The 2nd Annual Sunshine Orange Subaru Crosstrek Parade rolls through downtown Great Barrington on September 27, with RSVPs already past 80 and owners making a weekend of it from as far as Wisconsin and Ohio.
For some reason, or rather no real reason at all, the Sunshine Orange Subaru Crosstrek Parade returns to Great Barrington on Sunday, September 27. While last year’s unsanctioned and unexpected caravan of a dozen matching carroty hatchbacks baffled onlookers, this year’s conglomeration is going to overwhelm them. Over 80 cars have already RSVPed. Event founder Michelle Kaplan is excited, but equally bewildered that her whimsical social instigation has grown so rampantly.
This year the parade is attracting people and their vehicles to the Berkshires from as far away as Ohio and Wisconsin. One recent email to Kaplan came from a family in West Hartford, Connecticut, who told her they're driving out for the parade and turning it into a full weekend in the area.
"That's a huge takeaway I couldn’t have expected," she says. "There's over 20 people that are coming from far away, and they've said, 'I've always wanted to come to the Berkshires. We're gonna do it for this weekend, and make a whole trip out of it.'"
Not Complicated, Not Commercial, Just Weird
Here’s what's going to happen: Sunshine Orange Subaru owners will gather in the Big Y parking lot at 11am, roll out at 11:30am down Main Street and through downtown, and end at the Price Chopper lot. Every car in the procession has to be the exact same eye-searing shade of orange—anything else gets turned away, no exceptions. As of this week, 83 Crosstreks have RSVP'd, more than five times last year's turnout, enough that even Kaplan has started to wonder if she picked the right meeting spot. "I was just thinking this morning, like, shit—did I mess up by saying this should be at the Big Y?" she says, laughing. "I don't see how we're all gonna fit."
Last year's inaugural parade drew 14 cars, no permit, and a loose plan built mostly around looping the town's rotary a few extra times "just to be silly," says Kaplan, a local travel writer, DJ, and general fun-haver. Subaru itself has taken notice of this year's jump in scale, providing a limited run of 250 custom enamel pins for participants. Strangely, to Kaplan, pin collectors have found out and have been messaging her to buy them. She’s turned them all down.
Kaplan’s resistance to commercializing the parade is steadfast. A few local car dealerships approached her about collaborating, and she turned them all down flat. "It feels really important to me to keep this event completely independent and non-commercial," she says. "No sponsors, no ads, no selling anything."
One request stuck with her: "You think that I'm gonna let you put your huge logo on the front of a T-shirt, and then on the back, 'second annual Sunshine Orange Parade'? You actually think I'd say yes to that?"
"This is my way of giving back to Great Barrington in a way I wish to see more of," she says. "I want people to organize things and disrupt the normal flow of everyday life—to make people do a double take, to make people laugh. This is a unique expression of myself. It doesn't need to make sense. There's already enough that makes sense." Last year's parade, she says, affected people in ways she never anticipated: "It created meaning in something that was, in many ways, completely pointless."
For the first parade she skipped the permits entirely, and a police officer who wandered into the procession partway through seemed, by her account, mostly just confused. She also let one car in that was the wrong shade of orange, after a couple who'd driven up from New Jersey pleaded not to be turned away. Nobody should try that this year. Success has hardened Kaplan's heart: the color match is enforced without exception. "I'm not messing around!" she warns.
This year she also called the police ahead of time instead of leaving it to chance, on the advice of a friend on the Selectboard. "I said, 'Hi, I'm gonna ask you the stupidest thing you've heard all day,'" she says. The officer already knew. "He goes, 'Oh yeah, September 27th, it's already in our calendar,'" she says, and then they offered to help direct traffic. “No problem!”
Kaplan is better known locally as the host of “Mishmash”, a free-form community radio show she's run since 2015, airing Thursday nights from 7-9pm on WBCR-LP in Great Barrington and simulcast on WGXC 90.7FM in the Hudson Valley. The format changes week to week—sometimes themed, sometimes not, often built around whatever oddity Kaplan has recently pulled out of the internet or a regional library catalog, mixed with interviews and live performances.
The Mishmash name has since spread beyond the airwaves: on Patreon, Kaplan publishes a series of subscriber-only Mishmash Guides—dispatches on off-the-beaten-path destinations, art-studio visits, and interviews, covering towns across the region one at a time, previewed for followers on Instagram. She's putting the same instinct to work for the parade itself, sending out-of-towners a short list of restaurants and hikes worth checking out while they're in the Berkshires. "I'll give them a little Mishmash guide," she says. She's also written for Rural Intelligence, filing a dispatch last year on the after-hours dance scene at Hy's Fried in Egremont.
Asked why she’s spending time and effort on a second parade that could very well get out of hand, Kaplan doesn't have a straight answer. "There are lots of different reasons, and it's evolved over the past year," she says. "Part of it is a reminder not to take things so seriously. And honestly, car colors are just so incredibly boring these days! It's pop-up, spontaneous performance art."
From there the pitch gets bigger than one parking lot full of Subarus. "I want to encourage people to organize something they're excited about. Anything! If everyone organized a parade, a happening or an event, we could have the option of going to something fun every day," she says. "I want the option to go to a parade every day! It's totally possible if everyone did their part. I think about this a lot. It doesn't need to be a holiday or even have a theme. Let this be an example of that."
Kaplan has also applied for a Guinness World Record for the largest gathering of orange Subarus. "We'll see if I get on there," she says.
Spectators don't need an orange Subaru to take part—just a spot along Main Street. Participants can RSVP by emailing mlkj21@gmail.com. Parade starts at Big Y, 700 Main Street, Great Barrington, , and ends at Price Chopper, 300 Stockbridge Road, Great Barrington.
