Hutzell: Frogs, salamanders and Gloria Steinem — how No Kings rallies protect democracy

Paul Flack is impossible to overlook.

Well over 6 feet tall, dressed in American flag colors and topped with a golden Burger King crown, he blows lustily into his long, blue vuvuzela.

“BZZOOOT!”

“If you want to be a king! If you want to be a king! Go to Burger King!” Flack shouts. “You can be a king for a day!”

But America, he explains, has no kings.

You’ve seen them. I’ve seen them. At this point, we all get the point.

People with a variety of good reasons to oppose President Donald Trump fill No Kings rallies like this one Saturday near Annapolis. Protesters say he behaves like a king and worse.

“We have kind of a dictatorship starting to happen,” Flack says. “He’s flaunting the laws.”

“BZOOT! BZOOT!”

In 18 months of protests — one forms almost every Saturday at this particular intersection — these weekend picket-line warriors use wit, whimsy and showmanship to avoid getting lost in the anonymous roadside of political discourse.

Or worse. The president’s new National Joint Terrorism Task Force doesn’t name No Kings as a sponsor of “political intimidation,” but his allies throw it under their conveniently fuzzy definition of “antifa.”

Protest numbers have drifted down, even in Annapolis. As we hurtle toward a consequential election, No Kings organizers are discussing what comes next.

At the final rally before early voting, though, the strategy of spectacle played out again.

“We do want them to be creative,” local coordinator Angela Mezzomo said a few days later. “We tried to remind people that the point of this No Kings rally was a specific message: voter turnout.”

Saturday, 600 people showed up with 600 different signs. And, oh, were they creative.

Charlie West knows good signs.

At one end of the sidewalk picket line by Annapolis Mall, the graphic designer pulled multicolored sign after sign from boxes on the ground, each one expertly assembled and packed with care.

“You want the type to be as big as possible, and that’s the main thing,” he says, holding one up. “The main message in this particular instance is voting early. So, I try to make that stand out as much as possible.”

He’s been at all the Annapolis No Kings rallies and brings new designs each time. They cost about $25 each, but he hands them out for free.

This weekend’s design features black-and-yellow “Vote Early” and “Our Votes Are Not For Sale” messages. On the flip side, “What Would Gloria Say?” circles a ’60s-style portrait of the late feminist Gloria Steinem.

West looks at his work critically. Would passing drivers recognize the late cultural icon decades past her peak relevance?

“My very good friend suggested this because Gloria Steinem is one of her biggest heroes,” he says. “We’re, you know, kind of up there in years, so this is part of our history.”

Pete Doyle makes hats.

They’re beautiful hats, a kind of close-up magic different than West’s theory of what works.

No one driving by can read the words on the multicolored macrame hourglass on Doyle’s head. It’s just as unlikely they remember Gene Rayburn, host of a long-forgotten game show “Match Game.”

Yet here we are, playing Rayburn’s signature gag, a “How Dumb?” joke setup.

“Dumb Donald was so dumb,” Doyle prompts.

“How dumb is he?” I answer, trying to remember.

“You pick one of the questions,” he says.

“Oh,” I start over. “He’s so dumb.”

“No,” he says. “I mean, pick one of the answers.”

“Oh, OK.”

“He’s so dumb,” we read together, “he blamed his botched reflecting pool on BLANK.”

“Vandals?”

“Vandals!” Doyle cheerfully confirms.

It really was a beautiful hat.

If anyone has reason to be counterintuitive, it’s Peggy Donald.

Her sign explains in tiny letters that her father, Air Force Capt. Richard Galt, died exactly 85 years ago on the day of the rally. He was testing a fighter-bomber in Florida when it crashed, killing him.

Galt, his daughter says, would have hated what the president has done to America.

“I know his sentiments as far as politics were against fascism,” Donald adds. “And that’s what we’re all doing here.”

Costumes are part of many protests, and at No Kings rallies like Saturday’s, they make a statement.

An inflatable pink salamander — mocking claims that these protests are intimidating — marches. A verdigris-painted Lady Liberty refuses to give her name. There’s a pink unicorn.

TV superheroine Starlight struts, a green-and-white frog walks, witches against tyranny cackle and, conveniently, death waits for me at the end of the line.

“I’m concerned that come election time, we may even have some — I don’t want to say war — but civil disturbances, because I think that the people in this administration are going to try everything they can,” Nancy O’Donnel says from behind her Grim Reaper mask.

Her husband made tombstones for the grassy verge, each a warning. The cutouts occupy her front yard, too, next to 22 crosses for the servicemen and women killed so far in the president’s war against Iran.

Even death, though, can’t plan for everything.

“Oh, I forgot my gloves,” O’Donnel laments. “I had gloves that had skeleton hands.”

Toot toot, hey, beep beep.

Passing horn taps convince the crowd that Annapolis is a friendly audience for the No Kings message. Usually.

“Communists!” one motorist disagrees. “Communists!”

“Vote early” was the message, and four days before Maryland polls opened, who would object? Election Day falls on Nov. 3.

Has this worked? Has more than a year of costumes and clever signs kept the public focused on liberty, tyranny and fast-moving events?

Maybe. Annapolis was the first to hold rallies in Anne Arundel County. Now, they’ve spread to Glen Burnie and Odenton, which saw smaller but respectable crowds on Saturday.

More has to follow for this to stay relevant. Not just what protests are against, but what they stand for.

“We need to move forward,” Mezzomo said, “toward equality and fairness and defining what that should look like.”

Bzoot, bzoot.