ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, March 2, 1996 TAG: 9603030010
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LEXINGTON
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
THEY MOCKED THE PRESIDENT, his daughter, his home state and just about everything else Democratic on Friday, as W&L's raucous Mock Convention parade rolled through Lexington.
The Arkansas float had a bit of everything.
It had a Bill Clinton look-alike, his hair made grayer by a generous sprinkling of baby powder, holding a sign reading, "I swear I didn't inhale."
It had a young man wearing a purple dress with a brown paper bag over his head. A sign was taped to the bag: "Chelsea."
Then, of course, there were several young women with pillows under their shirts. They held a sign proclaiming Arkansas as No.1 in the nation in teen pregnancy. One of the "pregnant" girls had a sign that read, "Thank you Bill."
The Arkansas delegation's flatbed trailer was the first float in a line of more than 50 that rolled down Main Street on Friday in the kickoff parade of Washington and Lee University's 1996 Mock Presidential Convention.
The floats represented every state and U.S. territory - and varying degrees of humor and taste.
A mix of youthful exuberance, nervous exhaustion from all the convention preparations and perhaps a bit of liquor combined to make the parade a rolling, rollicking party.
Adrienne Bryant, the parade chairwoman, said two state floats - Kentucky and New Jersey - were pulled from the parade before it started because some students were alcohol in front of police officers.
"If you looked closely, you saw that most of the Kentucky delegation ended up riding on the New Hampshire float," Bryant said. "Then you saw a couple of the New Jersey people just walking down the street carrying a sign."
Over the years, the party atmosphere at the Mock Convention's parade sometimes has been known to get out of hand. Bryant said there have been a number of floats in past years with signs that carried profanities or phrases with risque double meanings.
In 1984, convention officials quashed a plan by the Massachusetts delegation to commemorate a notorious barroom gang rape in New Bedford, Mass. Some students had wanted to have a woman in a torn dress sitting on a pool table and waving while several males sang, "The Gang's All Here."
This year, Bryant said, Mock Convention organizers - and Lexington officials - made doubly certain there were no floats or signs that crossed the line of good taste.
"I was given special instructions by the mayor and his wife to make sure I looked over all the floats before they went out," she said.
She thought they ended up being "pretty tame."
Still, the Arkansas float's portrayal of Clinton's teen-age daughter brought a few surprised looks from the crowd.
Chris Rosen, a freshman from Little Rock, Ark., played the part of Chelsea. After the parade ended and he took the bag off, he said he'd seen "mixed reactions."
"Some people were laughing and cracking up. Other people were just horrified."
Floats that won awards for either construction or creativity included entries from West Virginia (which had a hillbilly shack, a toy truck up on blocks and an actual bluegrass band that was paid $250 for the gig); South Carolina (which depicted a grotesquely out-of-shape Shannon Faulkner - who unsuccessfully tried to become the first woman to be a member of the Corps of Cadets at The Citadel - being hazed by her former comrades), and California (which had two highway patrol officers on motorcycles in homage to the long-running television show "CHiPs - Celebrating 15 years of syndicated California stereotypes, Dude.")
Both sides of Main Street were packed with children and adults as the parade began. The procession was led by Asha, a 5,500-pound African elephant. As it passed the reviewing stand, the parade's announcer noted that the elephant "is the symbol of the Republican Party. Please stand back. He's a dangerous animal. He has a tendency to defecate in the street at will."
Then came the Arkansas float, which proclaimed its state as the "Home of the Next Ex-President of the United States."
Most of the students on the float were from Arkansas, and many wore plastic Razorback hog hats.
They kept up a running battle of words with the Connecticut delegation, which was directly behind them in a float with a Coast Guard Academy motif. The Connecticut folk teased the Arkansawers about following the rear of an elephant and yelled the word "Sucks!" each time the Razorbacks yelled "Arkansas."
"Yankees, they don't know how to act," retorted one of the young Arkansawers with a pillow under her shirt. "They're completely sober."
Because Democrats control the White House, this year's Mock Convention is trying - in all seriousness - to predict the Republican presidential nominee. That suits many of W&L's students, who tend to be more affluent and more Republican than the general population.
That made it a certainty that there would be a few digs at Clinton and his family. Students on the Arkansas float weren't fans of their state's native son. So, when they started planning their float, they quickly decided to spoof the Clintons - including dressing someone up, with the help of a hideously stringy, blonde wig, as the president's alleged paramour, Gennifer Flowers.
"We were going to put Playboy bunny ears on Gennifer, but we couldn't find any at Wal-Mart, and we weren't creative enough to make them ourselves," freshman Catherine Ruth Felton said.
In addition, Felton and another Arkansawer, Katie Mehlburger, decided the float also needed to spoof their home state's hillbilly image. "We thought to ourselves: We should be barefoot and pregnant," Mehlburger said.
As the parade ended, they proclaimed their float a success and were eager to move on to other convention-related activities.
"Drive by the Dumpsters," one of the students said, "so we can take everything apart and then go drink."
LENGTH: Long : 115 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ERIC BRADY/Staff A line of more than 50 floats makesby CNBits way down Main Street Friday during the kickoff parade of
Washington and Lee University's 1996 Mock Presidential Convention.
The floats represented every state and U.S. territory. A mix of
youthful exuberance, nervous exhaustion from all the convention
preparations and perhaps a bit of liquor combined to make the parade
a rolling, rollicking party. The procession was led by Asha, a
5,500-pound African elephant. KEYWORDS: POLITICS PRESIDENT