Sunshine Orange Crosstrek Parade: Great Barrington's Unexpected Spectacle
The event's organizer Michelle Kaplan, a local DJ, writer, and fun-haver, said the parade had no meaning.
The parade rolls through Great Barrington to the befuddlement of many.
- Michelle KaplanOn a sunny Sunday morning in Great Barrington on September 28, ordinary traffic was briefly upstaged by something extraordinary: a convoy of 14 Sunshine Orange Subaru Crosstreks, each topped with orange balloons, honking and waving their way around town. The 1st Annual Sunshine Orange Subaru Crosstrek Meet-Up and Parade was the brainchild of Michelle Kaplan, a local radio host and energetic cultural instigator who admits she came up with the event on a whim.
“I just thought it was so funny and stupid to me, and then it just kind of caught on,” Kaplan says.
Michelle Kaplan and her ride. Images Provided by Michelle Kaplan.
She's gotten sick of people asking why she was doing this. Everyone is overthinking it. “Why did I do this?” she wrote on Instagram the following morning. “To interrupt business as usual. To create a little performance art. To finally meet face-to-face the other orange Subarus we’ve only waved to in passing. To turn heads and make people laugh. To prove that weird ideas are worth following through. To bring people together for something completely ridiculous with no deeper meaning.”
Impromptu, Slightly Disruptive and Full of Laughs
The Crosstrek enthusiasts gathered in the Big Y parking lot before rolling into formation. “We went around the rotary a couple times just to be silly,” Kaplan recounts. She laughed about how an ambulance crew parked across from a liquor store reacted: “Around the second time, I heard a guy and his buddy get out of the ambulance and say, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ which was perfect.”
There was only one slight imperfection to the orange glow. “This couple came out wearing bright orange shirts. They were very cute and weird. They came all the way from New Jersey, but their subaru wasn’t Sunshine Orange,” Kaplan says with a shiver. “It was this dull orange. Not exciting at all. But they literally said, ‘Please don’t disqualify us. We drove all this way!’” She didn’t disqualify them but intends to be stricter next year.
And in one of the parade’s more surreal moments, at the end of the event a number of participants had trouble locating their vehicle in the lineup. “That made me lose it. I just thought that was great,” she says and chuckles. “Because when has that ever happened before?”
Images Provided by Michelle Kaplan.
A Happy Car
Kaplan bought her 2018 Crosstrek in 2019. “It was a rental car before,” she says. “It had some love on it.”
The appeal, she explained, was the color. “When I look out at the street and everyone just has, like, a black or a gray car, it’s so freaking boring. And when I see a car that’s decked out in stickers, or is some crazy color it just gives me a little jolt. My Subaru is just a happy car. You can’t drive that car and be in a bad mood.”
Her parade wasn’t sanctioned by any permits. “No, I didn’t get a… I said, let’s just do it quick,” Kaplan admits. “At the very end, there was a cop that somehow got into our parade, and a few people were like, ‘Was that part of the parade?’ But it wasn’t. I think he shook his head like, ‘This is so dumb.’”
Images Provided by Michelle Kaplan.
Happy Instigator
Kaplan grew up south of Boston and moved to Great Barrington in 2012. “We just wanted to settle down and be close to home, but not too close.” she says.
Her partner originally came to work at Berkshire Mountain Bakery, and she soon established herself in the local arts scene.
For more than a decade, Kaplan has hosted her long-running radio show “Mishmash” on WBCR and WGXC. “Every week is completely different,” she says, “I have a lot of special guests, or there can be shows with a theme, or just music.”
Kaplan’s knack for organizing playful community happenings extends beyond Subaru rallies. She recently sparked chatter with a “Larry David Look-Alike Contest” flyer she plastered around town. “I’ve been living here a while, and I just noticed so many older men that look like Larry David, and I just laughed to myself about it. So I just made a poster and put it all around town, just for funnies. And it really caught on. I get messages about it every day.” (The event date is TBD. She’s waiting to see if she can wrangle the real David, who she knows has been made aware of the local meme.)
Images Provided by Michelle Kaplan.
The Community Value of Absurdity
While some onlookers and attendees wondered if the Crosstrek gathering might turn into something more official, Kaplan was clear: “Someone said we should do it as a fundraiser next year,” she says, somewhat annoyed. “I’m like, ‘No, you do a fundraiser.’ This is stupid. This is just a celebration of absurdity. That’s what it is.”
Still, she admits the sense of camaraderie surprised her. “The group was very diverse, all different ages and coming from all over the place,” she says.
Kaplan insists there’s no deeper meaning to the event and that’s what makes it a fun distraction at a time when that’s what people need. In a town like Great Barrington that thrives on arts and culture, the Sunshine Orange Subaru Crosstrek Parade’s intentional lack of meaning is, in the end, what makes it mean so much.
