It started out as a joke. Or maybe a pun.

It was the mid-’80s, and Orlando had spent the last decade and a half as the center of the tourism industry for the entire state, if not the whole country. A shiny coat of paint was plastered on the city, especially every winter when the Citrus Bowl came to town. All the rough edges polished off, all the “weird” stuffed under the bed and into the backs of closets. When the Citrus Bowl and its subsequent parade rolled through town, the City Beautiful put on its best face.

Clowns and criminals amongst the assembled weirdos of the Queen Kumquat Sashay. (COURTESY OF THE ORANGE COUNTY HISTORY CENTER)

Bob Morris had been a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel for about a month when he wrote about the Citrus Bowl’s tidy-up effect on the city. He suggested an alternative. Much like Miami and Tampa would host “counter-parades” to the major games hosted in their respective towns, Bob Morris wanted to get in on the party. If Orlando was the home of the Citrus Bowl, he’d choose the least obvious of the bunch: the kumquat. The kumquat would be an alternative.

The Queen Kumquat Sashay Parade, as he dubbed it, would be attended by folks who “must possess a spirit of foolishness, an appreciation of the absurd and the guts to go against the forces of stodginess and convention.” 

A frequent theme of the Sashay was jokes about tourists. (COURTESY OF THE ORANGE COUNTY HISTORY CENTER)

With the city’s support and a handful of planning meetings around town, Orlando hosted its very first Queen Kumquat Sashay on Nov. 8, 1986 — 40 years ago this month. With a shocking arrival of 30,000 celebrants, the Sashay was off to a roaring success. Over the years, the crowd would fluctuate in size but would remain always characteristically ridiculous.

Over the decade of parades, the groups would rally behind obscure identifiers and signs, with no businesses or promotions allowed. The Orange County Regional History Center reports on a number of groups including (but not limited to) The World’s Worst Marching Band; People Who Have Seen Elvis Recently, my personal favorite; Just Some Guys Who Always Wanted To Be In a Parade; and of course, Bob Morris as the Head ’Quat, who, alongside others in the parade, would “toss kumquats into the crowd only to have kumquats ceremoniously thrown back at them.”

Elvis devotees making their loyalty known; my favorite bunch from the parade history. (COURTESY OF THE ORANGE COUNTY HISTORY CENTER)

It was chaos. Glorious, snarky, Orlando chaos.

The parade would not last a full decade and ended shortly after Bob Morris was let go by the paper.

The sentiment behind the original gathering hasn’t faded much since. Downtown Orlando was the heart of the parade four decades ago, and no question, the city has had more than a few layers of paint slapped on top of it since then. With a mayoral election looming next year, questions about what the city itself will look like in the very near future linger. Those Kumquat years are well beyond us.

Laser World was a laser light show in the Beacham Theatre that ran for a year in the early 1980s. (COURTESY OF THE ORANGE COUNTY HISTORY CENTER)

Now, I’m no Bob Morris, and it’s hardly 1986, but I can’t help but feel a little of what Bob must’ve felt 40 years ago. This town should be reminded sometimes of its one-of-a-kind character. Orlando remains the type of town that would hold a “Parade for People Who Would Not Be Permitted in Any Other Parade.” The city continues to defy categorization, made of communities who find each other in their eccentricities, their passions, or their uniqueness. We haven’t thrown a parade like that in about 30 years, though we perhaps richly deserve one.

Either way, I’ll be eating a kumquat on Nov. 8. And I bet, if we put our minds to it, we could still throw one heck of a party for the Queen Kumquat Sashay.