Columnist Susan Snyder: Float has us counting the flowers

Monday, Dec. 27, 2004 | 8:11 a.m.

What Mandy says, goes.

If she says to split grass, you split grass. If she says to cut impossibly weensy petals from flowers, get your scissors and start snipping.

"Stattice is like gold," Mandy said, holding a fistful of the tiny purple blossoms aloft so the crowd of volunteers could see.

She demonstrated how to cut the mite-size petals from the stems. The petals went into a box. The greens, to the floor.

"You have to move it around and cut it at different angles," she said. "You don't want any green at all in there because it'll look aquamarine."

Maybe not from up close. But from the sidelines of the Tournament of Roses Parade on New Year's Day, a little green mixed with the purple can ruin a float's whole effect.

"This is something you have to see once," said Claudette Madison, a member of the Las Vegas Breakfasters Lions Club. The club traveled to Pasadena on Dec. 18 to help decorate the Lions Club International float. "It's like paint-by-number," Madison said.

Actually, it's like painting the Sistine Chapel with a Q-tip.

Using your feet.

Mandy is one of the float crew chiefs for the Phoenix Decorating Company, which built 23 floats for the Rose Parade, including the city of Las Vegas float. (Check out the floats at www.phoenixdecoratingco.com.)

Outside, the float warehouse looked like any other building. Inside, it looked like Alice's Wonderland.

A knight sat atop a massive horse. Two kittens the size of city buses tumbled from a yarn basket. Butterflies with the wingspans of a Cessna poised to flutter away.

Every cranny eventually is covered with a bloom, grass or petal of the appropriate hue.

Each float's crew chief is charged with rallying armies of well-meaning volunteers of varying talent levels and keeping them on task. Some people are good with a gluey paintbrush and fists of pappas grass.

Other people are me. After gluing grass to my hands, pants and shoes, I managed to stick some onto the float.

Mandy was kind, organized and incredibly patient. But it's in her blood. Her parents are in charge of 5,000 volunteers on 10 floats this year. She's been doing the work since she was 5.

"By the time I was 12, they hired me," she said.

The company's full-time staff designs and assembles the structures and machinery. Volunteers start applying dry materials the first weekend of December. They began attaching flowers Sunday and will work 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. today, Tuesday and Wednesday.

Materials used on this year's Phoenix floats include 8,000 gallons of glue, 16 tons of dry materials, 20 million flowers (400,000 roses), 14 tons of plastic foam and 225,000 square feet of chicken wire.

Most materials are snipped, pressed or plucked before being glued to the floats. Volunteers stripped the tiny outer veins from papery lumeria petals before gluing them to giant lampposts one at a time. They ironed corn husks.

Tedious? Nah. Counting buckets of yellow chrysanthemums is tedious.

Cutting off the petals and sorting them by shade is maniacal.

But like the lady said, everybody who has the chance ought to do it.

Once.