What is the parade’s weakness? Many of the people taking part do not particularly want to listen to anyone. And they certainly do not respect the volunteers. More than 50 volunteers were enlisted to support the parade, mostly young people from the Bolesławiec scouting unit.
The people in the parade also do not want to remain in front of the stage after the exhausting march to listen to the rather boring opening ceremony of the ceramic festival. Even the announcement of the competition results, in which they take part, does not keep them at this compulsory ceremony.
The mayor has never admitted that he has no idea how to address the parade participants’ desertion from the area in front of the stage. Or the fact that they disperse in groups in search of shade. Or simply return home, like the employees of companies who do not take part in the competitions.
The Ceramic Parade was probably criticized most strongly by restaurateur Nowak, who promoted his own initiatives and his own clay parade, today known as a theater. To Nowak, the city parade was a parade of garbage trucks and water tankers from the water utility. He criticized it for having nothing artistic about it, saying that only municipal companies took part. The criticism was exaggerated, and Nowak himself seems to have come to that conclusion.
This year he surprised everyone by taking part in the city parade, riding his tricycle. For the first time—and probably the last—he joined it and even entered the competition for an individual costume or model. And best of all: he won. Although he had already ridden the bicycle more than once.
In the past, Zakłady Ceramiczne, Ceramika Artystyczna, Manufaktura and Millena ceramics marched together. Zakłady Ceramiczne even came up with the Zdobinki for the parade—people painted with little stamps—but then Wiesław Ogrodnik arrived and, offended by the mayor over the incidents involving Orka and president Tomczyk, put an end once and for all to the company’s parades for the city.
Ceramika Artystyczna took part in it continuously with its peacocks. However, the company has its own festival activities: the Ceramic Garden, which involves so much work that it probably no longer has the energy and resources for an additional parade. The same may apply to Manufaktura, and now, under a different president, to Zakłady Ceramiczne.
Another reason for the ceramics companies’ reluctance to take part in this year’s parade may have been that they learned about the money allocated to organize various things. As much as PLN 100,000. But it went not to a ceramic-business entrepreneur’s event, but to restaurateur Nowak’s. The same Nowak who criticized the Ceramic Parade.
What prompted the mayor to decide that he no longer wanted a parade that only he wanted?
Logically speaking, it must have been the organizational fiasco involving football hooligans.
However, having known the mayor for so many years, I am also inclined to admit that his carefully concealed homophobia may have been the reason here.
Bringing rainbow flags in front of the stage could have shaken Piotr Roman and caused a small, personal earthquake. That is, of course, my personal opinion.
Hearing how much the slogan “We are all made of the same clay” on the rainbow bothered him, and how strongly he felt obscured by that very banner, who knows. Perhaps it was precisely the rainbow guests who took part in the parade, having been invited by us at istotne.pl, who caused the change in the format of the ceramic festival.
That would be an enormous influence exerted by LGBT+ people, don’t you think? Even by so few of them. All it took was holding the rainbow banner high.