A brief Prologue: As we commemorate the first anniversary of Katrina, I thought that I would repost my thoughts from another milestone in the recovery of the Gulf Coast, Mardi Gras 2006. This personal journal was originally posted Wednesday, March 1st at the Welshman’s New International Times, so you will find it a bit dated grammatically speaking, but I’ve left it in it’s original form. You will also find that because of the intimate nature of the NIT that the writing is a bit less formal and a good bit more personal (rather like the Froggy Bottom Cafe crowd), and I tend to let all sort of emotion seep into my commentary. My writing reflects the conflict of emotion that I’ve experienced and see mirrored in the eyes of my fellow Louisianans.
So with all of the caveats out of the way, I hope you’ll indulge me with regard to the frankness that this very personal commentary was written – polydactyl
Au revoir Mardi Gras, bonjour Cendre Mercredi
Goodbye Mardi Gras, Hello Ash Wednesday
Well, the carnival season is over and the season of Lent begins. We’ve had our drink, gorged our bodies on animal flesh and king cakes, and danced to all manner of music much to the chagrin of the Bible Belters. We are all hedonistic villains, you know. But now, the time of self-flagellation and abstinence begins replete with more officially sanctioned guilt than you can shake a rhythm stick at.
I am all for facing my mortality head on, but after six months of mold spores, sky-scrapers of debris still in piles and the image of florescent orange signs of death on every door etched into my brain, I think I can maintain a little perspective without getting smudged in a ritual and hearing “Remember, man, that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.” Tell that to the floaters and those washed out to sea, the bloaters still under the unattended rubble, the 3,200 missing and the 8,300 misplaced by the government and thankfully found without the help of FEMA. Lou Reed was right, you need a busload of faith to get by…and, faith and religion don’t always go hand in hand.
Most folks around here pick alcohol and chocolate as their ‘personal’ abstentions, but the really hard part this year is going to be the whole carne val thing, the farewell to meat. Besides tearing holy hell on all of south Louisiana, the hurricanes trashed the inland marshes, home to the crab and the nurseries the bebe shrimp. The tidal surges provided sufficient salt-water intrusion into the estuary system that all of the natural breeding grounds of the crawfish have been wiped out for this year and perhaps another. The only crawfish this season will come from commercial ponds and even there, the season will be poor because of the drought.
Lent in Louisiana is all about the crawfish. Crawfish boils, crawfish etoufee, crawfish bisque, crawfish pizza. It is going to be hard doing without or doing with less, but we’ll get by on lots of catfish and sac a lait.
It struck me as a rather cruel irony that the six month anniversary of Hurricane Katrina landed on the 150th anniversary of Mardi Gras in NOLA, the day that is so emblematic of the joi de vive of New Orleans.
I certainly didn’t begrudge the citizens of New Orleans their abbreviated Mardi Gras season, nor do I question the judgment of Mayor Nagin for proceeding with the party plans even though the city is in the red to the tune of $120 million. I bear no ill will toward the hundreds of thousands of revelers from far flung locales that have descended on the French Quarter to experience a New Orleans Mardi Gras. They got what they came for…when you are hip to hip with two hundred thousand of your closest, new best friends, you really can’t tell the difference of a crowd cut in half.
I didn’t make it down this year, the Peach was in a play with three nighttime performances last week and had soccer matches over the weekend. Word out of the New Orleans office (who worked sporadically during the week due to parade routes closing roads and clogging parking, etc.) was that the crowds were definitely smaller, the locals were sorta somber but still fit to party, there were a lot fewer roving gangs of teenagers and frat boys only out to drink, and a high visibility of well-heeled tourists who were out to spend money and do the Mardi Gras thing big time.
I took that as a comfort. I don’t want to draw too much of a post-911 NYC economic comparison, but if you have high end tourists spending money in upscale restaurants, boutiques and galleries that is a good bit more productive in raising up the community than college kids sleeping in their cars and only carrying beer money. To those tourista types though, I appreciate the cash flow but want you to ponder two things: the French Quarter and Mardi Gras are not the sum total of Louisiana, nor should they be the gauge to measure the progress of gulf coast reconstruction. Second, the people of Louisiana are the culture of the state. Entire communities were wiped out by Katrina and Rita leaving us with a very personal void that cannot be filled by Johnny-come-lately-contractors and LandShark developers.
I write this from central Louisiana, the Crossroads, the ankle of the boot. Before the summer of storms, the parish seat of Rapides, Alexandria had a population of just under 46,000. Today, the best guess estimate is closer to 68,000. Sunday, Alexandria held one of its three Mardi Gras parades. In years past, the crowds would approach 75,000, but this year was different. People came from across the state and from around the country. The Peach and I marveled at the license plates we saw coming into town and the sense that this year’s parade had a different flavor, a different intensity. The police estimate on the crowd was reported at 150,000 and I wouldn’t argue too much with that. And, I don’t argue with the influx of new people and the strain on our small city’s infrastructure or the incredible traffic we have now. I embrace all of that and only wish that the federal government had not flung our south Louisiana brothers and sisters to the winds across 44 states.
Local street musicians roll before the Alexandria main parade
Krewe du Rapides float
My friend Danny as we stake out a spot, two hours before the parade
Watching the parade on Sunday, I thought a little bit about how it resembled the suburban parades in Metairie that I’d go to growing up. Big floats, lots of throws…doubloons and beads and little stuffed animals, marching bands, plenty of freaks and skin, but without the wanton debauchery, fear of random violence or overwhelming smell of sick that is attendant so many of the New Orleans nighttime parades. I don’t miss the crowds of New Orleans Mardi Gras, but I miss New Orleans. The real New Orleans, the people on normal Tuesday night in the middle of April far away from the Quarter, listening to the sound of an oyster knife splitting the shell mingling with whatever music is playing and the laughter of fifty conversations going on all at once. The friendly casualness of it all and the smell of atomized fry grease.
On Fat Tuesday, I thought of something different and it made my heart ache. Mardi Gras in small town south Louisiana is about as different from New Orleans as you can get and a good bit of that culture has been put on hold for the time being. I really wanted to be in Mamou yesterday and watch the Courir du Mardi Gras. The courir is a custom that predates the traditional parade Mardi Gras. The courir is a “man thing” with riders on horseback going house to house in search of the ingredients for a chicken sausage gumbo. The riders are dressed in wildly colorful, distinctly unmanly costumes, there is a lot of beer involved, trick riding and a good bit of chicken chasing. Mud diving contests and wallowing in mud puddles are a pretty good bet around noon, as the drinking starts at dawn.
Chasing the chicken (Mamou 2004)
The history of the courir dates back to the medieval fête de la quémande, a ritual “begging festival”. This medieval flavor influences the rider’s costumes which can include pointed hats, miters, and mortarboards to mock the wealthy, the ordained, and the well-educated. The point of it is for the rider’s to mock the usual social order: men dress sort of like women or the rich dress as the poor (and vice versa). Many riders prefer to dress simply as clowns or monsters. The courir sometimes involves sexual imagery when riders use whips to flog one another or have phalluses on their costumes. The women and children follow the courir on a procession of decorated flatbed trailers that always include a live band or two.
When I was in Mamou two years ago, the courir came back with 45 live chickens and enough other fixings for six 20 gallon gumbo pots. There is a covered community center which is the staging area for the return of the courir and there is music and food there all day…mostly boudin and crab-boiled eggs. Down the way is Fred’s, a Cajun stomping ground that is infamous for opening early and staying up late and is the fais do-do capital of the world. If you want to learn how to do a good coonass two step that is the place. If anyone wanted to get a true taste of Louisiana Mardi Gras, Mamou or Eunice would be my suggestion. I’ve met people from Nova Scotia and Brussels who were looking for their roots and people from Memphis and Austin trying to authenticate a sound. If you are one of those people for whom the accordion is an anathema, you haven’t heard Mitch Cormier and the Can’t Hardly Playboys.
There is this other little place in southwest Louisiana about an hour from New Orleans called Gheens and they take the religious side of the Mardi Gras tradition to the extreme. On Mardi Gras, the children of Gheens play this wicked game of hide and seek. It is really a twisted take on old initiation and fertility rites buried in Celtic tradition where young adult males wear clown or monster costumes with bells on and run or ride through the town with willow whips. If you are on the hiding end of the game and you get caught, you drop to your knees recite the “Our Father” with your hands folded in prayer. Once you finish the prayer, you have to run away with cries of “pardon! pardon!” and the riders go off looking for someone else to taunt into penance. Religion is weird stuff, I tell ya.
The Ghouls of Gheens
Edit/Update thingy: So, I was sorta rereading this not really wanting to “proof it” cause it got so damned long and I peeked in on the NIT and saw Keith’s (Welshman) additional request for a Mardi Gras roundup, so I’ll add some additional NOLA details, but they are all anecdotal from my office mates, the radio and the web.
I won’t go into the traditional big time parades except to say that Michael Keaton was off the leash (and using language that only Ray Nagin could understand), Stephen Segal is still a pompous ass, but has a serious love connection with Sheriff Lee and the reason that Brian Williams was not in NOLA Monday and Tuesday night for the NBC nightly news is because his older sister died of breast cancer. That gave Louisiana home-girl Campbell Brown a chance to step in and up for the occasion. I love her dad, Jim Brown, our former and embattled insurance commissioner, recently released from prison after an incarceration for a sin of omission with the FBI, but it is hard for me to get over Campbell’s prior relationship with J. Paul Bremer’s buttboy and chief mouthpiece, Dan Senor.
But on to the off the beaten path parades…the one’s you really need to seek out if you are fortunate enough to make the trip in Mardi Gras’s to come. The big, big point of Mardi Gras this year (outside of the obvious cash infusion) was to vent a whole lot of steam and to maintain some semblance of normalcy. There ain’t shit normal about New Orleans right now. You can’t go to the grocery store and have the checkout clerk ask ‘how yo’ mom an dem?’ for fear that they are dead or lost or in some other state. It has changed the whole dynamic. Polite conversation has been boiled down to the essence of living day to day.
First, on the must see list is the parade of the Krewe du Vieux. It is always a bawdy good time with lots of sex, alcohol and rock n roll and always very, very hip and snarky. They are always on the cutting edge of hipster culture and this year was no exception. This year’s theme was C’est Levee. Heh. I laugh every time I think about it. Almost all the krewe parades this year made fun in some way of FEMA, but the Krewe du Vieux made it a full time occupation.
When KDV first announced their parade plans for the abbreviated season, I knew it would be a classic…it is just a shame that I missed it:
2006 KDV Parade Theme, Royalty Announced
We’ve learned that you never leave behind a refrigerator full of seafood. We’ve learned that sometimes you can’t help but sleep on the wet spot. We’ve learned new meanings for “open house” and “waterfront property”. We’ve learned that FEMA’s just another word for nothing left to lose. What’s Krewe du Vieux’s response to all this insanity? In the laissez faire spirit that has so typified our home town that even the Army Corps of Engineers got swept up in the tide, the Krewe will stage its 2006 parade with the theme of “C’est Levee!” Leading the soggy celebration will be New Orleans environmentalist, film maker and comedian Walter Williams, creator of “Mr. Bill” of Saturday Night Live fame. As Mr. Bill knows much more about flood protection than Mr. Bush or Mr. Brown, the Krewe considers its 2006 king a true wet dream.
Ack…what a time to not have the flexibility to travel! The Times-Picayune’s pre-parade preview wrote it up like this from a double secret spy, Deep Float:
“You’ll see that they really don’t have a route this year — it’s what they’re calling a ‘projected path’ from Decatur and Port streets through the French Quarter, and ‘landfall’ is at Canal and Rampart at the State Palace Theater,” Float said.
You told me,” I reminded him, “you had contacted the KDV Poobah of Publicity.”
“I have,” Float said. “He said through an intermediary that they’re going national with publicity, to keep the message in front of the world. That’s why you’ll see ‘FEMA’ and the ‘Army Corps of Engineers’ all over these floats.”
“And what does the Poobah see happening?” I asked.
“He said every float will probably break down and FEMA will be there two months later to fix them,” Float said. “They’re designed for only a Category 2 parade.”
Float said that the Krewe of Mama Roux, now headquartered on Mold Gentilly Road, will present “Home Is Where the Tarp Is.” Members were able to get a special discount on blue canvas uniforms from a FEMA sub-sub-sub-sub-subcontractor, so the material was a mere $985 a yard.
The Krewe of Space Age Love, he said, will release its list of “Mold on the Brain Top Nine,” which will include some familiar names. “A deer in headlights would be Mensa material compared to Louisiana’s version of ‘Lost in Space,’ ” is what they’re saying.
Underwear will present “A Day at the Breach,” with the Army Corpse of Engineers, somehow weaving in the notion of breaching for the stars. The Krewe of K.A.O.S. will have a float with a “Waiting on FEMA” theme. The Krewe of Rue Bourbon is scheduled to interpret “Fridge Over Troubled Water,” and as usual, all interpretations are subject to last-minute changes.
“Some krewe, I hear, was supposed to do ‘Attention, K-Mart Looters,’ but that may have changed,” Float said. “You never know what the Krewe of Spermes or the Krewe of Drips and Discharges is going to do, so hang loose. Spermes is probably doing something premature, but it won’t be evacuation. Use your imagination.”
“What I’m hearing is that we’re going to see some out-of-the-boat thinking,” I said.
I haven’t seen any photos posted just yet (edit: KDV website still not updated), but you can be sure that there were plenty of blue tarp bikinis and other equally festive attire. This is one of the only krewes I know of that put out their own publication…check it out, it is a hoot.
The other parade that I was loathed to miss was yesterday’s Societé de Sainte Anne parade. It is a neighborhood parade that has most of the craziness of KDV (a little toned down because they skip-jump on the end of the Rex parade for a couple blocks before veering off toward the river), but has an actual spiritual purpose to match it’s revelry. So while there were reports of folks dressing up as MRE’s with a banner that said “lunch is on us”, and folks dressed up as graffiti covered refrigerators, the end of the Sainte Anne march every year is at the Riverwalk where the ashes of that year’s dead are sprinkled into the muddy Mississippi and there is a mass baptismal.
Sainte Anne’s will have photo gallery up in a couple of weeks, but in the meantime you can listen to Andrei Codrescu’s play by play commentary on NPR from yesterday: if you are willing to install Real Audio player.
I’m not willing to get into a battle of the mores with anyone over Mardi Gras, but I think that overall it was a very good thing and that the release of all that pent up anger, snark and aggression was timely indeed. After all, how would you feel if for the last six months the federal government had been telling you to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps when your boots had washed in to Lake Pontchartrain?
What’s a Prologue without an Epilogue? There will be some who read this as part of the Katrina anniversary who have very well defined feelings about FEMA, the Corps of Engineers, the Bush Administration and the tragically slow pace of the recovery on the Gulf Coast. My feelings tend to be defined in the emotion of the moment. My reactions to Bush’s public appearances in Biloxi yesterday day was typical…Three Minutes? A year of hard work and suffering and three minutes with the public is all he can muster? I can hardly wait to see his reception in New Orleans, unless of course he is insulated by an army of Rockey Vaccarella’s.
To all my fellow Louisianans: Peace. Strength. Patience.
