This Year's Coney Island Mermaid Parade Cheers With Color, Shimmer

By Kirstyn Brendlen & Erica Price, Brooklyn Paper

Scores of colorful mermaids and sea creatures braved scorching heat and a summer storm on Saturday for the 42nd annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade.

The parade bills itself as the largest art parade in the U.S., and an homage to the nabe’s wacky past and present.

Decked out in glitter and tentacles, Mermaid Queen and Neptune King Joe Coleman led the procession of marching bands, floats, and nautical homemade costumes and puppets down Surf Avenue and onto the boardwalk.

Hurrying to catch up to the parade in body paint and high heels was Paris Alexander, an artist and drag performer who had slept through his alarm and raced to get to Coney Island from his home in Bushwick.

Alexander was dressed as the sun, he said, in a golden feathered headdress designed by his friend Darrell Thorne, thigh-high heels, and plenty of shimmering paint.

It was Alexander’s first time marching in the parade, and only his second time attending. The boardwalk presented a challenge for his high heels, which kept getting caught and tripping him up — requiring some Willy Wonka-esque tricks as he righted himself and turned the stumble into a dance move.

Some of Alexander’s friends attend the parade every year, he said, which moved him to try it out last weekend. It reminded him, he said, of the Pride parades he used to attend in Vermont and Arizona.

“There’s something about, like, weirdo parades, where somehow it’s always like the same one,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what the looks are, or where it is … I don’t know how to describe the feeling. It’s cheesy to say I felt like I belonged, but I really did.”

Jan Aiello, her son Dave, and her husband Mike took part in the parade with a pair of homemade, seemingly odd-couple puppets: a mermaid and Godzilla.

But, the former Bensonhurst resident said, they make sense together. The mermaid is really the Ondine, a spirit they created as a guardian of the “healthy Hudson River.”

Godzilla, she said, is “also an environmental feature … he’s a cautionary tale for anti-nuclear weapons.” (Godzilla, who was finished only a few days before the parade, was already headed back to the car with Aiello’s husband when Brooklyn Paper caught up with her on Saturday.)

Though the blistering heat caused Aiello’s flip-flops to melt and stick to the hot pavement, she said the parade was “the antidote to that 21st century despair.”

“I see that whole panoply of human beings, all ages, interacting in that immediate moment, face-to-face, it feeds you, it just feeds your whole psyche,” she said. “…it’s this environment where people can safely just be together, be joyous, be inventive. It’s all good, it’s all good.”

Swimming among the vast parade ecosystem of fish and merpeople were the Pleiades Puppets, headed up by Deb Roth.

Roth, a Bay Ridge lawyer who picked up puppetry after a long break in 2019 and dove headfirst into the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, decided to go “full throttle” at the Mermaid Parade in 2022.

She and the Pleiades Puppets have been there every year since, a group of about 15 people working together in a “huge collaboration.”

Their theme this year was “Fishing for Compliments,” and the centerpiece of their contingent were four “monsters” in colorful outfits created with tulle, chicken wire, and plastic. It took Roth and her crew about six months to finish the outfits and their puppeteered fish, she said.

“It was fantastic,” she said of the parade. “We were all suffering and hot, but I think the thing that brings me the most joy is not only the people loving it … but I didn’t realize when I started working with a bunch of other people that it was so meaningful to them to be able to participate in something like this.”

The crew were “beside themselves with excitement,” Roth said. They’ll be back next year with a new theme — last year was “Reefer Madness.” She said she’s grateful to Coney Island USA for hosting the parade and allowing people to strut their stuff and show off their work without shame.

“Before I became a lawyer, I was a painter-printmaker,” she said. “I think it sounds cliché, but the whole COVID situation got me re-thinking about what I wanted to do.”

After the parade, there’s an annual ceremony on the beach, where participants throw fruit into the sea as an offering and celebrate the official (but unofficial) start to summer.

When he got to the end of the route, Alexander said he was given a bunch of grapes to toss into the waves. The ceremony and magic of the Mermaid Parade is part of what drew him to participate, he said.

“There are a lot of things in New York that are a little inauthentic, kind of like the Pride Parade,” he said. “But there are still these underpinnings of community marches that I think still maintain some kind of meaning and authenticity. Even though the Mermaid Parade was full of tourists and families … there’s still all of these freaks who are walking down Coney Island.”

Editor’s note: A version of this story originally ran in Brooklyn Paper. Click here to see the original story.

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