I’m thinking Ray Bolger would have loved Main Street Saturday. Between our scarecrow contest and the dancing scarecrows that posed on the sidewalks and danced every half hour in the center of town, it was scarecrow heaven downtown.

Not to mention the fact that they danced to “Ease on Down the Road” from The Wiz. Even Lola and Nolan from Berryland Café dressed up as scarecrows and handed out free pumpkins. Many of our downtown businesses also created their own scarecrows to decorate their storefronts and line the street.

There were more than 900 visitors who made the annual trek to Sumner to ring in the fall season this year. But in addition to the fantastic late night retail therapy happening in our downtown stores, it was truly heartwarming to see several generations of the same families standing together to watch the entertainment, clapping to the music or carrying pumpkins on their way back home.

I believe you can truly see the heart of our community at events like this.

Even our Come Walk With Me committee brought more than one generation of family to “pink” up the corner of Main and Alder and remind folks that our annual breast cancer benefit 5K walk will be Saturday. (By the way, if you read my column last week about our street banner misprint, just want you to know that Pat Clerget had his crew make the sticky patch correction. I love those guys!)

And I think our dancing scarecrows from Ascension Productions attracted even bigger crowds this year.

Though they danced every half hour, once again they posed up and down Main Street leaning on posts or sitting on the ground in front of stores and flower planters. It was really cute to see folks stop and try to get them to talk or move when they were in a frozen position.

I saw a little kid try tickling one to get him to move. They all have a great sense of timing, though, and at just the right moment would jump and scare the dickens out of passersby.

The Celtic Maidens were back again with some Irish folk dancing that had the crowds clapping and tapping their toes to the peppy Celtic tunes.

It was like a Main Street version of Riverdance as the Hammermaster girls and their cousins, the Watts, kicked and danced to an enthusiastic crowd. And the night ended with an encore performance of “Thriller” with an invitation to the crowd to join them in performing the routine if they knew it.

Do you remember the words to the Scarecrow’s song? It ends with “I would dance and be merry, life would be a ding-a-derry, if I only had a brain.”

Well our Sumner scarecrows did have brains and they definitely danced and were merry.

Here’s a big thank you from downtown to those “stuffed shirts” for bringing smiles to so many faces and for being another reason people meandered down Main Street to spend some time in Sumner.