It turns out that while one of those Big Mouth Billy Bass singing fishes can be funny, 250 of them mounted on a Volvo are terrifying.

Especially if you're 4-years-old.

Which is just another thing that you'll only learn at Houston's quirky Art Car Parade, the event run by the Orange Show folks that turns streets like Allen Parkway and Bagby into avenues of silly. This is where you'll find out that it takes a team of PhDs (more than 22 strong) to maintain an art car completely covered in singing sea creatures — besides the big bass, there are tons of rainbow trouts and lobsters in the choir as well

Of course, this being a Houston-created-car (you thought this could have been dreamed up anywhere else?), the mechanical sea creatures can't just sing their standard low-brow tunes. They've been reprogrammed to belt out opera too, all carefully conducted by Richard Carter, the local resident who's the lead brain on the brainpower-packed Sashimi Tabernacle Choir car.

"I'm just in charge of fixing all the bass heads when they break," said David Shine of Team Sashimi, whose PhD is in neuroscience (basically Shine is researching how to fix your brain when he's not fixing an army of mechanical fish that used to retail on late-night TV for $19.99 and drive wives crazy everywhere). "And they break a lot.

"It's a big job."

One that paid off in plenty of delighted squeals this afternoon (from the spectators, not just the fish) in the 23rd Annual Houston Art Car Parade.

This is the first time I've made it out to the Art Car Parade, six days after I checked out the Houston-dreamed-up Lemonade Day for the first time. It doesn't take long to realize that both these events could only be born in Houston — or that they're both best experienced through the eyes of a child.

Whether it's my own 4-year-old slowly backing away from that singing fish car like he'd run into Freddy Krueger from that new Nightmare on Elm Street or the reactions of the kids at the Project Row Houses when Houston mega-millionaire and computer tycoon turned national lemonade pusher Michael Holthouse's caravan rolled into the Third Ward, both the Art Car and Lemonade Day are at their best when the focus finds those who can't drive anything but bikes.

Events gone big

Both the Art Car Parade and Lemonade Day have come a long way from their humble beginnings. They've both grown into behemoths (the Art Car Parade from a 40-car parade with a mere 2,000 viewers to a 299-car, efficient conga line that brings more fans to the streets than a Texans game and features $125 VIP experience tickets, Lemonade Day from 2,500 kids learning Warren Buffett life skills to more than 50,000 this year). They've both developed slick marketing plans to push their message.

The Art Car Parade brought in Dan Aykroyd this year as Grand Marshall for some extra star power. Lemonade Day's added even more star touches around its usual, dedicated celebrity — former Houston Astros great Jeff Bagwell. CultureMap editor-in-chief Clifford Pugh told me about his first Lemonade Day story, how it was basically Holthouse, Bagwell and him driving around town in a limo, visiting the stands of local kids. When I tagged along this year, there were more than 20 other people in the now-limo bus (many of them representatives from other cities, hoping to bring Lemonade Day to their part of the country).

A flatscreen TV at the front of the limo bus replayed a loop of TV interviews that'd been done on Lemonade Day around the country and promotional spots that noted how Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Michael Dell all credit their first business with being a lemonade stand.

"That's great, priceless marketing," a real estate developer in the limo bus mentioned to Holthouse.

The Lemonade Day king gave a smile. Holthouse really does care about teaching kids basic business skills. This is a passion, not a sales pitch, and that's obvious if you spend more than five minutes with the man. Holthouse could be doing anything with the $375 million received from the sale of Paranet Inc., his computer network services firm, to Sprint.

Just like the Art Car Parade people are devoted to keeping the original spirit of their event alive — making sure that everyone can see the cars for free (at Discovery Green on Friday night in a preview that packed the park and far outshone the latest Astros loss going on down the street, at Sam Houston Park and a bunch of other locations along the parade route today without the VIP extras).

Still, it sometimes takes finding the kids who really care to relocate that spirit.

It's no surprise that Holthouse's already-high energy picked up even more when the limo bus made it way toward the Project Row Houses — after stops at places like the Galleria (where Mayor Annise Parker made a photo-of appearance) and Discovery Green (where several enthusiastic suburban-mom types almost tackled Bagwell in the competition to get him to visit their kids' lemonade stands).

Holthouse seemed to grasp that this is where his Lemonade Day dream carries the possibility of making true life and death differences.

"This is a part of Houston that a lot of people won't even drive through," Holthouse told the reps packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the limo bus. "It's an area that the tourists never see."

When the limo bus doors opened, kids playing steel drums provided welcoming music and the whole street seemed to be in on the party. A lot of the kids didn't have their own parents with them. Instead, they were in on Lemonade Day — making their own stands, coming up with a recipe for the drink and setting a price point — through the help of community teachers like Diane Weatherspoon.

"Lemonade Day means more here because there's a lot less here," Weatherspoon said as she helped the elementary school-aged kids in her charge collect money for their homemade cups, money they could put in their pockets as their first earnings. "It means something to these kids just to see people coming out here to support something they're doing. They don't get that a lot."

Bobblehead by Jesus

The Art Car Parade doesn't want to change the world — unless it's making sure that the world, and Houston in particular, maintains its sense of humor, its belief in the value of quirkiness. It's more than just a bunch of adults like the PhD singing fish crew blowing off some steam by obsessing over making a car fantastically silly though.

It's more than the crowd having fun as the cars come by in a steady stream of surprises, more than the guy who thought it'd be a good idea to put a Porta-Potty on wheels, sit on the toilet in it, with the door open and his jeans around his ankles and call it The Crapper Car, more than the large group of Australians that come in for this parade every year. It's even more than the spontaneous moments of fun, like when a few people in the crowd decided that one of the roller-skating support people looked a lot like former major league pitcher David Wells and started screaming out "Boomer" at the startled fellow.

(For the record, the real David Wells is not up at 1 p.m. on any Saturday in retirement, he wasn't up at 1 p.m. on many Saturdays that had afternoon games he was supposed to start).

The Art Car Parade becomes more when you see it through the eyes of kids.

Whether it's one of the few lucky kids who actually rode in the parade like Mia Mitoff in the copper dragon car named Amblin or just a kid who gawked wide-eyed at the art cars anytime this weekend, it doesn't really matter.

My kids happened to love the anti-religion car, the one bearing stickers like "Flatter Jesus or he'll torture you in hell" and "Religion is the Opiate of the masses." They didn't understand a word on it. They just thought the Jesus bobbleheads were ultra cool (though, they did think one of the Jesus bobblehead's was actually a Phoenix Suns Steve Nash bobblehead, from Nash's really long-haired days — that's the perils of having a former sportswriter for a dad).

I didn't see a kid that didn't love the school bus with hundreds of toys attached to it (from Matchbox cars to SpongeBob figures).

If you watch the Art Car Parade this way though, it suddenly doesn't seem like just a bunch of adults with an awful lot of time on their hands amusing each other. It becomes something bigger.

"Houston isn't always that kid friendly," parade-watching dad Jeff Sloan said. "There are a lot of people in Houston who don't like seeing kids. The Art Car's a nice switch."

It turns out that both the Art Car people and the Lemonade Day king found that staying on mission means remembering not to forget the people who are easy to look right over.