IF YOU GO TO MARDI GRAS SEEKing something mystical and mythical, spurred by a vague, romantic idea about masks and music and feathers and fantasies, it may take you a while to find what you`re after.
Suppose you get to New Orleans on Saturday night, three days before the big day, and head toward the French Quarter, where all good tourists go. You shove your way through the throngs on Bourbon Street, sidestepping puddles of beer. At every turn, you bump into a band of shirtless college fellows howling at the whole wide, wonderful world of women, ”Show your —-! Show your
—-!”
Coveys of young beauties lean over the wrought-iron balcony rails and merrily oblige. In return for the show, the young men toss them highly prized strands of cheap white beads. The women shout back, asking the men to respond in kind. A few of them do.
You begin to wonder: Is Mardi Gras nothing more than a frat party run amuck?
It can be. It doesn`t have to be. In many respects, Mardi Gras is whatever you make it, but there`s one thing it`s not: It`s not Disneyland. It is not predictable and sanitized. It`s raucous and raw, terrible and wonderful, wildly friendly and outrageously impolite. It has its own peculiar rhythm, which is why you should go a few days in advance-to feel the pace quicken and the fever rise, to get accustomed to the things that you don`t like and ferret out the ones you do. Mardi Gras is a progressive pleasure.
Mardi Gras is more than a day, it`s a season, a season correctly known as ”Carnival,” which extends from just after Christmas until Ash Wednesday.
In those few rollicking weeks, more than 50 parades, run by social clubs called ”krewes,” fill the streets. All over town, buildings are swathed in the official Mardi Gras colors of purple, green and gold. Bakeries hawk king cakes, which are round coffee cakes frosted in the season`s regal hues.
As Mardi Gras nears, there are several parades every day, big parades and little parades, daytime parades and night-time parades, downtown parades and neighborhood parades, parades by krewes of common folk and parades by krewes drawn from the wealthy New Orleans families who occupy the old mansions of Uptown and the Garden District.
The parades are the heart of Carnival-as much sport as spectacle. The masked float-riders toss doubloons, beads, underwear, cups and other trinkets called ”throws” to the jostling, grasping crowds who plead, ”Throw me somethin`, mister.” Everyone-tourists, locals and even police officers-winds up festooned in red, blue, green, white, purple and yellow beads, as if these cheap baubles were an intoxicant or a temporary license for sin. The more beads you wear, it seems, the looser you get. You begin to feel benevolent toward everyone, even the howling frat brothers.
Carnival is about chance encounters. Strangers meet strangers, and strange times are had. If on Lundi Gras, the Monday before Mardi Gras, you encounter a couple of frat fellows in a bar and they invite you to go hear the Neville Brothers or a jazz band or a blues rocker in a hole-in-the-wall up by Tulane, you go. After all, you are wearing a lot of beads now, around your wrists and neck and ankles, and you have caught the Mardi Gras mood.
You have great fun, and you hobble back to your hotel at 3 a.m. knowing you`ll never see these guys again, which is exactly how things are supposed to work at Mardi Gras.
The big day itself begins the night before. Well before dawn, parade-goers stake out territory in the grassy streetcar medians along St. Charles Avenue or on the Canal Street sidewalks.
By 7 a.m., the musical walking clubs are strutting around town, handing out crepe-paper flowers in exchange for kisses and sending the sounds of Dixieland through the teeming streets.
It`s understood that no business will be done today. Even Federal Express will not deliver.
The Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club provides the day`s first parade. It is a predominantly black parade, one of the grandest, reigned over by King Zulu. The Rex parade follows, presided over by the King of Carnival, typically a middle-aged, purebred member of New Orleans aristrocracy. He rides on a gilt papier-mache throne and along the route toasts his queen, typically a glowing maiden who is also a purebred member of New Orleans aristocracy.
Meanwhile, the French Quarter has turned into a costumed menagerie of the freakish and fetishistic. A few zealots try to fend off moral doom. They`re the guys hoisting signs with warnings such as, ”If you were to die this minute, are you sure you`d go to heaven?” But they are hugely outnumbered by the likes of the guy in the monk`s hood and leather codspiece who wears a sign that says, ”Confess your fantasies.”
By now, you, the formerly prim Mardi Gras-goer, are wearing so many beads that when a walking club prances by singing ”Down by the Riverside” and playing percussion on empty Jim Beam bottles, you rowdily tag along.
The last formal parade is Comus, the smallest, the oldest and the most mysterious. It is a night-time affair illuminated by the tall, kerosene torches of the hooded flambeau carriers. The identity of the masked King of Comus is never revealed.
Then it all ends, abruptly. At midnight, the police herd revelers off the streets. Mardi Gras is over. The fun is fini. Lent has begun.
The next morning comes with a little pain and an odd, melancholy peace. Last night`s revelers wander around with Lenten ashes on their foreheads, a reminder that, however far-fetched it seems, religion was the excuse for this big, bawdy party.
CARNIVAL 1991
CARNIVAL SEASON BEGINS JAN. 6. Mardi Gras is Feb. 12. Local tourist agencies suggest making hotel/motel reservations for what they call ”The Greatest Free Show on Earth” as soon as possible.
For more information, write the Greater New Orleans Tourist and Convention Commission, 1520 Sugar Bowl Dr., New Orleans, 70112, or call 504-566-5068.
