Bronwyn Sell goes behind the scenes of the biggest public event on Auckland's calendar, the Farmers' Santa Parade.
THE PARADE DIRECTOR
For Pam Glaser, Santa Claus is not simply coming to town. Santa Claus is being directed, budgeted and marshalled into town. He's been cast, costumed, choreographed, reindeered, sleighed-up and surrounded by a 3500-strong escort of wildly attired characters.
So far as a quarter of a million Aucklanders and visitors are concerned, the Farmers' Santa Parade starts at 2pm tomorrow. For Glaser, the parade director, and her lean permanent team, it started with brainstorming and budgeting shortly after the pine needles on last year's Christmas trees turned brown. Even so, every year, sometimes as late as September, Glaser gets the question: "Have you started organising the parade already?"
"It never stops," she says. Forget No. 8 wire and a "she'll be right" attitude. This is one of the biggest events in the country. It's not about throwing together a few floats and costumes and going for a bit of a wander. The logistics are astounding - 250,000 spectators, 3500 performers, 500 volunteers, more than 40 floats, several kilometres of CBD streets closed off, thousands of balloons - but it's the level of detail that's the real mind-blower. Here are a few of the 130-odd instructions from last year's parade runsheet:
7am: Put fire extinguishers in cars.
8am: Brief balloon-blowers, give them balloons and nozzles.
10.45: Leave Santa section leaders with water to put in sleigh.
11am: Check lost children signs are up at the library.
1pm: Check pavs and lamingtons collection from props area for NZ Herald Gumboot Men.
And there's no dress rehearsal. "We do it live every year, and we only get one chance to get it right," says Glaser.
Glaser has been organising the Santa Parade for 22 years, first as a promotions manager for Farmers, now for the Auckland Children's Christmas Parade Trust.
She has ultimate responsibility for the creative aspects of the parade - the floats, the performers, the themes - but she's also in charge of sponsorship, marketing, budgets and finance, insurance, permits, traffic management, parking, street marking, health and safety, volunteers, vehicles, security, signage, catering, liaising with police, portaloos, and even getting the trees trimmed in Vincent St ready for the parade to assemble.
The assembly itself is a logic puzzle. The performers, vehicles and floats line up along the back streets of the city in three lanes, divided into sections and supervised by a team of volunteers. It's a long parade - by the time Santa makes his entrance (last), the floats stretch 2.2km in front of him. Pacing is crucial. If a gap opens up, it's no easy task for the acts behind to catch up. The performers can't run. The floats can't reverse. Pipe bands cannot speed up.
With all the logistical minutiae to co-ordinate on parade day, Glaser is obsessed with the weather. At 8am tomorrow she'll make the weather call. It's notoriously difficult. As any Aucklander will know, hail in the morning does not preclude the possibility of an afternoon heatwave.
"My biggest fear is making a wrong call with the weather," says Glaser. "What if we cancel and the weather's worse the following Sunday?"
Glaser has a high threshold of pain when it comes to the odd shower, and the parade has only been postponed to its rain date a few times in its 77-year history. However, with the tall helium-filled floats, it's strong wind she's cautious about.
The parade has weather insurance, to cover the money that's already been committed by 8am, including catering, the balloons, the paid contractors and the hireage fees. "We worked out if we had a cancellation and we didn't have rain insurance, we wouldn't have enough funds to stage the parade the next Sunday," she says.
The other big concern is heath and safety. Gone are the days of lolly scrambles from Santa's sleigh - an eager child could get too close to the heavy float's wheels. And the assembly area and route have to be carefully checked for overhead wires, banners, foliage and other hazards.
"If something major goes wrong you feel so sick inside. You want everything to be so perfect," says Glaser.
Though this is a serious business, it's also creative and fun. Early in the year Glaser and her team, including float creator Peter Taylor and costumers Ronelle Thompson and Maralyn Meyrick, start to dream up the parade. Each year they create about three new floats and three new sets of costumes. Though they have creative licence, they're careful to stick with crowd-pleasers that fit the tight budget.
When Glaser started organising parades in 1988 the floats were mostly inspired by nursery rhymes and fairy tales. "Nursery rhymes don't cut it any more. It's about what kids want to see."
These days it's less Mother Hubbard and more Buzz Lightyear. Glaser keeps in contact with toy-buyers at Farmers and monitors children's television to find out what the kids are into. But there is still room along the route for traditional characters. No one has yet caught the Gingerbread Man.
The great shame, Glaser says, is that after spending a year consumed by the parade, she doesn't get to see it, bar the odd glimpse of a stilt-walker or inflatable head when she's racing through town to head off potential crises.
Even when the parade after-party begins at 3.30pm, Glaser doesn't stop. "I could just sit and enjoy the entertainment, but I can't. I go to the Aotea Centre and start to pack up. If you pack up well, things are so much easier the following year."
Still, the little parade junkie inside her does love a good colourful, noisy, musical, big parade.
"I'm so excited about this year's parade. If it all goes well, you feel good and you feel content and you feel proud. It's just a special day."
THE FLOAT MAKER
Peter Taylor tells some good Santa Parade disaster stories.
Like the year the float maker experimented with eco-friendly potato flakes instead of paper confetti to symbolise a volcano erupting on a float. They were "the best", he says - until rain turned the flakes to mashed potato that dried on to the float. When Taylor returned to the float warehouse after his summer holiday he found it alive with rats. They'd devoured the potato then nibbled at everything else in sight.
And then there was the year of the cat, when a feline family crept into the float warehouse. The Santa float was halfway down Queen St on parade day when someone spotted a terrified kitten climbing a pole. Another kitten somehow got stuck under the dashboard of the lead car and the car had to be disassembled to free it.
And then there was the time the chimneys fell off the Three Pigs' float when the glue failed, the time the clutch went on Santa's float in Remuera on the morning of the parade, the time a Maui float hooked a lamp post in Remuera en route to the parade and lost the Hawkes Bay, the time Buzz Lightyear was placed on a float backwards so his butt was to the crowds, and the time a careless driver took out Dino's leg.
But no real harm done (except to the rats). Taylor has learned a lot since he started creating Santa Parade floats as a teenage Farmers' employee 35 years ago.
"I don't suppose there's any other job where you get such a variety, from doing the conceptual drawings for a float to building a scale model to building the real thing. The only thing that's not fun is the stress of the last month."
When he started out, in the 1970s, the floats were built on trucks cobbled together by Farmers' fleet mechanics from bits of old cars dating back to the 1920s, including Model A and Model T Fords and a Morris truck. But these idiosyncratic creations needed a lot of maintenance and incurred the horror of transport authorities. These days all the floats are on trailers and a car club volunteers to tow them.
The floats used to be made from wire netting and papier mache, with a liberal garlanding of crepe paper. When it rained they'd start to shrivel up and expose wires. With such fragile materials, the building team was creating up to 23 new floats a year.
Now the floats are created out of hardier materials - timber, fibreglass, polystyrene, acrylic paint - and Taylor builds two or three new ones each year.
"It's very easy to put a pretty picture on a piece of paper and sell it to someone," he says. "And then think, 'how the hell am I going to make that?"'
Through most of the year he works alone in the warehouse, steadily fixing, cleaning, maintaining, upgrading and repainting the existing floats, and designing and creating the new ones. As the big day nears he gets help from part-timers and volunteers. He is particularly fond of his latest creation, a Flower Power float, a colourful retro throwback to his youth.
As well as making the floats visually appealing, Taylor must ensure they can withstand the challenges of the undulating parade route, variable winds, and overhead hazards. And the floats are cumbersome, weighing up to two tonnes and measuring up to 10m long and 6m high.
On parade day, shepherding the floats becomes a family affair. As well as long-standing fleet leader Ian Gibson, and mechanic Peter Glynn, Taylor is joined by his son, his son's mate, his daughter's ex-boyfriend and sometimes his wife and her six sisters. "People just love doing it," says Taylor. "It's a really good day. Even though I'm not a great one for crowds, it's the beginning of summer, just before Christmas and everyone's happy."
And as for the odd mishap: "I think all of that adds to the fun and the drama of the day."
THE WARDROBE MISTRESS
Just washing and ironing the costumes after the Santa Parade takes a full three weeks.
Within hours of tomorrow's parade, wardrobe mistress Maralyn Meyrick will have the washing machine on in the costume department's Newton headquarters.
As the hire trucks back up and unload, the room will start to fill with rack after rack of tulle, tinsel and top hats. A thousand costumes, some with five components. And almost all must be washed, ironed, sorted and filed.
Needless to say, in the 11 years the dressmaker has been doing this job, she has become an expert in picking durable and easy-care fabrics. A bugbear is cheap, wrinkly satin. Satin-backed crepe is far preferable. She's also a formidable budget shopper and loves sniffing around in Geoff's Emporium for promising fabrics and accessories. The materials for some costumes cost just $10.
"We shop pretty damn well, actually. We love raiding the $2 shops and we get pretty good bargains."
Maralyn has cut, stitched, glued and fitted pretty much all of the 3500 costumes in the parade wardrobe, including about 200 new ones this year. She knows her friendly witches from her bad fairies. Each costume has a shelf life of about five years, and most are surprisingly intricate. She pulls a bright costume out of a rack that will transform a young waif into a flower for the new Serendipity float. Twenty-five pieces of fabric went into the skirt alone, and there's a whole row of them.
The costume room is a fancy-dress lover's fantasy, with sparkly silver hoop skirts hanging from the ceiling, flaming satin stilt-walker's trousers jutting out of a rack, and jewel-coloured enchantress' crinolines stacked up in a corner. Props and accessories clamour for attention from every corner, and from dozens of racks swings a vivid forest of costumes.
Maralyn can spend up to nine months of every year at her dressmaker's bench, while the costume room manager, Ronelle Thompson, does most of the concept designs, manages the choreography and dance rehearsals, administers the database of performers and takes care of the budgets and other administration. "We've got it down to a pretty fine art after all these years," says Maralyn.
Like everything else in the parade, there are precise logistical machinations at work. All 1000 costumed performers - ranging from 7-year-olds to grandmothers - visit the costume room for fittings, which begin as early as July. Maralyn says it's vital that they love their outfits, so they're visibly buzzing on the day.
On the big day the pair work intensely for about 14 hours, though they do down their pin cushions to watch the parade.
"When you see the kids all excited with their costumes on you forget all the extra hours," says Maralyn. "You have so many laughs and it's fabulous. It's a weird thing because you've worked all year and it's all over and done with in an hour. The next day I come [into the costume room] and it's, 'Where do I start?"'
BEHIND THE SCENES ON THE DAY:
* 5.30am Key staff start work. First truckloads of costumes and props depart for the Aotea Centre.
* 6am First floats emerge from float warehouse.
* 7am Float cars arrive at warehouse, ready for driver briefing.
* 8am Final weather call. Parade route checked. Final balloon blowing begins.
* 8.30am Parade director briefs parade marshal on any changes.
* 9am Floats escorted into the city by police.
* 10am Parade vehicles arrive in assembly area.
* 11am All floats and vehicles in position in assembly area.
* 11.30am Costuming begins.
* Noon Parade route closed to traffic.
* 12.30pm Pre-parade entertainment begins. Santa arrives at his dressing room.
* 1pm Final costume checks. Marching teams and bands report to section leaders. Costumed characters lifted on to floats.
* 1.15pm Charity collection begins.
* 1.30pm Last of the participants join their sections. Police in position on top of Bledisloe Building.
* 2pm Parade starts.
* 3.30pm Parade ends.
SANTA PARADE ESSENTIALS
* Parade starts: Sunday at 2pm
* Last float reaches the end: 3.30pm
* Routes: Starts at the corner of Mayoral Dr and Cook St, travels down Mayoral Dr into Queen St, then into Customs St West and Albert St, ending at the corner of Albert St and Wellesley St.
* Santa's Party: 3.30pm - 5.30pm in Aotea Square, with stalls, rides and entertainment.
* If it's stormy: Listen to Newstalk ZB from 10am tomorrow for any cancellation announcement.
* Free parking: At Auckland City's Downtown, K Rd and Victoria St carparks.
* Public transport: Check maxx.co.nz or call 366 6400.
* Road closures: All inner-city roads will be closed 12pm-4pm (including to buses).
* Spectators are advised to be in the city by noon.
* Honour line: Spectators should keep behind the blue line painted on the road.
* Charity collection: Collectors will circulate with buckets before the parade, collecting donations for the Leukemia and Blood Foundation.
* Auckland's other big Christmas event, the Coca-Cola Christmas in the Park concert, happens on December 11 in the Domain. Performers this year include Michael Murphy, Rebecca Wright, hip-hop groups, and musical stars of homegrown blockbuster Boy, the Patea Maori Club.
