The town of Scarborough, Maine has an after school program you’ve probably never heard of before. The Gym Dandies is made up of students from 3rd grade to seniors in highschool who all have one thing in common; they practice to hone their skills of juggling and unicycling. The Gym Dandies’ Performance Group travels around Maine (and occasionally further) to show off their expertise in unicycling in parades big and small. This story is about riding a giraffe unicycle in one of the bigger parades I rode in: the 2018 Fourth of July parade in Philadelphia.
Transcript
I want you to imagine a unicycle. The bike wheel, the pedals, the seat. Now imagine the neck of the unicycle- the part where the seat connects to the wheel- is getting taller. It gets so tall that you can’t reach the pedals from the seat. So imagine the pedals go up to, and now there’s a bike chain connecting the pedals to the wheel.
So think about that in your head and imagine the seat is now five feet off the ground, probably reaching around your chin if you were standing next to it. You have imagined a giraffe unicycle, exactly what I was practicing to ride in the 2018 Philadelphia 4th of July parade.
If you ever get the chance to see the gym Danis in a parade, you would first see two adults holding a banner proudly stating “Gym Dandies” in bright red and “Scarborough Schools, Maine” just under in blue. On one side of the banner, there’s clip art of a unicycle, and on the other there’s a cartoon of a boy wearing a backwards baseball cap riding a giraffe. After the banner, you’d see a flock of kids on 20 inch unicycles, the regular ones you see often. Behind them is the taller group of giraffe unicycles, towering above everything except the trees.
All the kids are wearing blue shirts that say “Gym Dandies Defying Gravity since 1981”. There are several adults and gray shirts walking with the kids, some with megaphones yelling out instructions, some helping kids get back on their unicycles if they fall down, others carrying water or keeping the parade floats behind them from getting too close to the riders. And all these kids, from third graders to high school seniors are from a town called Scarborough, Maine. One of them used to be me.
By 2018, the Gym Dandies had been in national parades before, but I had not. Being part of such a big event was a rare thing for our small town circus group. For one, it’s expensive to ship upwards of 50 kids, parents, instructors, and gear around the country, and for another, it’s hard to get ready for something so major. Riding in the Yarmouth Clam Festival parade is one thing, riding in front of the country is another.
We started practicing for the 4th of July parade soon after school let out for the summer. While the performance group members of the Gym Dandies met once a week during the school year, we also had other events to practice for, like the Red Claws halftime show and our yearly community performance.
For this parade, we wanted to come up with new routines and perfect the old ones. So to prepare, we would convene at the big parking lot outside the intermediate school at 7:30 in the morning. We all showed up in layers- sweatpants and sweatshirts over t-shirts and shorts. Way up in Maine, it’s still cold in the morning in early summer, but the pavement would heat up fast and we’d be sweltering by the time we ended practice three hours later.
From the start, we knew a few things about the parade route. We knew the route itself was about one and a half miles long. This seemed very easy until we learned the parade itself was meant to start at 11:00 AM and go until 12:45.
The thing about unicycles is they move a little faster than a quick walking speed, and if you wanna stay up on a unicycle, you can not stop moving. This means even if we assume 45 minutes of the parade are going to be spent not riding either because there were floats that started or ended before or after we did, one hour at an above walking speed meant we would still be riding about five miles.
Because we were going to be moving faster than the floats around us, part of our routines had to be different ways to turn around by essentially making big circles while we waited for the parade to move along. Because we had to go so far without stopping, we trained for long distance. We would get up on our unicycles and ride and ride for big parts of our practice time and if you fell down, you’d get right back up and rejoin the group.
We also know we’d be going up and down hills, so we practiced on this big hill that connected the road between Scarborough’s intermediate school and the high school. I remember we would ride past the football field on the way, and the kids who had early morning soccer practice would watch us huffing and puffing our way up and down that awful hill.
Finally, we knew there were going to be cobblestone roads for part of the route. That would be fine for any other mode of transportation, but unicycling is extremely balance oriented. Even the shallow dips in cobblestones could prove a falling hazard for us. Luckily, Maine has a lot of bad roads, so we practiced riding over cracks in concrete and over a short length of gravel near our parking lot.
In such a big event, just riding in a straight line or circles doesn’t really cut it, even if we are performing on unicycles. Luckily, the Gym Dandies are a theatrical people, so we were willing to come up with some fun routines. Our most popular trick was “shoot the tunnel” where the giraffes would line up in two columns and hold hands while a single file line of 20 inchers rode down the middle, as if through a tunnel. This looked really dramatic as the shorter group is surrounded by the taller group. It felt dramatic too. Can you imagine falling from six feet in the air onto a seventh grader, three inches to your left? Thankfully, no one has gotten hurt from that one yet, but I still think it’s a good thing we wore helmets.
Our most difficult trick was the flank. The giraffes would form two single file lines on opposite sides of the road, and when someone called on the megaphone, we would all turn a sharp 90 degrees and ride right at each other, passing closely, then reaching the other side of the road and turning 90 degrees again. It’s hard to keep perfectly straight lines for that kind of trick because you’re asking 30 kids with wildly different body sizes to move at the exact same speed at the exact same time.
After weeks and weeks of practicing, we were ready for our national audience. All we had to do was go and do it. We took buses down to Philadelphia and sent a U-Haul ahead of us with all our unicycles and gear packed in. Altogether, there must have been about 50 kids plus chaperones and instructors. I remember having a great time on the bus singing and playing games with my friends, visiting this big mall to get lunch on the way. I’m sure the adults who had to keep track of us felt even more stressed than we did.
Everyone packed into a hotel the night before the parade, with nerves and high hopes.
The day of, it was 100 degrees. Quite literally the feels-like temperature was in the hundreds. That wasn’t great news, but we had come prepared with athletic headbands that we soaked in cool water to put on our heads so we wouldn’t boil in our helmets. The parade walkers with us had belts- that were originally meant to carry beer- that held little water bottles so they could hand us water at any time. There were also auxiliary parade walkers with wagons of extra water bottles in case we ran out. We got to the loading area and tried to warm up without wasting energy.
Partway through our second flank practice maneuver, whispers started passing among the instructors. We were told to hop down and convene. One of our people had just learned that where the cobblestone road was, there would be a run of cable across the road for all the cameras where the live broadcast of the parade would be along with the TV commentators. Over the cable would be a cable protector, essentially a big, hard plastic trapezoid that would keep the cables from getting crushed. Like all of our other obstacles, this is a negligible detail if you’re in a car or walking. But trying to get a one wheeled machine over something that steep is hard, especially when you’re several feet in the air and don’t have the leverage that being closer to the ground would give you.
We had not prepared for this at all, and we had no time to come up with a solution.
The parade started. With no more time to worry. We all hopped up on our unicycles and set off. All the flanks, shoot the tunnels, banana splits and pivot-360s looked great and everybody loved us. There aren’t many child unicycling groups out there, and we were stars.
Then we entered onto a more open part of the road, and the cobblestone began the cable cover approached. There were massive crowds of people and a platform where the cameras and commentators sat. In the space right before we would enter the camera hotspots, was the cable cover.
The 20 inches were in front of us. They got over just fine. A few of them fell, but they could all just hop right back on, no big deal. The giraffes approached the cover. Our parade walkers stood next to the cover, ready to try to give us each a hand over, and one by one we all fell down. We each picked up our unicycles and ran forward so we didn’t get mowed over by the cyclist behind trying to get over.
The parade walkers scrambled to help us get back onto our unicycles, but by then we had already absolutely humiliated ourselves on national television. Worse yet, we later learned that the commentators had called us amateurs and implied that it was our lack of skill that caused us to fall over instead of a totally unforeseen obstacle. And, like, is the Gym Dandies a group of amateur circus kids? Yes. But we also put so much effort into preparing and we were so proud of what we had accomplished to get to Philadelphia. We felt like professionals. And at that moment, it really felt like all our hard work had been for nothing. This dumb cable cover had to appear and ruin our really special performance!
Despite the embarrassment, we all got back up. There was still three fourths of the parade route left after all, and even if we were mad and upset, not one Gym Dandy was about to quit and walk away in the face of difficulty.
We rode on the rest of the parade, and while I’d like to say no one fell at all, that would be a lie, but at least there wasn’t another domino situation. It was only one or two falls per person due to non cable cover related issues, which felt like no big deal in comparison. We finished out the parade strong- or as strong as you can after unicycling five miles in 100 degree heat. We had gotten back up and got back to doing what we were good at. Defying gravity.
