Papa’s Last Great Balloon Launch

Wooly Bully, Amen.

In true Rainbow Traveling Show style, there was much fireside sitting, heavy binge drinking, tearful goodbyes and storytelling belly-laughs at Papa Dollar’s Memorial and Wake in sunny Florida on Wednesday, February 25, 2009. With just about every one of the ‘usual suspects’ up to no good from start to finish.

Not the least of which was when the heir-apparent put my daughter Tash in charge of the blank-book in which we were all supposed to write something pithy about our old friend’s multi-storied life and times. She asked him what day it was so she could use her beautiful calligraphic skills to etch the title page, and he told her it was February 29, 2009. She (not paying attention to dates much) believed him. And now the precious family keepsake is forever dated Leap-Day in an Odd Year, something that’s never once actually occurred in the entire history of date-keeping!

But the best – better even than the formal Medicine Show eulogies – was the balloon launch, something Ras Papa was internationally infamous for. For this one it had been decided to launch Papa’s ratty old hat with the balloons. Which the 120 or so people present had to shuttle from his front porch helium tank to the mower polo field so they could be tied together into a freeform… thing. The animal balloons had sat in the sun too long, mostly exploded before they could be filled, but we did get a few. People drew or wrote things on the regular balloons with Sharpees before filling them, each with a personal note or charicature that related to Papa’s life.

As the old-timers and Jason built the construction, Odin the aero-engineer kept trying to tell them that they had to move to the other side of the field in order to launch, or they’d end up in the power lines. But NOOOOOO… mass of shape-shifting balloon sculpture and a ratty old hat finally was let loose, only to become hopelessly entangled in the power lines in record time. I was almost rolling on the grass with laughter, this was something Papa would have been absolutely livid about.

Not to be undone by grief-induced dumb-ness, the perps almost immediately decided to shoot it down so they could start over with fresh balloons from a more reliable vantage point. As we backed up in awe, they began setting off major fireworks right smack dab underneath the trapped balloons, missing them badly while causing the crowd to flee in panic (if they weren’t laughing too hard to move). Once it became apparent that the big boomers weren’t doing the trick, someone brought out the Roman candles. The sheer audacity of the cross-fire was amazing, considering nobody got hit!

More of us fell laughing to the ground, it was just too too funny. Eventually they managed to pop or deflate all but one of the balloons, but the mess was still firmly attached to the power line with a sad and ragged hat dangling forlornly underneath. It’ll be there for at least 20 years, I figure. Or until the next time the power company turns up. The face drawn on that last balloon standing was a tragic clown. Perfectly cosmically correct.

Back to the fire and more revelry, and everything went great until someone (who shall remain judiciously unnamed) set off a box of leftover fireworks on the bar of Papa’s Cantina. I figured it would burn down (and some of us were still sober enough to do a bucket brigade from the hot tub out front), but somehow it survived. The visual of major fireworks secondary boomers coming out from all directions as people were running and ducking is one that’ll stay with me forever. Not cosmically correct, but definitely cosmically incorrect enough to go down in history!

We’ll miss you being in the world every day for the rest of our lives, old friend. But you’ll never be far from our fond (and/or slightly singed) memories. Wooly Bully, Amen.

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