I’m not into parades for the same reason that I’m not into musicals, which boils down to an excess of enthusiasm — one might say an embarrassment of enthusiasm. Parades are sort of embarrassing. People in a parade go by in a state of unnatural enthusiasm — what is marching but unnaturally enthusiastic walking? — and then everyone watching the parade must respond with enthusiasm of their own, or the whole enterprise falls apart.
But last year I learned a destabilizing fact, one that threatened to change my anti-parade outlook forever. A friend told me that he was going to join something called the Sue Pasco Memorial Williston Precision Lawn Chair March & Drill Team, sometimes conveniently shortened to SPMWPLCM&DT. Each year during the town’s Fourth of July parade, my friend explained, a group of Willistonians convenes to perform an esoteric routine that involves marching in formation with lawn chairs, something no one ever needs to do in the course of normal life and that therefore simply must be done.
This year, I decided I had to join them. SPMWPLCM&DT, to me, spelled personal growth. Could I become a parade person? What exciting opportunities awaited me on the other side of getting over myself?
When googling yielded no discernible way to get in touch with the organizers, my friend put me in touch with one of them, Lori Fisher. Two days before the parade, I received an amazingly detailed email from Fisher confirming my “non-transferable media invite.” The email advised: “Please prep in advance for the demands by marching around your domicile on an eight count, stretching, hydrating, and getting a good night’s sleep every night.” The email further advised that SPMWPLCM&DT’s single annual practice would occur on the morning of the parade at the home of Fisher and her husband, Ben Rose, between 8:14 and 8:58 a.m.
Also per the email, the only permissible variety of lawn chair was the vintage kind with a metal frame, ideal for the precision snapping sound for which SPMWPLCM&DT is renowned. I do not own this kind of lawn chair, nor are they easy to come by in the modern outdoor furniture marketplace. I had to borrow one from my SPMWPLCM&DT-insider friend.
Due to my failure to leave my house on time, I arrived at the Fisher-Rose residence at 8:20 a.m., six minutes behind schedule. I stood awkwardly in their driveway with my chair, wondering if my non-transferable media credential would be revoked as punishment for my imprecision. Instead, Fisher, wearing a straw fedora and red kerchief, greeted me warmly and offered me fresh-baked scones and coffee. She told me that the group is always looking for new recruits and repeatedly insisted that I include in this article her email address, which is lorifishervt@gmail.com.
Both Fisher and Rose are recently retired — Fisher as executive director of the Lake Champlain Committee, Rose as a section chief for Vermont Emergency Management. The couple have been involved in SPMWPLCM&DT for more than three decades. To the best of their knowledge, it’s the only active lawn chair brigade in Vermont and a known quantity in the small but vibrant ecosystem of synchronized lawn chair performance — an ecosystem that encompasses Wolfeboro, N.H.; Dunwoody, Ga.; and Ely, Minn.
“I think we’re, like, the fifth or 10th most popular lawn chair team, if you YouTube it,” Rose told me.
Fisher and Rose’s late neighbor, Sue Pasco, started the lawn chair team in the ’80s. Pasco taught English at Essex High School and was extremely serious about being unserious. Not long after Fisher and Rose moved into the neighborhood, in 1989, they found a typed note under their door inviting them to join the “prestigious Williston Lawn Chair March and Drill Team.” They’ve marched faithfully ever since. Their son wrote his college application essay about the lawn chair team, as did a not-insignificant number of other Champlain Valley Union High School graduates. (“It’s a noted résumé builder,” Fisher said.) When Pasco died of cancer in 2002, Fisher and Rose took over as lead organizers and intend to keep it going in her honor.
Last Friday morning, the group of 27 included several 20-year veterans, a handful of first-time marchers, a visitor from the UK (“We should add ‘International’ to the acronym!” someone joked), and Seth Hibbert and his 10-year-old son, Lewis, whose task that day would be to hold the sign displaying the entire team name, minus the word “Precision,” which had been omitted in error.
“The reason for the short practice is to keep that sense of the edge of danger.” Lori Fisher
Hibbert wore a short-sleeve button-down printed with SPMWPLCM&DT-approved lawn chairs. He’d ordered the shirt online, from “some sort of sketchy, probably Chinese print shop,” and had been pleasantly surprised when it arrived on time and was not the size of his hand.
This was Hibbert’s second year in the parade. Before last year’s march, he had found a regulation lawn chair at the dump, but the webbing was compromised. “I was kind of worried I’d fall through,” he said. This anxiety did not come to fruition, but he rewove the webbing this year, just in case. (Fisher confirmed that someone once did fall through a chair during the parade and sustained only mild embarrassment.)
As we assembled in the cul-de-sac for rehearsal, Fisher gave a pep talk. “The reason for the short practice is to keep that sense of the edge of danger,” she told us. Aside from some especially hot, humid years and the time the team marched behind an equestrian group and had to negotiate piles of manure, the rigors of a lawn chair parade, for the average spry newcomer, are mostly psychological.
Just as we were about to begin practicing, I blurted to the commander, Alison Duback, in a tone that might have sounded normal if she were a skydiving instructor and not a lawn chair brigade commander: “Do you have any quick tips or tricks?!”
“Don’t worry,” she reassured me. “We’ll go over everything as a group.”
As someone who performs poorly in coordinated activities involving large groups and yet persists in doing them, I was not reassured.
One by one, we walked through the routines: “present chair,” in which we were supposed to hold our chairs in front of us and open and close them with great ceremony; the “short routine,” in which we placed our chairs on the ground and marched around them to a four-count; the “medium” routine, which I’ve already forgotten; the “long routine,” in which we sat in our chairs and crossed and uncrossed our legs while pretending to read or take selfies; and the “arabesque,” a balletic maneuver in which we balanced on our chairs with one arm extended in front of us and the opposite leg behind.
The arabesque, Rose told me, is a crowd favorite. He admitted to stealing it from the Wolfeboro team. “We’ve generally resisted change, but we couldn’t resist that,” he said.
By the end of the half-hour rehearsal, I felt less imperiled. For one thing, the sound of two dozen metal lawn chairs snapping in unison, or almost in unison, had produced in me an altered state of consciousness not unlike being stoned. For another, to my enormous relief, I wasn’t the only person who occasionally messed up.
Lynn Blevins, in the row ahead of me, has been part of the brigade for about 15 years. “I like the ridiculousness of it,” she said. “You’re bringing joy to people at your own expense.”
SPMWPLCM&DT also occasions the sort of desperation that results in moments of serendipity with strangers. One year, when Blevins could only come up with a nonregulation lawn chair for the parade, she approached a random woman on the sidelines, who happened to be sitting on an approved chair, and asked if they could swap. The woman looked slightly taken aback, but she obliged. When Blevins caught up with her later to return the chair, the woman told her that it had belonged to her late mother and she’d been tickled to see it put to such good use.
To get to the start of the route, we had to walk the length of the parade, a little over a mile on Route 2, through the part of Williston that I know primarily as the Place Where Best Buy Isn’t. People had set up lawn chairs of their own along the side of the road, and I couldn’t help but notice how few would have made the cut. When Pasco first started the lawn chair team, Rose said, the webbed, metal-framed chairs were the dominant species. The troupe could blend in with the spectators, then take everyone by surprise by jumping into the parade.
Today, a couple dozen people carrying vintage lawn chairs cannot pass unrecognized on the Fourth of July in Williston. “There go the lawn chair people!” a woman on the sidelines gasped as we walked by. “They’re the best part of the whole thing!”
I lost track of how many variations of that sentence I heard. One woman filming on her iPhone screamed “YES! YES! YES!” with the sound of every precision metal click.
The sound of grown adults losing their minds over people marching with lawn chairs dispelled any lingering traces of self-consciousness. During an arabesque routine, I put my chair down too close to Blevins in front of me and nearly got kicked in the head. No problem. Only one moment felt even slightly weird. We’d reached a point along the route where, inexplicably, nobody was cheering.
“Make some noise, you guys!” someone yelled from within our ranks. “Otherwise, we feel ridiculous!”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Joining the Parade | Why march in a lawn chair brigade? The better question is: Why not?”
This article appears in The Cartoon Issue 2025.
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