A Puppet Parade
Happy Halloween you spooky ass bitches 👻 Every year I aspire to create a cool costume and every year I end up wearing my skeleton onesie (it is basically pajamas, which says a lot about where I am in life). I was thinking about making a last ditch effort to attend the parade this year, but it’s hot as balls out so I bought some candy last minute and will be staying home.
I thought it would be fun to write about the history of the parade though! It’s one of those very kooky very NY things and I literally never manage to write about timely stuff, so here’s my chance. Following that, I’ve got a little review about an Italian place in Bushwick. Read on…if you dare 🧛🏻
But first - please make sure you vote! If you vote on Halloween, you might get a special “I voted” sticker that has a pigeon wearing a witch hat, which sounds de-fuckin-lightful. I’ve already mailed in my ballot and if you have too, you can check to make sure it was received here. 🗳️
The Village Halloween Parade is regarded as the largest Halloween parade in the world. But it didn’t start out big at all. The parade was the dream of puppeteer Ralph Lee. Lee was living in the Westbeth Artist Housing (which is an interesting place itself) in 1973 when the idea struck him: he would organize a little Halloween event in the courtyard of the housing complex for all the kids (and kids at heart). That first parade contained a fun mix of giant puppets including snakes floating atop wooden sticks, dancing skeletons (my fave), and huge masks like the Owl. The next year the parade moved outside of the building’s courtyard and went from Jane Street to Washington Square Park; about 200 people participated. The little parade continued to grow in popularity each year and in 1985 with crowds upwards of 250,000, the route was moved from various side streets to Sixth Avenue from Spring Street to 16th Street. A NYC tradition was officially born.
When you think of puppets, your go to guy might be Jim Henson. But Ralph Lee had an incredibly prolific career in puppetry! His fantastic masks and puppet figures were seen in productions by the Mettawee River Theater Company and in shows by the Met Opera, the NY Shakespeare Festival, NYC Opera, Theater for the New City and various dance troupes and stage companies. Some of his creations even made it onto SNL. My guy knew what was up when it came to puppets and he loved Halloween.
“Halloween is for the kid in all of us,” he said in 1982. “It gives people, especially adults, permission to act any way they want.”
This parade is unique in that literally anyone can march in it. Really. If you show up in costume at the starting point before it kicks off, congrats, you’re in the parade! You don’t need to pay anything or register anywhere, literally just show up (though they always welcome donations).
The parade remained a pretty local grassroots effort for about 10 years until it simply grew so large that Ralph Lee no longer recognized what he created. He envisioned this as a parade for artists to show off their craft and for children to marvel at the sights, but it’s hard to keep stuff quiet in NYC and soon the crowds numbered upwards of 1 million. Eventually, Ralph stopped leading the parade and Jeanne Fleming joined as the Artistic and Producing Director in 1985. She had already been working with Ralph for a few years and worked to expand the parade by partnering with community organizations, schools, residents, and sponsors. Regardless of the increased scale and popularity of the parade, I think it still feels like a very uniquely kooky NYC event and I really hope it doesn’t go the corporate route that so many of our parades have gone.
The parade has a lot of quirky little elements to it; the most noticeable might be the giant spider that hangs off of the Jefferson Market Library. Her name is Zohra, btw. The Jefferson Market Library is a gorgeous ass building to begin with and the Victorian Gothic tower juts well above all of the nearby buildings on 6th ave. Lee’s original spider began crawling down the tower in 1977 and around 1999 Basil Twist redesigned the puppet and took ownership of Zohra’s appearance. It takes 5 puppeteers to control the spider and she descends from the library tower as soon as the parade reaches 6th ave and 10th st and bobs up and down for the rest of the night.
Another highlight of the parade is the group of performers who do the Thriller dance every few blocks. For the longest time I just believed that this was a bunch of random people marching who happened to know the dance, but it’s actually an organized effort by a group called Thriller NYC. They’ve been dancing in the parade since 2004 and for $50 anyone is welcome to get a zombie makeup tutorial and attend the rehearsals that they hold prior to the parade. They also have some “zombie bouncer” positions available if you’re not much of a dancer but you still wanna hang around and help keep things moving. But be warned: the group can only accept so many members each year so if you want to register as a dancer when tickets open you’re gonna need to move faster than an actual zombie - tickets often sell out in minutes.
The theme of this year’s parade is “Meow” which is no doubt in response to fuckface JD Vance’s comments about “miserable cat ladies.”
We would gladly have remained aloof – poised and peaceful among the houseplants on the windowsill or stretched out among the books scattered on the daybed.
But we have heard the call, and the time has come to mark our territory. We didn’t ask for this fight, but when feline honor is at stake, Cats and Ladies will rise (…after a languorous stretch) to meet the moment.
The folks at Processional Arts Workshop are the official puppeteers of the parade and they have been hard at work creating fantastic cat puppets this year in a style that would have made Ralph Lee proud! You can see some of their past work for the Halloween parade and others on their website and some behind the scenes for this years puppets here and here.
If you want to attend the parade this year, here are the deets:
Parade Path + Time
The parade starts at 7pm at Canal Street & 6th Ave, and ends at 15th Street & 6th Ave. The route is 1.4 miles long. The parade typically lasts until 11pm.
Parade Theme
This year the parade theme is MEOW. Expect lots of cat themes and cat ladies. I am living for this 🐱
March in the Parade
Anyone can march in New York’s Village Halloween Parade, and it is FREE, however you MUST be in costume to join. Line up at the corner of Canal & 6th Ave between 6:30pm and 9pm as that’s the starting point of the parade.
Watch the Parade
Spectators can gather on both sides of 6th Ave, between Canal & 15th streets to watch the parade. Get there early to stand in the front and also be aware subway closures and reroutes. The parade is also televised on NY1.
Crowds
Not gonna lie, the crowds can be pretty nuts and I understand why Ralph Lee stopped attending his own parade. The weather is also alarmingly beautiful today, so expect lots of people and please be aware of your surroundings. Bring water for yourself, have an exit strategy, and take care of one another.
Alicia and I finally managed to sync up our schedules this week and we enjoyed a nice little dinner at Marie’s in Bushwick. I heard about this restaurant opening a while back because I was a fan of Chef Miguel Trinidad’s previous restaurants Maharlika and Jeepney. He cooked Filipino food there and I thought that Italian was a strange pivot, so I was interested. Marie’s is named after Chef Trinidad’s partner (Marie is her middle name, along with every girl I went to high school with) and his vision for the restaurant was to create a place with classic Italian hospitality with dishes that are a playful homage to NYC - he does claim to have been born in the back of a NYC taxi cab, after all.
The dish to get seemed to be the chopped cheese raviolo, though I’d read some mixed reviews of it. Despite that, my love for chopped cheese reigned supreme and I knew I had to try this dish. But first - bread. I’m such a little slut for bread so you know I was gonna order that focaccia with Calabrian chili butter. The bread arrived in a little baby skillet along with a side of unnecessarily star-shaped spicy butter. The bread was nice and warm, but the butter was unfortunately really cold, which is a total amateur move! However, my beautiful genius friend thought to warm the butter over the little candle on the table. Is there anything women can’t do? I’m happy to report that the focaccia was fabulous - very fucking fluffy with the slightest crust on top. I ate a bit with the chili butter, but honestly found that the butter was kinda meh; it was neither particularly buttery or spicy and didn’t do much for me so I saved most of my bread to sop up the sauce from the raviolo.
I’ll admit, the chopped cheese raviolo intrigued me. I really love the creativity of some fusion dishes and this one seemed promising! To set expectations, this dish consists of one single raviolo, not a bunch of ravioli. It wasn’t small by any means, but if you’re really hungry you’re going to want to get more than just this one dish. In some of the reviews I read, folks complained that the dish was a bit oily and you can see that the sauce has that oily sheen to it. But to that I say - what chopped cheese have you eaten that wasn’t greasy?? Like, isn’t that just part of what a chopped cheese is?
After taking my first bite, I was pleasantly surprised that it did have the flavor profile of a chopped cheese! The sauce was tangy in a way that tasted more like ketchup and less like pasta sauce. I realize this description may be off-putting to some, but I grew up eating ketchup on my pasta so this tasted like home for me. Also, it fits the flavor profile of a chopped cheese (which sometimes has ketchup on it). The outside will have you thinking you’re gonna get some fancy cheese on the inside, but it really did taste like cheap ass American (in a good way). Whatever cheese they used also really lent itself well to maintaining the correct texture of a chopped cheese. With a sloppy joe, you would expect the meat to be loose and fall out, but in this case the filling all sort of held itself together so that I was able to cut little slices and not have everything fall apart.
If I’m being honest, I don’t know if I would get this again though. $21 for a single raviolo is pretty steep - I could buy about 4 full chopped cheeses for that price! But the menu did have a bunch of other items that looked interesting, like the duck ropa vieja and the lamb patty ragu (a riff on a Jamaican beef patty). They recently started serving brunch and lunch and I’m very interested in their ricotta pancakes. Also - they do a free pasta night the first Tuesday of each month! I’m not 100% clear on if there are any parameters around this, so if you go there for free pasta let me know!
The Museum of the Moving Image has some cool Godzilla screenings happening all weekend. Tickets for each screening are $15 and if you want to combine a film screening with a visit to the galleries, the museum recommends purchasing the screening ticket then adding on a gallery visit ($5).
They’re also screening The Others on Nov 2, which is a film that really affected me for some reason. I won’t spoil it if you haven’t seen it, but there’s a great twist!
There’s a new holiday market coming to town! Macy’s will be hosting a holiday market outside of their flagship location in Herald Square (one of my go-to places for bathrooms in the area tbh). Macy’s Holiday Square will open on Nov 1 inside the store and following the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a new market dubbed the Herald Holiday Market will open on the plazas outside the store on December 6.
I just heard about a book truck that gives out free books to folks in areas that may be underserved by libraries! How freakin cool is that? Their next popup date is on Nov 4 on Staten Island, but there are more dates through the end of Nov.
The NYC Marathon is this Sunday Nov 3! If you ask anyone in NYC about the marathon I feel like they will tell you that it is a magical thing. New Yorkers hate train delays or crowded streets, but we fuckin love the marathon. I used to watch a friend run and I loved when runners would wear shirts with their names on it so I could yell their names to cheer them on! If you are traveling around the city or plan on spectating, please be aware of any subway/street closures.
Halloweekend will soon be over and if you’ve got a jack-o-lantern you need to dispose of, you can do that at the Hudson River Park Pumpkin Smash on Nov 2! You’ll get 15 minutes of smashing fun and your choice of a bat, hammer or shovel to break up your gourd into the smallest pieces you can. Your bits will then be turned into compost.
In random news, jaywalking is now legal in NYC. This means nothing to me, as I’ve been jaywalking like a fuckin champ for years.
New waltz just dropped! Remember when I visited the Morgan Library and loved it? Well apparently they just found an unreleased Chopin waltz somewhere in the collection. I’m not a classical music girly, but this is pretty dope!
In Japan folks celebrate “Mundane Halloween” by dressing as incredibly specific things and every year the photos absolutely kill me. Tag yourself - I’m "Person whose sweater got caught on a doorknob"
Those Jay Lee heads are amazing! I wonder when the last ticket for jaywalking was given out?