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Praise the lard
BEWARE Blairgowrie, the Balloon Platoon are arriving in their twin- town tomorrow, fresh from the Festival.
The diary's pick of the parade on Sunday was not the dragon or the pipers, but this "bunch of clowns with no make up" from Pleasanton, California.
The Platoon had caught our eye out the office window earlier in the day. A group of sixtysomething guys with mops were parading up and down, conducted by another guy with a toilet plunger. Pythonesque to be sure, or maybe it was the "jannies" involved in one of their Masonic rituals.
But come the parade all was revealed and we hunted down the head honchos - "commodore" David "that was no plunger that was my sceptre" Muck, Dick Howard and Brad Hirst, together with the rest of the gang and the wives at the MacDonald Hotel.
This wacky crew is from, believe it or not, Pleasanton's Presbyterian Church and could teach their Calvinist cousins in the Kirk here how to have a good time.
The boys from company B were started off by Dick in the mid-1970s and have paraded at community events around the world. "It was inspired by Carol Burnett's 'fat woman' routine on television. But we went for 'fat sailors'. I was at Goodyear at the time and had a truck of inner tubes that we used. Two queen-size bed quilts are required to complete each uniform."
Goodyear blimps rather than Michelin men, the church group that makes you chortle attends about ten parades a year and has to turn down three times as many.
As Brad says: "The world's a secure place when this part of the US navy's around."
Secure but not so sane, and all the better for it.
Law breaker
THERE are still luvvies who are not in it for only the lolly. One forsaking the visceral fleeting fame and fortune of television to attend the Fringe, looking for a higher artistic plane in which to practise their art, is Richard Beaufort.
The "thesp" who's the spitting image of a young Jeremy Irons - in...