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mardi Gras
baby onesies
Onesies pictured on page 2, 49 & 50
can be purchased at Fluerty Girl.
oh baby!
The tradition of placing
something in a king cake
was started by the Twelfth
Night Revelers, a social
Neutral Ground side • sidewalk side
In New Orleans itself, most parades roll down streets that are split by a
median (and in the case of St. Charles Avenue and Canal Street, streetcar
tracks.) In New Orleans, those medians are called neutral grounds.When you
give your GPS to friends or people riding on floats, you always let them know
neutral ground or sidewalk side.
Therefore its got its own image problem: it
suffers the ignominy of being represented by
the same image every year; hell, practically
the
same photograph
every year — that one
that makes the wire services and nightly
newscasts and Facebook feeds: The joyous,
nubile, wet-eyed co-ed on a Bourbon Street
balcony, her neck wrung with cheap, shiny
ornaments, spilling the beer she holds in
one hand while balling up the bottom of
her sweater with the other, ready to pull it
up and flash the crowd below in effort to
get more cheap, shiny ornaments to wrap
around her cheap, shiny head.
She flashes, flashbulbs flash, lather, rinse,
reTweet.
Yes, that does happen a lot around
here at Mardi Gras. Then
again, that happens a lot
around here every Saturday
night, also. And more than
a few Wednesdays, truth
be told.
But still, I wish I could draw more joy in
the irony that — when Dave and Alice Q.
Public from Des Moines see these images
— correction:
this one singular particular
image on the news, they blow their warm
milk out of their nostrils and rail against the
moral decay and they call their congressman
and scream about how debauched and evil
New Orleans is, why just look at those girls,
those shameless hussies …
... when what they don’t seem to realize is
that those girls —
those shameless hussies —
are more likely to hail from Des Moines
than from New Orleans because Bourbon
Street is less a local destination at Carnival
than it is a place to rustle all the rookie,
hack and amateur out-of-towners together
in one place where they can scream in each
others’ ears and spill hurricanes on each
others’ shoes so the rest of us can have the
rest of the city to ourselves to do what it is
we do at Carnival Time, which is laying out
the fabrics all over town, all over the state,
the region, the million little pieces that,
when woven together, stitch-out the glory
and triumph of family, neighborhood, pride
and tradition at Mardi Gras.
It’s that uncapturable, incandescent,
ephemeral pixie-dust daydream we call
Carnival Time around here — just another
Tuesday in March when we as family and
community gather up all those little frayed,
tattered, colorful and exquisite pieces of a
dream ... and weave it all together as One.
And now that I think of it, that’s your
answer to The Question.
That’s
what Mardi Gras is like.
group in New Orleans,
in the late 19th
century.