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A Million Firecrackers -- and Us AsianConnections is proud to present the adventures of Ben Fong-Torres, our Renaissance man, author, broadcaster, and longtime writer and senior editor at legendary Rolling Stone Magazine. This guy's our hero! There's even a major motion picture coming out this Fall 2000 featuring a
character about Ben, written and directed by Cameron Crowe. (Cameron wrote and directed Tom Cruise in "Jerry Maguire.") Early on in the broadcast of the San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade, I told the story of the dragon chasing after the pearl, and, seconds later, told it again, word for word. An errant extra page of script made me do it, but after the repeat performance, I should've asked my co-anchor, Thuy Vu: "Is there an echo out here?" "Out here" was the big, black KTVU tent, propped up high on Union Square, where Thuy and I sat and watched the parade�mostly on little monitors. That's because the parade marches by behind us. And that's because, when the cameras are on us, they want viewers to see the most colorful backdrop possible. And what better than the parade? With more than a million firecrackers exploded before the Year of the Dragon was officially rung in, the parade was nothing less than a blast. Sure, it's oversized, corny, and commercial�I cringed when I saw that the mallet that struck the parade-opening gong was draped with a banner advertising the sponsoring telecommunications behemoth�but, hey, it's a parade. And, as we said at the top of the show, it's an American event. I was only surprised that the pearl that the dragon was chasing wasn't sponsored by the Diamond Warehouse. It being the year of the most celebrated creature in the Chinese Zodiac, we couldn't help but repeat ourselves�even without duplicate script pages. Just about every float, every contingent featured some kind of tribute to the dragon. The occasional respite�the wacky Stanford University Marching Band; the acrobatic Cheer San Francisco, and the Millennium Ball (Oh, all right; it was the "Bay Area Ford Stores Millennium Ball")�were most welcome. The Ford entry, which I called "a disco ball on steroids," included a gang of dancers who could've been working the Grammys. And then there was the group who shambled by in T-shirts and jeans; another unit on stilts; a woman who kicked bowls into a neat stack on her head�while riding a unicycle. It was all very Ed Sullivan; all American. To avoid the traffic mess that is as much a part of the parade as any lion dance or firecracker, I took public transportation to and from. Packed into a subway car with happy parade-goers holding souvenirs and umbrellas, I heard nothing but praise for the event. And a couple of days later, the ratings were in. Despite huge crowds along the streets�police estimated upwards of a million spectators�enough people stayed home and watched the broadcast that the parade won its two-hour time period. Happy Year of the Dragon, indeed. ____________________ Ben Fong-Torres, long-time writer and editor at Rolling Stone magazine, is the author of four books, including his memoirs, The Rice Room: Growing Up Chinese-American, and his latest, Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll. He is Editorial Director of myplay.com, an Internet music site that offers free Web space, where users can grab, store, mix, play, and share music of all kinds. Click to Ben
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