Mardi Gras is on my mind this weekend. This afternoon, I tried to explain it to my friend’s two-and-a-half year old. I don’t think she understood. She’s never seen a parade of any sort before, so my description probably didn’t make much sense to her. I found some plastic beads and tried to convince her to “play Mardi Gras” with me, but she wouldn’t say, “Throw me something, mister!” She did like it when I threw the beads at her, though. Maybe she absorbed something from it. Maybe not. Maybe she’ll never know.
(Mardi Gras stories after the flip)
I grew up in Lousiana, and had family in New Orleans, and so almost every year, we’d go down to visit, and we’d go to the parades. I remember the names. I remember how it all looked. The very first parade I remember was a night parade – maybe Endymion? My mom and my aunts carried plastic cups filled to the brim with beer; their husbands drank right out of cans. They caught beads, and kept putting more and more beads on me. Do you like this one? Yeah! It’s pretty! Then I got tired of the weight of that yoke of beads and wanted them off, but it’s not so simple to get 100 strands of Mardi Gras beads off as it is to put them on. They get tangled. I got frustrated and cried while they took them all off. Then, of course, once they were off, I wanted them on again. I think they limited me to three or four, and stowed the rest away in grocery bags.
Before you go to Mardi Gras for your first time – your first half dozen times, if you’re a kid – you get the lecture about never, ever bending over to pick up a doubloon with your hand. You stomp it first to claim it, then pick it up. Otherwise someone else will stomp it while you’re trying to pick it up, and stomp your fingers as well.
It’s funny because most people who’d never been to New Orleans for Mardi Gras were horrified that our parents would take us, even when we were small. “Isn’t it dangerous?!” We might get shot, or worse, see a woman’s boobs. But, what a lot of folks don’t realize is that there are parades that are decent enough for children (as long as you don’t mind your children witnessing the consumption of alcohol. But who in Louisiana minds that? Not many.) If you go to the daytime parades on Saturday or Sunday, they are both less crowded and less raucous. On Mardi Gras Day, we usually stuck to Metairie if we went to parades at all, rather than going into New Orleans proper – again for reasons of avoiding crowds, although on Mardi Gras day there are crowds upon crowds, even at the Metairie parades.
Anyhow, I liked Mardi Gras parades quite a lot. But I had a child’s distaste for waiting, and going to parades involves quite a lot of waiting. You’ve got to get there early to secure a spot for your blanket, your ice chest, and your ladder box.
Ladder boxes became popular when I was around seven or eight – just on the verge of being too big for one. They’re simple to make. You just get a wooden painter’s ladder, and some boards. You nail one flat to the ladder for a seat. Then, close the bench in on either side and on the back with more boards, and drill a hole in each of the side boards for a dowel. The kid sits on the bench, enclosed by the side and back boards and held down by the dowel so they can’t fall off. This solves the problem of kids being too short to see, and constantly wanting to be lifted up. Sitting in a ladder box, one has a fine vantage point to see the parade. But, without mobility, it’s much harder to catch beads – a distinct disadvantage.
But back to the waiting. Because you had to arrive, oh, an hour early, at least, and because an hour’s wait is excruciating for an excited child looking forward to a Mardi Gras parade, my favorite parades were always Iris and Tucks on Saturday, and Venus and Thoth on Sunday. Both pairs went back to back along the same route, so you got twice the parade for your waiting. We’d find a spot on St. Charles every year, in the neutral ground where the streetcar tracks ran. Sometimes, my dad bought us those poppers that make the lovely snapping sound when you throw them to the pavement. We rarely were allowed to have any of the other plastic stuff sold off the grocery carts that were pushed up and down the road prior to the parade. For several years, “invisible dogs” were popular – a leash and a dog collar reinforced with wire to retain shape, so that you’d hold it out and it looked like you were walking an invisible dog. There were various inflatable toys. There were silly hats and headbands of all sorts: one year I got a plastic headband with hearts bobbing on metal springs. I suppose I looked like a sort of Rainbow Brite alien.
The parade came, and the bands were alright, we supposed, but it was the floats we were waiting for, and it was their loot we were waiting for. Beads! Doubloons! Plastic cups upon plastic cups! (You never needed to buy glasses. Ever. You’d just get your year’s supply at Mardi Gras.) Sometimes there’d be more interesting items, like the realistic rubber-and-bamboo tomahawk I got one year. Or the realistic rubber dog poo that my uncle caught.
We always willed the fire trucks and street sweepers to stay away as long as possible, prolonging the acquisition of cheap useless plastic stuff… and the fun of seeing our adult relatives go nuts over it. My father tells a story of my mother almost getting into a fight with another grown woman over a mess of beads still bound together by stapled paper. This was before I was born, or at least when I was too small to go with them. But I’d watch my aunts and uncles knocking into each other, laughing, grabbing for the beads and the toys. They were (almost) always deferential to us kids… though not necessarily, not when it came to the best of prizes, such as doubloons, and those still-bound sets of beads. But they shared – usually.
By the time the parades were over we’d drunk enough soft drinks that we needed to pee, usually. But we were out of luck, because everyone knows there is no place to pee in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. We had to hold it until we got back to my grandmother’s house – or occasionally, until we got to the far-too-crowded-and-noisy restaurant where we’d be eating. Mandina’s. Mike Anderson. R&O’s.
I never went to Bourbon Street. I moved away for school and never went to Mardi Gras as a college student, of legal drinking age. To me it was always about family, and giddy, unrestrained fun. And watching your parents, even your parents, let their hair down. I miss Mardi Gras like you miss childhood, but before this year it never really bothered me. It never bothered me because I felt sure that, for years and years to come, other children would enjoy Mardi Gras with their families just as I did.
I don’t know if this year’s Mardi Gras will approach what a “real” Mardi Gras once was, or if it will only be a hollow shell of it as some people have claimed and feared. My brother is there. Maybe he can tell me, when it’s over, if we’ve truly lost something so precious to us, for all time.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.