Have you made your plans to attend the North Providence Memorial Day Parade?

There will be marching bands and floats from local businesses. Boy and Girl Scouts and youth sports teams will march with civic organizations and public safety organizations. There will be police and fire vehicles. The dog officer will scoop up strays.

The mayor decided we needed a parade, he said, based on what he's seen of the annual Memorial Day Parade in Lincoln.

Don't get me wrong. It's wonderful to borrow ideas from our neighboring communities. You've just got to be careful where you draw the line.

Lincoln also has a slot machine parlor and a mall. Too bad Rizzo Acres is already spoken for - perhaps we could have put one or the other there.

Johnston's a neighboring community. They've got a landfill. Surely we don't want another one of them.

You can see how coveting our neighbors' things could get out of control.

But I digress. Back to our parade.

It kicks off at 1 p.m. from the high school parking lot, down Mineral Spring Avenue to Rizzo Acres, and hooks a left onto Douglas, heading up to Notte Park.

"It's a way to restore pride," the mayor told one of my Breeze colleagues recently. "To be proud of where you live."

So that makes it a Memorial Day/Civic Pride Parade. But from the early descriptions, the whole thing sounds pretty generic. There's nothing about it that really screams North Providence.

Time to fix that, I say. Here, then, are some of the suggestions submitted by the North Providence Gang:

* We need a Hair Salon Float to celebrate the town's biggest industry. A gaggle of stylists will staff the float, pulling parade-goers out of the crowd at random for a quick cut. A giant hair dryer will blow hot air on the crowd - competing with the politicians in the parade.

* Speaking of politicians, there simply must be a School Committee Float, celebrating the accomplishments of this august group. Every member will be present, but some will be behind closed doors. Rod DaSilva, North Providence's answer to Monty Hall, opens door after door while others slam them shut.

* Naturally, we need a Why Can't We Get That Float, celebrating the mayor's masterful refuse reclamation effort. If the recyclists manning the float spot something along the route that the town could put to good use, they will snatch it up.

* We must have a Tree No Tree Float, celebrating the town's Replanting After Deforestation policy. It will be a diorama rotating on a giant Lazy Susan contraption to show the circle of life for a typical North Providence tree. Planted as a sapling, allowed to grow, diagnosed with some arboreal disease, felled, and then replaced with two new saplings.

* We must also do something to celebrate the town's storied tradition of cutting through. So, the parade has two divisions. The Gold Chain Division leaves the high school at one, following the prescribed route. The Big Hair Division leaves at 1:30, but cuts through Puritan and Fitzhugh to break into the Gold Chain Division in a race to the review stand at the Knights of Columbus. Doesn't that sound like fun?

And a final thought. Perhaps we should reconsider the parade route itself. What sort of message does it send when our Memorial Day/Civic Pride Parade is actually headed out of town?

The end of the parade is a simple stone's throw from Smithfield.

They've got a university there, you know.

Why can't we get one of those?

Join the North Providence Gang, and weigh in on the town's most important topics. What a great way to celebrate your civic pride. Just send an e-mail to frankocomedy@cox.net, and you'll be signed up.

- Frank O' Donnell, a comic from North Providence, is the entertainment writer for the Breeze newspapers.