Parade fan set to dress for success
MACY’S PARADE DRESSER — Watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was an annual tradition when Gage Pipkin was growing up in Jonesboro.
“My mom would wake me up and say the parade was on and breakfast was ready,” says Pipkin. “My grandma loved the parade.”
This Thanksgiving, the 21-year-old senior theatre arts major at the University of Arkansas Little Rock will be part of the parade, helping dress performers on the Louisiana state float. He leaves for New York on Tuesday, he says, and will be working with a group that includes former Arkansas State Thespian Directors Michelle Moss and Marisa Arnold.
Pipkin was chosen for the job by Shirlee Idzakovich, the New York City-based costume designer and teacher. They first met at a workshop when he was a student at Westside High School in Jonesboro.
He was going to go last year, but the pandemic got in the way, so he asked Idzakovich about a spot this year when he was visiting New York last month.
“I think there are around 14 of us,” he says. “I’m dressing the Louisiana float in, quote, jazzy suits. There will be about 20 people that I’m dressing.”
The day for Pipkin will begin at 4 a.m., and his duties will include getting the right costumes to the right people and making sure they fit.
“It’s also our job to make sure they get on the bus on time to head to their float.”
The dressers get to watch the parade indoors on a big screen and afterward, “the performers come back and we will put everything away where it needs to be,” Pipkin says, adding that the crew will have their Thanksgiving feast together that evening.
“I’ve never been a dresser before, so I’m interested in learning a new skill set” he says when asked about what he’s looking forward to most. “It’ll also be fun to take on the city with a new group of people.”
UPDATE ON DAVE: Cast your memory back to Nov. 7, when we reported on Dave Puente, the Californian who for 13 years has been traveling to Little Rock for treatment of his myeloma at the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
Puente recently underwent chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, also known as ABECMA, a new therapy for myeloma sufferers that alters the patient’s own immune cells to fight the cancer.
His wife, Lori, passed along word last week that things are going even better than expected after the treatment, and they will be heading back to California early.
“We’ll be doing all the scans and bone marrow stuff in two weeks and head home right after,” she says in a text, adding that they will be back in Little Rock for five days in February for Dave’s follow-up treatment.
“What a wild ride,” she says.