Earlier in life I frequented parades, where I photographed bystanders and participants alike. Berea, Kentucky celebrates each September a food delicacy — Spoon Bread — with processions, demonstrations, foot-races and dancing. The bread is a gooey cornmeal concoction bordering on pudding; it is sweet, containing fresh cream and eggs in copious amounts. Thousands of the town’s inhabitants and outsiders by the hundreds gather to pay homage and consume the local dish.

Behind Gail — the mom in our photograph — a flurry of eye-catching balloons injects angular motion into our composition. Gail appears a robust and well-nourished woman about forty, topped in a deep plum color. She dwarfs her daughter Hannah, who wears a tiara and white ribbon on her head and seems to perch uneasily hunched over on her mother’s lap. As mother-daughter look-alike winners they have earned a coveted distinction, thus capturing a much sought-after privilege: they are mounted in royal fashion and glide down the boulevard atop the Spoon Bread Queen’s cherry red Ford Mustang. Concerning the old man seated next to the girls (whose right arm appears badly withered), I can provide no definite explanation. He could be the Grandpa in the drama. Extrapolating from his red, white and blue-checkered fishing hat, and the splashy collage draping his body, we might conclude he is a one among the town’s eccentric characters, a type of colorful individual contained in vast numbers within the borders of Kentucky.