I love a parade....especially if I'm in it

    “Somebody has to pick up Mel Fisher.”

     “He’s dead.”

      “Well, that doesn’t mean he can’t be in the parade.”

     Mel Fisher  is the great Florida treasure hunter who discovered the wreck of the Atocha in 1985, bringing up over 40 tons of gold, silver and precious jewels and causing my mother to say “Today’s the day, I’m gonna find me a gold doubloon,” ten times an hour every time we went 

to the beach. Fisher’s quest took many years and it’s a great story of a kind of adventure that seems almost gone from the world. Plus now that so many people are so down on their luck it feels even more important to know that the pot of gold doesn’t just come to the hero at the end of the movie; sometimes it happens in real life.

            Mel Fisher is also still the official King of the World's Longest Parade , one of the many celebrations going on during the Conch Republic Independence Celebration. And yes, Mel was in the parade.

            It was Bill Murphy of Fairvilla Megastore who got the last word in in the exchange above, and a cardboard cut-out of Mel rode shotgun with Bill at the head of the parade that happened last night in Bill’s award-winning 1950 Willys Overton candy-apple red Jeepster. The hour-long shindig which ran down Duval Street was filled with all t

he classic Key West goofballs, including but not limited to: a guy wearing a hanky-sized swatch of tye-dye over his wang, a drag queen with  the most posh lampshade on her head that I’ve ever seen mat and enough pirates to populate six more Johnny Depp sequals. It was hard not to notice a lot of those were outfitted at Fairvilla, whose selection of pirate wear we talked about a bit yesterday. You can tell a bit about a town from what sells at the sex shop. In Orlando they make a lot of room for fetish gear. Here in Key West, where the parties never end

, the costumes take up about half the store and the pirate costumes have a large and prominent place – we’re not talking about felt hats and fake parrots here, but serious brocade coats by Shrine and corsets that make everything a sexy synch. This is beach town that is indivisible in its desire to

 get dressed up and messed up.

            Joseph Martens, who you may remember from yester

day’s blog and, oh yeah, HIS FREAKING APPEARANCE WITH UFUCKING2 , drove the car I got to ride in and together we winged a good 20 pounds of Mardi Gras beads at the screaming crowd, starting a bead-war with the car in front of us (it was friendly fire, we swear) and generally having the best time anyone was having in Key West at that moment and that’s saying a lot (right - the drinking began 24 hours earlier, myself, Shari Smith Murphy and Joseph with the lovely Key Lime martinis that started the party).

       My favorite part was being flashed by men, none of whom went the fully monty just having guys lift of their shirts and offer some nippage all for the sake of some brightly colored trinkets made me understand the exact moment Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis thought “You know, I could get used to

 this.” Short of just carrying beads in my car and making it generally known that if you flash me you’ll get something shiny, I’m not sure how to parlay this, but I’m sure love will find a way.

            We did  decide that next time, though, since we were

 Fairvilla sponsored and all, we should throw pleasure beads next time.

            Mel is doing fine, by the way. Bill dropped him off at the store where, as far as we know, last we heard, he was watching "Pirates" and couldn’t be happier. It’s good to be the king.