Eccentrics Are In Full Bloom Costumes Range From Fish To Foul As Many Put Fashion Before Finish Times
Elvis didn’t show up, but several Johnny Cashes moseyed by. A couple of fish hopped along and a cake balanced on top of the crowd. There were bargain-basement hula girls, hippie chicks and at least four airheads.
For some, Bloomsday’s a chance for exercise. For others, it’s a fashion statement.
They dressed in drag, in matching T-shirts, in balloons and in airplanes. Maybe they wanted to go faster, or maybe they wanted an excuse for losing. Whatever the reason, some people really bloomed on Bloomsday.
“I labored the whole week on this,” said Heidi Colby of Coeur d’Alene, who sported a black leotard lined with daisies and a straw hat sprouting pink roses.
Melinda Monroe and daughter Vanessa Lipton angled through the crowd. They swam upstream with elastic wrapped around their ankles and fish uniforms draped over their bodies. Their eyes were wobbly plastic-foam balls, their faces overshadowed by pointy fish heads.
“Look, it’s land sharks,” a runner pointed out.
“They’ve been calling us sharks all morning,” grumbled Monroe, 42, who was really a girl fish. “We’re fish. So much for our school system.”
Yes, some of those kids just can’t spell. The scrawled stomachs of four students from Mead’s Northwood Junior High read “OMS DAY 96 BLO.”
“Whoops, we’re out of order,” said Kiira Larson, 14, otherwise known as “BLO.”
She skirted around to the front of the “OMS” girl to correct the spelling.
The four were cut-rate hula girls with white garbage bags for skirts and thrift-store grabs for shirts. “We just wanted to be weird and stand out,” Larson said.
Seth Bartels, 18, also was decked out for the race - his purple sprig of hair poking up from an otherwise bald head and his nose ring in place. He wore a backpack equipped with an umbrella, tapes, water and ginseng extract. The Moody Blues blared from speakers attached to the backpack frame.
“And, of course, I have an extra pack of cigarettes,” said Bartels, who planned to puff his way through Bloomsday.
His friend Matthew Dockrey, 18, planned to yell his way through. He held a megaphone and announced, just after the starting gun had shot off: “We should be off any minute now. We’re experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by.”
Dockrey wore a T-shirt proclaiming, “I put the fun in Dysfunctionality.” He also planned to yell “Bloomsday has been canceled” and “spandex has been outlawed.”
Joe Phillips didn’t wear spandex. He wore pink felt. Phillips used to be the “Clock Tower Guy,” but this year he took the cake - on his head. For two years, Phillips, 39, carried a cardboard clock tower dotted with Bloomsday tags. This year, he wrapped pink felt around chicken wire, frosted it with purple stars and stuck 20 candles on the top. “20 years and running,” the cake proclaimed.
“I wanted to show everybody out there who’s not participating, it’s a piece of cake,” Phillips said.
Dave Reichman, 63, wore a shirt stating “Charter Member Old Farts Hall Of Fame” underneath a Seattle Seahawks jacket. “I was going to wear the bottom half of my (Detroit) Lions costume,” said Reichman, who chickened out. “That way, I’d be a Sea-Lion.”
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