LEBANON - Participants at the Strawberry Festival Grand Parade agreed: Pirates are bad, marauding, backstabbing thieves and make terrible role models.

But it's still really, really fun to dress like them.

"Shiver me timbers! Ya wanna walk the plank?" hollered an eyepatched Queen Tammy, a.k.a. Kay Clark of Sweet Home, riding with the Sweet Potato Queens in Saturday's parade for the 98th annual Lebanon Strawberry Festival.

This year's theme, "Strawberried Treasure," featured John "Ol' Chumbucket" Baur of "Talk Like a Pirate" fame as grand marshal. Many participants chose to follow a similar pirate theme.

The five Queen Tammies all donned sparkling green eyepatches, tied pink skull-and-crossbone bandannas around their flaming-orange hair, and decked out their pink Cadillac with a pirate-skull flag wearing screaming pink lipstick.

"You have to come up with a theme," shrugged Queen Tammy Lin Gagner. "It's just fun."

Girl Scout troops 293 and 326 created a pirate ship they dubbed the "S.S. Juliette," after Girl Scout founder Juliette Gordon Low, to sail down Highway 20. Troop 293 leader Colette Smith said the pirate theme was fun for dress-up.

"It's like anything else," she said. "You can choose to see the positive or the negative."

Dennis Neal of Lebanon, who rode his scooter with the Century Fields float, made a pirate insignia out of a big white balloon and two giant rawhide chewy bones.

"People don't recognize you, so you get away with murder," he joked.

East Linn Christian Academy earned a third-place trophy in its category for creating a pirate-ship float with an adjoining tropical island. Music teacher Jenni Grove conducted the band from the prow of the ship.

The school had no problem with the pirate theme, Grove said, but their float's haul wasn't gold or gems.

"We seek the treasure of God's word, so we put a Bible in our treasure chest," she said.

Other entrants also found unique ways to interpret the treasure theme. Carmen Glasscock of Albany rode her red, white and blue Pagsta motorcycle through town carrying her 4 1/2-year-old Pomeranian, named Ufie.

"I wanted a dog and a bike, and I wanted to do it for the troops in Iraq," she explained. "The troops are our treasures, and so is my dog."

Sweet Home Rodeo Queen Larissa Bjornsen and Princess Cera Kim rode their horses for treasured memories, and to campaign for breast cancer awareness in memory of rodeo supporter Susan Fitzsimmons.

Lacomb Rainbow Preschool also went with a pirate theme, but teacher Julie McKinnon said the group was just lucky to get a float together at all.

The pirate-clad preschoolers had received a trophy for their wagon entry in Friday's junior parade, but weren't expecting to ride on Saturday.

"We didn't know we were going to be in it till this morning. We had to come up with the whole thing," said McKinnon, nodding at their pirate dinghy and tropical "palm trees" fashioned from patio umbrellas, put together on a flatbed truck in just two hours. "We just pulled it out of our barns, basically."

As for the theme, she just grinned. "We believe 'Love your neighbor, love your pirates.'"