If You Like Parades, You’ll Be in Seventh Heaven Today

Three parades today will offer movie stars, an Olympic boxing champ and a synchronized briefcase drill team marching and gliding on floats through the streets of Hollywood, Los Angeles and Pasadena.

The Hollywood Christmas Parade, complete with television and movie stars, begins at 6 p.m. with Jimmy Stewart as grand marshal of the oldest and biggest of the three choices.

Olympic gold medal-winning boxer Paul Gonzales will join actor Ricardo Montalban and other Latino community leaders in the East Los Angeles Christmas Parade.

The Doo Dah Parade, a parody of the stately Rose Parade, will bring offbeat entrants such as the young professionals who march in time down the streets of Pasadena, briefcases in hand, to an expected crowd of 40,000 this morning.

The Hollywood parade will start on Sunset Boulevard, with 2,858 people marching, singing or riding in the parade that draws such Hollywood luminaries as Angie Dickinson, Betty White, Lorenzo Lamas, Ed Asner, Tim Reid, Joan Van Ark, Ernest Borgnine, LeVar Burton and Cesar Romero.

At the other end of the parade spectrum is the 10-year-old Doo Dah Parade, with its trademark lack of structure and pomp and circumstance.

But what started out as an anti-establishment spoof on the world-famous Rose Parade, has come into its own in the parade world, with its own 5K run this year and 140 entries.