THE ROSE PARADE IT'S NOT.

Byline: Diane Dietz The Register-Guard

Organizers of the Eugene Celebration parade - set to begin downtown at 9:30 this morning - got the wacky notion that entrants should actually march in straight rows with uniform forward movement.

Appoint column leaders and row captains, organizers advised in their "Marching in a Parade" tip sheet.

And then the tip sheet added a veiled threat: "Many parades, such as the Rose Parade, eject entries which do not adhere to the spacing and forward movement rules of the parade."

Never going to happen, respond members of the Society for the Legitimization of the Ubiquitous Gastropods - or SLUGs - who have long served as heart and soul of the celebration.

"Slugs do not march," said Slug Queen Inspira Gastropodium. "Slugs have one foot; it's physically impossible. They slither, they slime, and they crawl on their bellies, but they do not march."

Reigning Queen Glorious Gastropause - in her pre-royal days - served on the parade organizing committee for a half-dozen years. She said there was always one person with the impulse to tidy up the parade.

"We'd just laugh," she said. People whirl and twirl, Queen Glorious said. They're disobedient and disorderly.

"One does not need drinking to be disorderly. Disorderly is a much finer state of mind without drink," she said.

"It's very hard to celebrate if you're in step with the person next to you. The celebration is about being out of step - outside of the box, not inside the rows and the columns," she said.

But parade organizer Roberta Morgan said an unwieldy procession causes problems. Dawdlers cause gaps, and then spectators go home thinking the show is over, when the rest is yet to come.

Last year, the pace was fouled up, she said. The parade had no color guard. The Eugene Highlanders - with their bagpipes - were first, and they took off like a shot, causing the other entrants to trot through the course.

With only 70 entries last year, compared with the 98 lined up today, the parade was foreshortened.

Still, the Eugene Celebration, with its contradictory impulses and staunch resistance to conformity - or even normalcy - is practically impossible to manage.

"Herding SLUGs is like herding cats, only slower. I can't imagine it," said Slugretha Latifah Uleafa Gastropodia Jackson.

Still, parade organizers found the perfect kind of go-your-own-way person to serve as grand marshal this year.

He's Bend gas station owner Kent Couch, who recently flew a lawn chair levitated by 100 helium balloons at 13,000 feet across Eastern Oregon.

His wife told ABC News she was terrified, but there was no use trying to talk him out of it. "Once something gets in his mind he's not going to forget it," she said.

Today, he's an honorary Eugenean.

Celebration organizers also erred when they attempted to describe SLUGs in their PR material. First, they touted the SLUG KING - an insult to the queens, who are both male and female.

SLUGs do not need a mate to fulfill their biological imperative, said Queen Frank Slug-snotra, a woman singer.

And Queen Inspira: "The SLUG queens are betrothed to no one," she said.

"Whoever wrote that has no idea what they're talking about."

Then, to add insult to ignorance, the writer referred to the SLUGs as "benign and uncouth."

"Obviously they have never met the (SLUG) queens," Queen Glorious said. "We're certainly more than benign and less than uncouth."

Inspira dragged out her dictionary to read that "uncouth" means lacking manners, refinement and grace.

"We are nothing but refinement and grace," she sniffed, "though in a tacky, gaudy, glamorous way."

Queen Slug-snotra was incensed: "For 25 years these men and women have kept celebrating diversity, beauty, representing all kinds of members of society. They're very sophisticated queens, including myself," she said.

"We represent inner beauty and we represent fun and frivolity, and we've been able to keep it going for a long time," she said.

In short, said Queen Scarlett O'Slimera, "We're simply subslime."

STREETS CLOSED

The Eugene Celebration parade will take over the downtown core this morning, with these streets blocked in places:

7 a.m. to 11 a.m.: Ferry, Mill, High and Pearl streets.

9 a.m. to 11 a.m.: Oak, Willamette, Olive and Charnelton streets, plus Eighth and 11th avenues.