Jeremy Danneman’s birthday parade winds through Stuyvesant Town with random skater kids in tow. — Photos by Joel Myers

This year for his birthday, East Williamsburg resident Jeremy Danneman decided the typical party wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to put on something else entirely, a totally new kind of celebration. To avoid the unimaginative, he would have to muster all his stamina for… a day-long Parade of One.

	Danneman at the UN. Click for more.

“I thought about having a party and decided I didn’t want to have one this year,” Danneman explained. ”And the idea of a parade came into my head, and before I really even thought it through I sent out an email to everyone I knew saying I was going to do a parade.” He soon found out it took quite a bit of planning to pull off the ambitious route he had in mind. 

Danneman began the parade on his own, his alto sax in tow, from his home in East Williamsburg at 11:15 a.m. He marched into Queens via the Pulaski Bridge, playing saxophone much of the way, meeting up with his first co-parader in Long Island City. The parade then continued on to the Queensboro Bridge (I met up with him at the pedestrian entrance), where he managed to jam his way through the 40-minute walk with a non-stop bebop improv session. Construction workers on the Queens side below the bridge looked up at the parade as it passed, grinning appreciatively. He continued on his way, attracting amused looks from several joggers, as well as a sour glance from a pissy girl on a cell phone. 

Upon finally reaching the end of the bridge at 2:45 p.m., small hand bells were rung at his arrival into Manhattan. Danneman put his horn away temporarily, and the parade became more of a “just some people walking down the street” kind of thing, while the parade leader went for a bottle of water and prepared himself for the next step — an impromptu concert outside the United Nations. 

All the flags were down when the entourage finally arrived at the building — apparently no one at the U.N. had been notified of Danneman’s visit. He had originally planned to set up in front of the Visitor’s Center entrance, but the “NO DEMONSTRATIONS” sign — not to mention two no-nonsense security guards standing with their thumbs on their belts — convinced Danneman to move down the way. He then played a 45-minute set straight while others started making parade signs with slogans like “SPRUNG,” and “THIS IS A PARADE.” A number of people stopped to enjoy his music, including a second group of construction workers across the street, one of whom did some kind of Charleston dance and bobbed his head a lot.

After the concert was finished at 4 p.m., as the birthday boy was putting away his horn two Pakistani gentlemen who had been watching for a while and trying not to be noticed finally came up and asked him why he was playing. Lily Maase, a Bushwicker and co-parader who had planned to tag along for an hour and ended up staying for five, pointed to a sign that said “March of One.” The gentlemen pointed out that it was in fact March 21st, not March 1st, at which point some explanation of the tricky double meaning of the word “March” ensued. Danneman finally explained the logic behind the parade — something he was forced to do several more times throughout the day — by saying, “Well, we’re celebrating Spring. And uh, we’re trying to unite the nations. Because uh, we’re in front of the United Nations. And it’s my birthday.” 

The parade was in a lethargic funk after the UN, trudging down sparsely trafficked First Avenue — but Danneman kept trucking, confident that things would soon turn around. And sure enough, the Parade-of-Now-a-Few came to life when it took a detour through Stuyvesant Town. Danneman got into a groove on his sax with a bumping klezmer melody, and kids and onlookers smiled (and even danced a little) as they watched the parade pass by. Several people joined the parade at intervals, walking behind Danneman’s strong leadership with thumbs up, grins, and shouts of “Hell yeah!”

In the East Village, the parade euphoria was in full swing, and the little entourage made several laps around Tompkins Square Park with Danneman pulling out one hip riff after another. We picked up a few paraders, including a gardener on his way to buy mulch when he heard the sax and decided he had a few minutes to spare. We handed him an extra sign and he marched with the group for a while.

Later, the party headed over the Williamsburg Bridge to a bar on the other side, and finally back to Bushwick.

What was initially planned as a Parade of One ended up attracting dozens of participants and entertaining hundreds with kookiness, absurdity — and hot some klezmer. It left me looking with anticipation to next year’s parade when we can again celebrate, as Danneman put it, “that fateful day when I first arrived on planet Earth.”