O, Coney Island Mermaid Parade! You are a motley procession of tacky body paint and beautifully protruding guts and cheese-puddle fries and broken bath toys (and boobies). You are the only summer Saturday afternoon when it's even remotely tolerable to be stabbed with elbows and suffocated among a burnt-skin throng of ogling strangers, because you are so weird and wild and loud and ridiculous (and there are boobies). You have created so many memories for New Yorkers and tourists and children (and boobies). And now, you are in danger of cancelling your festivities (and your boobies).

At least that's what the Daily News is reporting today. Hurricane Sandy's cruel menace tore apart Coney Island so thoroughly that the parade's organizing committee, Coney Island USA, is still more than $400,000 in debt. Without some financial help, the group can't afford to put on the parade again this year.

"We’re a tiny organization and I’m not going to commit organizational suicide to put on the parade unless the money is there," Coney Island USA founder and director Dick Zigun told the Daily News.

Zigun says they need to raise at least $100,000 to hold this year's festivities, so they're launching a Kickstarter campaign hopefully to recover lost revenue that begins May 6.

"The Mermaid Parade is America’s most underdressed parade and it is a major tourist attraction not only in Brooklyn but the entire city of New York,” the Daily News quotes Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz as saying.

In other words, save the boobies!

Update, May 7, 2013: The "Save the Coney Island Mermaid from Extinction!" Kickstarter has launched.

[Daily News // AP Photo/Mary Altaffer]

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