Just when you thought it was going all right, Greenpoint held a Phil Collins Day Parade on Tuesday night.
More than 250 fans of the treacly pop singer showed up — against all odds, if you will — and danced into the light down Franklin Street.
Organizer Heather Kramer and friends have long set aside Feb. 15 for their tribute to the British drummer Collins as an antidote to Valentine’s Day — and because they can’t stop loving him they set aside one more night for the parade.
“This went better than I imagined,” said Kramer. “Everyone had so much fun,” adding that’s just how she feels and that’s the way it is.
Revelers carried signs with Collins lyrics and swarmed around a parade float — a six-foot-tall paper mache bust of Collins’s head affixed to a Nissan — while a Collins impersonator atop another car took requests.
You can’t hurry love, but it turns you could hurry the parade.
Police — not the love police, the actual police — told the impersonator that he ought to know by now that standing on a moving vehicle was unsafe.
“He said, ‘You can do what you’re doing, but you can’t stand on the car,’ ” said the impersonator, Scott Riehs. “I’ve been waiting for this moment for all my life.”
When the parade finished at Shayz Lounge, where there’s a place for us, these Collins fans found a way to our hearts.
But that’s just this neighborhood’s true colors. Indeed, it was another day in paradise — Greenpoint, actually.
Or, as Phil himself would say, “Sussudio.”
