorado and Vinedo Avenue, in front of the Denny’s. Entrants then head two blocks west along Colorado to Altadena Drive, turn and head east to San Gabriel Boulevard, then start the route again to bring the parade full circle, so to speak.

Post-parade concerts and after-parties this year at The Colorado Bar, Poo-Bah Records, the American Legion and several other local businesses are signs that the parade is returning to its more homespun roots, says Corky Peterson, who owned the former Chromo’s Bar in Old Pasadena before redevelopment efforts changed the area into a retail juggernaut.

“Old Town has become just a little too high-class for Doo Dah,” says Peterson, who disappeared from the parade for more than a decade but returned when Doo Dah headed east in 2010.

It was at Chromo’s in August 1977 that original Czar Peter Apanel and several of Peterson’s other regulars hatched the idea for an alternative Pasadena parade on Jan. 1, 1978 — when the Rose Parade was on Jan. 2 due to the tournament’s “never-on-a-Sunday” rule.

Doo Dah grew through the 1980s, and in 1990 the event earned a full local television broadcast hosted by Richard Simmons and Vicki Lawrence.

But with success came increased anxiety and expenses for Apanel, who canceled the celebration in 1992 and experienced Doo Dah disaster the following year with a plan to charge admission for a march around Pasadena City Hall.

Coston and co-conspirator Patricia Hurley took over in 1995, adding raucous and gender-neutral pre-parade queen tryouts — first at an empty Northwest Pasadena home on loan from a local developer, then the sprawling Altadena estate of the late artists Dabney and Jirayr “Jerry” Zorthian, and finally the American Legion, near the current parade route.

A younger Doo Dah crowd has been reflected in its recent queens, including last year’s 17-year-old Queen Red Rosie — Alverno High School student Rosalind Schoen, whose hair is now blue.

The freedoms of Doo Dah are a remedy for creative people often under pressure to blend in with the crowd, says photographer Julie Klima, Queen Skittles of the 32nd Occasional Doo Dah Parade in 2009.

“It’s encouraged not to worry about what people think,” said Klima, a 2006 Art Center College of Design graduate. “Everyone’s always so concerned about how you dress and who you are, but at Doo Dah no one cares. You can be whoever you want to be.”

On April 1, local artist and blogger Diane Patrizzi was crowned Queen Patrizzi Intergarlictica after a grandiose theatrical dance performance in a glittering gown that deeply inebriated judges deemed reminiscent of Elizabeth Taylor’s “Cleopatra.”

“Unabashed laughter is the supreme highness to be gained by both watchers and parading players,” the new queen decrees. “I have been experiencing a long, very long, and sustaining orgasm since the crown was placed on my head.”