Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Parade weirds out
King Mango Strut mocks almost everything that drove SoFla crazy in 2016.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott has declared South Florida a Zika-free zone. Is there no safe space for a hotyoga pants-wearing South Beach mosquito like Antoinette Baldwin?
There’s one. It’s a stretch of Main Highway in the Grove, where Baldwin and a swarm of costumed South Beach- and Wynwood-themed mosquitoes will march Saturday during the city’s King Mango Strut parade. Trailing these pesky mosquitoes will be WLRN senior producer Richard Ives, dressed as Gov. Scott, who will bark into a loudspeaker that Zika has been banned in South Florida.
“He’s the mosquito whisperer. You do not fly here or here,” says Baldwin. “We’ll just be a big swarm being chased away by Gov. Scott.”
If “Saturday Night Live” ever staged a parade, it might resemble the King Mango Strut, Coconut Grove’s annual ode to weirdness and political satire. For its 35th edition, more than 130 costumed acts and parade floats will send up the year’s headlines, roast politicians such as Donald Trump and poke fun at topical news such as medical marijuana and Pokemon GO.
“It’s just one day of the year that, at least here in Miami, you get to make fun of all the things that drive you crazy, the absurdities of life,” says Baldwin, who organized the Strut for 14 years until 2009, and has worn costumes in the parade since the early 1990s.
The King Mango Strut started in 1982 as a parody of the Orange Bowl’s parade, the King Orange Jamboree, after the Jamboree banned Coconut Grove residents Glenn Terry and Bill Dobson from playing kazoos while wearing conch shells on their heads. So they created their own raunchy parade, led by an oversize, inflated mango, says Mike Lucas, the Strut’s current organizer.
The Strut comes together at monthly parade meetings in the Grove, during which Lucas and other volunteers float ideas spun from news headlines. President-elect Trump is, of course, a popular punching bag, as is Gov. Scott and deceased Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. This year’s acts include groups costumed as Skittles, a reference to Donald Trump Jr.’s disparagement of Syrian refugees; a float in the shape of a Trump University degree; and Castro’s coffin.