MOSCOW, Vt. (AP) – There won’t be 76 trombones leading the Moscow Fourth of July parade. Instead there will be about a dozen radios.

Members of the Moscow All Men’s Marching Radio Band will carry them on their shoulders, backed by radios on front lawns and windowsills tuned to a local radio station that plays Souza marches and other tunes suitable for the occasion.

The Radio Band will be followed by floats, fire trucks, antiques cars, horses and an occasional llama that make their way down the tenth-of-a-mile stretch of the main street past the Moscow General Store and back.

The parade starts at 10 a.m. and doesn’t last long.

“It’s the shortest parade in the world. If you miss it by 10 minutes, you’ve missed it,” said Tom Hamilton, one of the founders of the parade.

Participants say preparations are sweetened by shortness.

“It’s never organized,” said Ed Rhodes, who has never missed the annual parade since it started. “It’s gotten so it runs itself. I just show up with the American flag and march in front.”

The Radio Band always wins the award for best band, Rhodes said. But the star attraction is the Moscow All Ladies Lawn Chair Drill Team.

A group of women 50 and up do a routine with old metal lawn chairs.

“We swing them around our bodies and swing them in front of our faces, and open and close them to make a ‘clap clap, clap.’ We sit down in them and point our toes and everyone thinks that’s great,” said Jane Christopherson, one of the founders of the parade.

“We’ve been asked to be in other parades,” she said.

And all they do is practice for 20 minutes in her backyard before the parade.

Although there is little planning for the parade, there are unwritten rules. Floats can’t be built until the morning of the parade and they must be thrifty.

“You have to keep that in mind when you’re watching the parade,” said Hamilton’s daughter, Nina Totland, 31, who was in the first parade. She’s visiting from Norway with her two children.

The family gets up at 5 a.m. the morning of the Fourth for coffee, donuts, and to build the masterpiece.

“We have a very private yard, so there’s an element of surprise,” Totland said. She wouldn’t say what the creation would be this year, only that she and her father always have different ideas.

“He likes to go with volume, height, impact; he likes to be seen,” she said. “He always goes vertical. I like quality.”

They’ve gone with zoos, ships, superheroes and political themes.

Rhodes likes it simpler. “One year I took the old Christmas tree in the yard, stuck it in a garden cart and decorated it with Christmas lights,” said Rhodes. He linked a dozen extension cords, plugged them into a friend’s home and unrolled them as he went.

Another rule is the newest household to move into the neighborhood must clean up after the animals. If no droppings are left behind, the resident must bring manure to scoop up, Christopherson said.

Moscow is a hamlet within the town of Stowe. The five or six families on the main street came up with the idea for the parade when they discovered the town of Stowe wasn’t organizing one for the 1976 bicentennial.

“We had one float, which was a lawn tractor with an umbrella on it with a drum, and all the kids decorated their bikes, and there were couple of horses in it,” said Rudi Hamilton.

Word has traveled, and now the parade often draws a crowd of 2,500 or more. It runs from the lightpole at the storage shed in Stowe to the ‘y’ in the road at Moscow Road and River Road and back again, Rhodes said.

“We don’t tell police. It’s just a block party,” Rhodes said. And if cars try to drive through, “we let people go through but we scowl,” he said.

Parade goers park as far as a half-mile away and walk to see the fleeting event.

“If you don’t get there early, you walk a long way and miss the parade,” Rhodes said. “You walk a long way to get quality,” he added.

AP-ES-07-03-03 1456EDT