Chapter Excerpts
Chapter 11
Mardi Gras
Even the people who most keenly anticipated Mardi Gras were wary of how it would all look from the outside.
More than the household logistics of hosting a half dozen people for Mardi Gras, I was worried how the city would seem to these visitors. I subjected them to a little pre-travel counseling. I told them to expect a city full of upset people, a skeleton crew of a population racked with anxiety and stress but still determined to paint on a happy face for the sake of their town’s favorite season. We were all feeling our way through this experience, I explained, and no one was confident about how it would end up.
We were giddy but jumpy, eager to celebrate our city and show the world we were back but we deeply dreaded some spark, some crazy violence or even innocent mishap in the mayhem of Mardi Gras that could ruin it all and spin us down further still. We were unsure if the old clothes of celebration would fit after all the distortions our city had been through.
Even the people who most keenly anticipated Mardi Gras were wary of how it would all look from the outside. New Orleans culture in general is hardly ever conveyed to the rest of the world in anything like the way it feels to locals. Even under normal circumstances, Mardi Gras with all its decadent displays is a particularly easy target for clucking tongues. There is an alluring spectacle to debauched tourists acting out, flashing their fellow camera-laden tourists, trying to shock perverted cabbies and the nonplussed cops. But how to convince newcomers that, despite all that business, what really gets me excited is the thought of people my grandparents’ age holed up in the back rooms of their Creole cottages methodically assembling costumes to wear out on the streets for Mardi Gras? It’s hard to make a sound bite or video clip that communicates the encompassing fun of all the countless little unofficial parades that break out with their sardonic themes and beads recycled from years past and homemade musical instruments. There is magic in the spontaneous glee and bonhomie of one of these homemade processions rambling out of a side alley or down from a porch, its members instantly inviting you to join them. A moment later you might be swirling with the group in a riot of color and noise and sunshine on brass instruments and plastic beads flying and hand slaps and hand claps with smiling strangers. Joining in and offering up generous participation, doing your part to make the city ring with cacophonous, infectious joy, playing your role in the unscripted theater of the costumed street, that’s what Mardi Gras means to the locals who embrace it.
Frat boys chanting from Bourbon Street corners and biker chicks thrilling the video camera set from hotel balconies are certainly part of Mardi Gras. Another is the visible wonder on the faces of children raised here who know that at Mardi Gras time the world of workaday adults and rules gives way to plastic-jeweled royalty. The same streets that bring them to school or the doctor’s office are for a few days littered with toys and treasure tossed their way by benevolent strangers, masked by their costumes and deep in their cups.
Mardi Gras, at its best, can make you believe in New Orleans, in its magic and its fun and its romance. In that winter after Katrina, at the tail end of that dark and terrible season of night, New Orleans needed magic, fun and romance. It needed believers and it needed Mardi Gras.
