Image courtesy of CleverGrrl. Licensed under CC BY SA 2.0.

Little Five Points is Atlanta’s Haight-Ashbury equivalent–it’s the neighborhood where you can, as a teenager, wander unsupervised to buy we-swear-it’s-just-for-tobacco pipes and crystals for magick before making a stop in the natural food co-op and heading out for pizza. As an adult, it’s a place where you can go access several of the city’s theatres and performance spaces, and get drunk (while sadly ignoring the pizza in favor of the natural food co-op). Halloween is, of course, the neighborhood’s favorite time of year.

That’s why there’s a Little Five Halloween parade each year, where the neighborhood’s art organizations, theatrical troupes, and general weirdos gather together to march a mile down the road with floats ranging from hastily-assembled to elaborately-planned (credit goes to this year’s Godzilla entrants, whose paper-mache beast was 30 feet tall). As part of my volunteering with the improv theatre, I found myself marching in the parade this year.

We couldn’t see the entire parade, but from our marching spot there were a few fun things to be seen. I particularly enjoyed the theatre several spots up from us who’s putting on a production of Madeline this year–they had their twelve little girls in two straight lines, complete with matching red swing coats and hats. They were the actual cutest thing, and the children did an admirable job of ignoring the haunted house float behind them which had women in cages and alarmingly-realistic human skins dangling off the back of a truck cab.

Several folks brought pets to watch, which was not unexpected (a few dogs even marched in the parade). However, the most unusual pet award probably belongs to the woman who appeared to have carted out her African grey parrot into the fray. I saw her talking to it as we marched past.

One of the floats visible from our marching spot was for the neighborhood’s music school. It featured a band of 7th and 8th graders performing covers of the Shins, and it was–much like the Madeline group–completely cute. At one point the MC misidentified the drummer as being in 5th grade, rather than 7th. When he corrected his error, the drummer did a rimshot behind him.

I’ll be back in the neighborhood on actual-Halloween in order to help out at the theatre, but I suspect that Halloween celebrations will carry on over there all the way through to Halloween (and quite possibly after).