TAMPA, Fla. — Jolie Migliara loves seeing the floats of her krewe, saying they reveal the identity of who she and the other members are.
“These floats tell our krewe’s story,” Migliara said. “Our story.”
She’s the president of the Krewe of Queen Anne’s Revenge and has spent the last dozen years celebrating Gasparilla on top of these floats during the parade.
“It’s a passion project,” Migliara said. “It was an amazing accomplishment.”
As one of the founding members, she’s seen the krewe grow from just half a dozen to nearly 215 women.
But Migliara said coming together on the floats for a 13th year was in jeopardy last Spring.
“The company that we rented them from, it was going out of business,” she said. “They were selling their property and were deciding not to go ahead with their float rentals.”
Migliara said that led her and the rest of the board, which included krewe treasurer Grace Altieri, to move quickly.
“We were put on notice, and within 30 days we had to make a decision,” Altieri said.
She said figuring out what to do wasn't easy, because buying multiple floats isn’t cheap. But on the flip side, Migliara said the floats are part of the krewe’s identity.
“Without them,” she said, “we’re just a marching band.”
After looking at the costs, members of the krewe decided to pull the trigger and buy the four floats.
“These are our floats, no other krewes are going to have them, nobody else throughout the state will see anything like this,” Altieri said.
But those weren’t the only hiccups leading up to this year’s Gasparilla.
Because the floats had been kept outside, they were not in great condition and numerous repairs needed to be done.
“When we started working on them, we started finding out things like mechanical, electrical, the woodwork, the chassis, the frame,” Altieri said.
In all, it took about $80,000 to repair all four floats, but Migliara said that the issues were only minor setbacks.
“This lady has spent 40-plus hours a week of her time for the last six months,” Altieri said, referring to Migliara. “She has put her sweat and tears into these floats.”
The krewe will be debuting three of their four floats this weekend and are saving their newly refurbished ship float for adult Gasparilla.
“We can’t wait for the members to see what we’ve done with the floats, because they haven’t seen them since last year,” Migliara said.
Migliara said that finally getting to this point after weeks of uncertainty and months of hard work, is just another testament of the krewe's love for this Tampa tradition.