Happy Belated OFFICIAL Thanksgiving Day Parade!
National Operations 2 Comments 
becky, gsusa, OFFICIAL scarf, redcoat band, sylvia acevedo, university of georgia
It’s a few days after Thanksgiving, and I’ve just gotten back from the strange and mysterious world of no WiFi. Yes, believe it or not, there are places in this world where homes have NO WiFi! Our family’s farmhouse in very rural South Georgia is one of those places. But you can get 4G service if you have Verizon, so all is not lost. You just have to watch your data usage. But a very nice trade-off is seeing the Milky Way Galaxy and gorgeous sunsets, so I don’t mind going without WiFi for a couple of days.
While we were there, my two daughters and I watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade for guess what … The West Virginia University Marching Band! Seriously, I really did! A friend of mine from my UGA Redcoat Band days is the Director of Bands at WVU, so I was hoping to spot him. I did not see Scott, but I did see…
THE OFFICIAL GIRL SCOUT FLOAT!
Now I normally watch very little of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade because I get antsy after a little while and feel like I need to be up and moving about. But this year, I had TWO things to look out for! Plus, we had the requirements to get the Girl Scout Float patch, so we camped in front of the TV. (I did get up and get ready for the day during the commercials.) I think my youngest daughter was more interested in the Pikachu balloon.
We had seen many pictures of the float up to this point, but what would it look like in action? Who was going to be on it? Anybody famous? Yes, it featured two country music stars that I had never heard of. Everybody else seemed to know who Maddie & Tae were, but since I don’t listen to country music, I had no idea. But I didn’t care! They were just background music for what we wanted to see.
I thought the float looked great! And – what’s that? Were those OFFICIAL scarves that I saw? Yes, they were! Immediately my phone (sans WiFi) began to blow up with text messages and Facebook notifications from friends who also spotted the OFFICIAL scarves. Becky of this blog’s hiking fame wrote on Facebook: “I said, ‘Hey! Look at all of those official scarves!” My husband was confused.'”
While I have critical of GSUSA for various reasons at times, I enjoyed the Girl Scout float and OFFICIAL scarves on display for what they were – good publicity.
Did you miss the parade? Here’s a YouTube video of the whole broadcast. The float makes its appearance at 1:07:55.
Here’s Sylvia Acevedo again rockin’ the OFFICIAL scarf!
Great blog. I also get antsy and don’t sit through the whole parade. This year of course I had to. Being on the west coast I knew it was about at the 10:30 point. That helped.
Great blog post about a great float and of course, the scarves really did look awesome. I think to the right of (left looking at the photo) is Kathy Hopinkah Hannan, the President of our GSUSA board. There was a lot of complaining on various posts about what the girls were wearing, whether they were real girl scouts (maybe, maybe not if just Macy’s relations per their ‘rules), and the type of lyrics that Maddie & Tae sing and whether or not they are suitable role models, and of course – the money – spending girl money on the float. Frankly I don’t care about all of that, even the money – I recall it was funded by directed donor funds, not cookie money – it really helped promote this program. And it doesn’t hurt that the float and Maddie & Tae were in the top seven musical moments (at least per this website) – even more positive exposure. And, there was no Boy Scout float. 🙂
http://www.axs.com/7-best-musical-moments-from-the-2016-macy-s-thanksgiving-day-parade-110551
6. Maddie & Tae – “Fly”
It’s perfect that darling country duo Maddie & Tae sang their inspirational anthem “Fly” on the Girls Scouts of America float. Girls Scouts is all about empowering young women and the uplifting song fit the moment and the float like a glove. This was also Girl Scouts’ parade debut and they couldn’t have paired a better act to ride along.