Keystone Blossoms With Mini Lilac Fest

The rules for the second annual Keystone Elementary School Lilac Festival were simple.

Start with a shoebox, and build a float for the parade.

The results were quite something.

About 70 students, some apparently with parents’ help, created masterpieces of improvisation.

Cottonballs made great clouds. Old CDs made shiny decorations. Legos and Barbie dolls came in handy.

Many of the floats were gender-specific, with boys tending toward military, automotive or dinosaur themes.

A rhinestone-bedecked dinosaur scene, complete with volcano, won the division for kindergarten, first-and second-graders. Its creator, second-grader Dalin Tipkin, had a reality check, though, as he and the other float builders waited for their chance to parade through the Keystone gym.

“Help! My arms are about to break,” Dalin said. “This is heavy.”

A Titanic, with only its bow pointing skyward, was a prize winner for second-grader Devin Perala.

Fourth-grader Megan Brown carried a float that included a horse and wagon with a smaller-than-Barbie doll in the driver’s seat. The doll’s arms reached to wave to the crowd. Up on the wagon, a bumblebee dangled from a twig off a cedar tree.

“I just figured it out,” said Megan.

The festival included the Lilac queen and several princesses, as well as Lilac Festival chairman Bill Phipps, who urged the students to grow up and come work on the real Lilac floats.

“I think I know where to go if we need some ideas,” Phipps said.

The North Pines Junior High Jazz Band provided music. The pace of the parade, as kids carried their floats through the crowded gym, grew almost frenzed as the walkers tried to keep up with the beat.

“Really good. Bad. I can’t see.” That running commentary on the floats came from a candid fifth-grader.

But every prize winner was generously applauded by the students. In fact, the students had cast their ballots for their favorite floats.

Winners among the older students were fifth-grader Aran Patchett, who mounted his shoebox on a remote controlled car; and sisters Melinda and Kayla Carpenter, whose theme was the Magic School Bus. Levi Kendrick placed third among the younger students.

The Lilac princesses enthralled the students with their impressions of what they liked best about being a princess - eating worms at the Fairchild Air Force Base survival school was the most popular answer.

And when one festival visitor asked if the Keystone float builders would march in today’s Junior Lilac Festival, Keystone Principal Val Anderson answered, “We’ll do that next year.”