Doo Dah Parade

The Doo Dah Parade is Sunday, and this year's stellar cast includes: * Sheila of the Jungle, a fruit-covered woman/gorilla singer. * Johnny the Skunk Man, a fur-covered guitarist with a black and white Mohawk haircut. * And the Dead Rose Queens, some beauty pageant winners back from the dead. One Doo Dah first is Eiffel for Andrew, a wedding shower that will be celebrated during the parade by newlyweds Jessica Schulman and Andrew Edelstein.

Doo Dah Parade watchers, rejoice: The leather is back. After a six-year hiatus, the Synchronized Marching Briefcase Drill Team has been resurrected for the 24th annual display of irreverence, which will take place Sunday in Pasadena. The valise-toting team of bankers, lawyers, management consultants and at-home moms was one of the parade's most popular acts until unruly crowds drove it away six years ago.

11:30am Parade If the Tournament of Roses Parade is the epitome of elegance and good taste, Pasadena's Doo Dah Parade is its inverse: an event at which participants are encouraged to deliver wicked parody and irreverent satire. For the 24th year, the Doo Dah Parade will present a motley crew of anti-establishment rogues.

Among the works of art listed on the Sothebys.com Web site is a 1982 photograph of the Briefcase Drill Team marching in the Doo Dah Parade. Price: $350 to $450. Anyone who has the nerve to ask that much money for such a snapshot deserves to be crowned King or Queen of the next Doo Dah Parade. . . . In case you're unaware of the ballet-like grace of the Briefcase Drill Team, I've included a photo from the 1981 Doo Dah (see accompanying). Go ahead and clip it. It's free.

There's a swell line in "Romeo and Juliet" about the "the sweetest honey" being "loathsome in its own deliciousness." I learned the truth of that the hard way, from a surfeit of Girl Scout cookies at a tender age. It has been a useful assessment for many things since, chief among them the Tournament of Roses parade: too much sweetness and light for me.

Everything needed to amuse 9-year-old Gabriel Moran was marching down Colorado Boulevard in Old Pasadena on Sunday. The West Hollywood Cheerleaders, decked out in pink skirts, blond wigs and sporting 5 o'clock shadows, had just passed the Highland Park resident's perch. The next entrants in the 21st annual Doo Dah parade, a bevy of people dressed as animals, marched by as Gabriel broke out into a huge grin. "It's not what you expect. It's so wild," giggled Gabriel, a Doo Dah rookie.

Lily Hobge always wanted to be queen of the Doo Dah Parade. On Wednesday, in keeping with the unconventional traditions of the event, a long-running spoof of the Tournament of Roses Parade, her wish was honored--posthumously. Her husband, holding a box containing the ashes of his deceased wife, entered her into the tryouts for Doo Dah Parade queen.