Hurricane Katrna breeches the St. Bernard Parish levee at I-510 and the Mississippi River Gulf Outet (Courtesy of the St. Bernard Voice) 

Saturnalia Night at MoMs

MoM's remains, as a friend of mine put it, the highlight of the adult Mardi Gras. I'm not going to try to describe it at length until I have the space and time to really do it justice. That means, not until I get home.

If you've never been, it's hard to describe. First, read Wolfe's The Eletric Kook-Aid Acid Test. Then borrow an anti-rave film from you daughter's dare teacher. Then, Google up "Bosch Hell". The look on the face of the tormented soul is the look of the MoM's Reveler.

Two things I remembered after 18 years away from MoM's. I remembered why I don't like masks. I know some of the people I collided with wrote me off as one of the hopeless drunks, but I was merely peripheral vision impaired. The second is, bring your own booze. If you tip too well for a cocktail, you get a glass full of two-dollar-a-gallon white rum, with ice.

I ended up guzzling ice water most of the night, which cause a host of what I think were young X heads to congregate around me, thinking me one of their own. The truth is, one rum and tonic, and one rum and ice, and I was done. I learned going to Grateful Dead concerts and having just a few bears that there is a tremendous contact high to be had in the right places. At MoM's, everyone is tripping, whether they intended to or not. And that is probably the best description I can give of MoM's. If that means nothing to you from personal experience, then you will likely never understand MoMs.

Go with the Flow to Algiers

"Remember that these are mostly brains ravaged by antisocial and mindless pleasures."
-- Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow

The MoM's ball is what I rather hope Hell will be like on Saturday night.

It's midday Sunday, and I have not enough sleep, and no voice, and I have to go join Aunt Pam and the kids.

More on MoM's later. It is everything I remember, only writ much larger to fill Blaine Kern's den instead of the Arabi VWF.

Must find coffee.

Endymion at the O.D. Clinic

After a few hours rest and way too much food (my mom had hoped by cousin's would come in to walk to Endymion from Park Esplanade, and had shopped for an army), Brian comes by with two old "krewe suits" to offer to Ron so Eric can help get him in costumes for MoMs.

I grab some of the beer and a nealry untouched tray of finger sandwiches, and we're off to Dr. Alo's OD Clinic on Canal for Endymion.

The parade is a large and lavish as I remember, only more so with the kleig-light trucks with confetti connons. Killian is losing some of her barshfulness under our prompt, and is starting to stagger under the load of beads appropriate for a fabulously cute young teenager. My son Matt has made friends with the kids of some old acquainteances from the Lakefront, and everybody is having a blast.

I have to learn not to scream like a demonically-possesed nine year old at every float, or I'm going to lose my voice. I can already feel my throat cracking up.

The only disappointement is that St. Aug did pass by in full high-step. By the time of the really big parade breakdown (or the end of the parade) no one cares and they're all ready for home: the kids to bed, and I to get ready for MoMs.

Parades, Day One, Part One

My buddy Eric B. and a friend of his kindly offered to take us up to Napolean and St. Charles to watch the day parades. It didn't take the kids more than about 10 minutes to get the drill down, and to bury themselves in beads. That this was Iris (notortiously stingy when I was a kid) was amazing.

Tucks has grown up further since I left town. While they have the sort of smaller floast I recall from my youth watching mid-City roll down Canal, it is a far cry from the truck floats and pickup trucks I recall. (I ususally didn't make Tucks, or the Krewe of Dreux, on Saturdays).

Either Eric or his friend caught a spear, and gave it to my son. I ended up holding it, and Eric said the way I was holding it so white-knuckled tight and waving it about, it was--for me--the spear I'd never caught as a kid. He's probably right.

Brian has found another MoMs Ball ticket, so Eric and Ron will come. I have a ride, and can just party.

Gettin' in Rhythm

I wander over to the Fargo, N.D. library to borrow their CD set “Crescent City Classics Vols. 1-4” (this is a great set of songs anyone who grew up in N’wawlins, compiled into a four disk set). Alas, some other frustrated citizen of the Mardi Gras Nation has checked it out. Ditto the big box set of Louis Armstrong I was going to grab. But what do I find in the disk stacks but Mos’ Scocious, the Dr. John Anthology. Synchronicity is a funny thing, so I grab it, and wax nostalgic to Morgus the Magnificent and Wash, Mama, Wash (one of the great N’wawlins songs).

Also, I get to show my daughter some pics of Dr. John is his, well, Dr. John period. “That is what a great Mardi Gras costume looks like,” I tell my 13-year old daughter. She sighs and rolls her eyes.

My wife and daughter like to refer to me at certain times as, well, flamboyant. Halloween comes to mind. Then again, I’m the only guy in Fargo N.D. who regularly wears a beret all the cold months and a Shantung straw all summer. I prefer to think of my self as colorful, just this side of eccentric. They insist on flamboyant. Ok, fine. But my daughter is increasingly resigned that she is going to have to go to Mardi Gras with this lunatic who used to be her father.

“The biggest drum led the big parade / All on a Mardi Gras day”. Oom Pah Lay!

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What to wear, what to wear?

“Don’t be fallin’ out of your house with no needle and thread in your hand”
-- An Indian Chief heard early one Mardi Gras morning on WWOZ

My good friend Brian, having no kids of his own, has never given up on the Mardi Gras of our twenties. He always had MoMs tickets and went to their Captain’s Party. His costumes were always wild and outrageous. He had gotten a ticket for me to MoMs every years for the last two decades, only to have to give it away to someone else.

And he reminded me: I needed a good costume to get into MoMs--unless I wanted to go in with no pants.

The kids Mardi Gras day costumes were easy. For the day, my son could wear the fairly elaborate pirate’s costume we had just purchased this past yea for Halloween.. (I have sublimated my Carnival spirit into Halloween for many of the past 18 years). I told him if he didn’t wear the eyepatch, he could be Diego Montoya (we rather like the Princess Bridge)

My daughter is in a dance school with competitive companies, and has a closet full of competition and recital costumes. She will wear the red one from last year with the blond page boy wig that made them all look like little clones of Carol Channing.

Me, I had long planned to return to Mardi Gras dressed as Captain Beyond, the cover art character of a studio band of the early 70s that put out some serious rock. This was not a simple costume to assemble, and I was not sure I could pull it off.

I am a great fan of the author Charles de Lint. I was reading Greenmantle at Xmas break.

Suddenly it occurred to me.

I’m going as the Green Man.

This is not a hard costume. A few silk plants from the Hobby Hut, a fresh bag of glue sticks, a mask and some base camo clothes or tights, et voila..

My now thirteen-year-old daughter lays down a rule: I am not allowed to appear in tights in any pictures with her. I explain to her that I used to wear tights as part of costumes all the time; that I learned the hard way that guys with hairy legs should never where white tights.

She is not convinced.

So, I dredged out the pair of loden green chino’s I used to stuff a ghoul last Haloween into the house, and start glueing on leaves and moss to go with my mask and camo shirt (also with some leaves glue-gunned on;the fancy 3-D, structured camo ready made is just too pricey).

As my daughter said as I came out of the bathroom last Sunday dressed out for the first time, “Oh my god, you’re a tree!”. Mission accomplished. I shed $2-a-bag hobby hut Spanish moss wherever I go, but I’m bringing the rest of the moss and leaves, and the glue gun.

If I start to come apart at MoM’s (and at 47 and on a Strict Alcohol Diet, I just might) I’ll have time to put myself back together on Monday.

Why watch when you can be the parade

“Why watch another parade when you can be the parade?”
--My children’s wise Aunt Pam, on FQ (St. Anne or Kosmic Debris) v.
Uptown watching trucks debate

Most of the weekend is easy. Saturday: parades. Saturday night: an old buddy’s Endymiom Party. Saturday midnight: MoMs. Sunday: I sleep in, Aunt Pam takes the kids to the parades. Sunday night: Bacchus at Tipitina’s. Monday: Lundi Gras and Parades.

But what to do on Carnival Day?

As I said when I started this blog, I’ve been a Quarter person since I was born. If it was just me, there wouldn’t be any question what to do on Mardi Gras Day. See Zulu and maybe Rex for old times sake in the madness of Canal Street, then retire into safer parts of the Quarter, where friends still knew people with homes and offices for bathroom and general madness breaks, ending the evening down in Marigny.

The kids changed all of that.

So, do I take them over to Napoleon for the day and miss Zulu? Do we brave lower St. Charles? (I talked to one person who said they had a great spot on St. Charles, “right near where the shooting was last year.” Um, OK. )

Or do we just toss caution to the wind, and join Aunt Pam or friends behind St. Anne or Kosmic Debris, kids and all?

One friend who hauls a big bass drum in Kosmic Debris every year pointed out that he always brought he daughter (now in her teens at NOCCA) to the quarter. Aunt Pam and others point out that 1) I have more sense to get near the bad blocks of Bourbon on my own, much less let my kids get near there and 2) we know where to find bathrooms in the Quarter (sister’s friend’s house, and a friend’s friend’s law firm).

Will my children be struck blind if they see two guys in leather thongs shackled pierced nipple to pierced nipple?

My gut instinct is, we go to the quarter. My quarter friends are all marching behind St. Anne this year, including a couple who usually join Kosmic Debris. As Aunt Pam wisely pointed out, “why watch another damned parade when you can be the parade?”

So, it’s decided. I think. We go downtown.

Coming Home to Carnival

My earliest memories of Mardi Gras are of downtown. Rex turning onto Canal, a fleeting glimpse of Indians on the neutral ground at Galvez as we drove down Canal to my Aunt’s place in the Quarter, sitting on the stoop at my Gert and Sadie’s place on Royal watching Mardi Gras of around 1960 go by.

My great Aunts Sadie and Gertrude Folse lived in an apartment at 824 Royal Street, now the Hove Parfumeur, and for the first decade of my life, that is where I spent Mardi Gras Day. I can remember as clearly as any early childhood memory can be, sitting hoisted on my father’s shoulders somewhere on the French Quarter side of Canal, watching Rex roll by.

After Gert and Sadie moved to Thibodeaux in their advancing old age, I remember spending a couple of Carnivals on Napoleon just off St. Charles, and one year riding the truck float from the Vista Country Club. But as soon as I could shake loose of grownups (starting probably a bit too early), I was headed back to the Quarter.

By the 1970s, my friends and I were firmly into costuming, and constituted part of what we sometimes thought of as the Krewe of Wildlife & Fisheries. If you ever stopped by there to visit the bushes or for other herbaceous refreshment, you know about where I’m talking about. We went to MoMs (old lakefront and UNOvians that we were). We were the Mardi Gras.

Then, in 1986, my life changed drastically and I moved away from New Orleans, first to Baton Rouge and then to Washington, D.C. Nineteen eighty-seven found me in a rented tuxedo wandering the bowels of the Washington Hilton in the wee hours of the morning with a H brass band and a dozen die-hards, trying to find some place to continue the party after the last hospitality suite threw us out.

But after 1987, I put off going back for Mardi Gras. First, my wife was in grad school and I wanted her to come, but Mardi Gras kept bumping up against midterms or other critical school dates. Then, in 1992, my daughter was born. Two years later, we moved to Detroit Lakes, MN (The Waveland of the North), but only I had a job. Money was tight. My son was born. No Mardi Gras, except for Ma Mere’s king cakes and wild dancing with my little kids on Fat Tuesday evening.

The longer I was away, the easier it became to just not go back for Mardi Gras. We came home for other reasons. A friend got married. A funeral. But these were never near to Mardi Gras or Jazz Fest.

Before I knew it, it was 2004. In 2006, it would be twenty years since I’d last been to Mardi Gras.

Almost twenty years since I’d watched Krewe of Druex, or been to MoM’s ball. Almost twenty years since I’d Ritz-died a pair of tights or a bit of old Krewe suit.

Almost twenty years since I haunted the Wildlife and Fisheries Building, tumbled behind Kozmic Debris, eaten my usual Mardi Gras meal—the Comus Corn Dog—before hectoring the débutantes going in to greet Comus from their Canal St. balcony with overly-loud “Ooohss” and “Ahhssss”.

Almost twenty years since I’d stumbled back through the Quarter to the side door entrance to Betz Brown’s Abbey (it’s very best incarnation and the living room to a decade’s worth of Quarter Rats in the 1980s), to finish partying well into Ash Wednesday.

Almost twenty years since I’d lain on my coach with Pharaoh Sander’s Love is Everywhere in loop mode on the turntable and rested up, or eaten a bowl of my traditional Ash Wednesday Chili.

Worse than my own deepening self-pity, my kids—now twelve and nine—had never seen Mardi Gras.

Since they were small, we had read Mimi’s First Mardi Gras, sent by their Aunt Pam. In Kindergarten, I had arrived with a boom box and a king cake and throws and lead their kindergarten classes in a second line around the classroom.

We had watched Mardi Gras Day video tapes of WDSU’s parade coverage. Every year MaMere’ sent a King Cake, and we feasted and danced wildly in Paper Warehouse masks in front of the picture window for the entertainment of the neighbors.

But they had never been to Mardi Gras; never seen a “real” parade.

We decided. It was time to Come Home to Carnival.

By Markus, the publisher of Wet Bank Guide