Fat Tuesday

This may be the last message from N'awlins. I think I've about covered it. But Mardi Gras is such an unusual phenomenon (is that redundant?) that I feel I must give it one more post. For example, the food bank was closed not only today but yesterday as well (they were open on Presidents Day, and an employee told me they don't pay much attention to the federal holidays, just the Catholic ones). Okay, I understand how some businesses would close but WalMart? McDonalds? It was like Christmas out there today. I had intended to buy a few things at WM, and then have some really bad (good) fast food in preparation for Lent, and I was thwarted on both counts! I was bummed!

Saturday I attended one more parade because folks told me how they were more family-friendly out in the neighborhoods than in the French Quarter. So I drove to the Mid-City area to the home of a new contact who was having lots of family and food and lived within walking distance of the parade route for the Krewe of Endymion. I arrived at 9 a.m. for the 4:15 parade so I could get a parking place, then had some red beans and rice for breakfast. Yum! With King Cake too, of course, which is really a cinnamon roll, not cake.

As I approached my host's home I passed blocks and blocks where people had obviously been camping out in order to reserve their parade-viewing spots. These people are serious parade watchers. They rent porta-potties at $125 and then charge others $2-$5 to use them.

They build parade-viewing contraptions. They wear parade-viewing clothes. They put up tents and bring their grills. It's Party City on the median. I don't know why, but some New Orleans streets have 50-foot-wide medians. This is what it looks like before the parade:

And here's a float we saw on its way to the starting line.

TThis is what happens when the parade rolls by:

There is the biggest hoop-tee-do and fightin' and scramblin' and hollerin', to catch beads thrown from the floats so you can show that you were able to get more cheap junk to hang around your neck than your friends did. And woe be unto you if you try to bend over in that crowd to pick up something off the ground. You're liable to get your hand stomped on. There's no way to see any of the marching bands because the folks with the ladders are all in front (their reward for squatting out there for 36 hours) and there are police barricades to prevent anyone from getting around them.

Well, it took me all of about 10 minutes to decide I had had enough, but the people I was visiting were there until the bitter end, and they do it every year just as if it were a novelty they might never experience again in their lives. I walked back to the house and ate myself into a coma.

There were 57 parades this year, beginning with the one I told about earlier, on Feb. 7. Nine of them took place today, beginning at 8 a.m., and I didn't go near any of them. I was too busy trying to find just one lousy double cheeseburger. These people are crazy. I need to move on.