Parades # 5 & 6 – Preschool Playground Parades, and Mama Marches in D’Etat

On Friday morning, Jack’s class had their annual parade at school.  Half of the kids decorate wagons with purple, green and gold banners.  They dress in their Mardi Gras finest, and then roll around the play yard and throw to the other half of the kids.  (Jack’s always caught, never thrown!)  It’s funny – they totally offload the crap that their parents had caught the night before!  We caught tons of the same Muses stuff that we’d caught on Thursday night.  My SIL, BIL, niece Ella, and our buddy Mr. Scott came by to watch – Ella lined up with the rest of the kids and caught stuff, while Liam marched around the playground pushing a kiddie car and trying to insert himself into the parade lineup.

After the parade, a bunch of us headed to Juneau’s on the Westbank for hot dogs, and then I came home to gather my stuff for my big night.  I’d snagged an invitation to walk in D’Etat dressed as a slutty French maid, so I had to gather my costume pieces, including feather duster, stockings, garters, and modesty-protecting leotard.  I’m not normally a girl willing to walk the city in slut attire, but at Mardi Gras, anything goes.  In fact, I’d been feeling a little uptight about it, until I went to Muses and observed women and men of all ages, shapes, and sizes wearing all kinds of crazy stuff.  It made me feel better about being a 33 year old mother of two parading around scantily clad.  That’s the point of Mardi Gras – you get to play a role, and your wildness fades into the crowd where everybody is being wild.  Letting loose before Lent buttons you back up.  I couldn’t love this more.

The organizer of this walking group was the 22 year old daughter of my law professor.  He is staid, solid, conservative and dry-witted, and a total Mardi Gras-phile.  His daughter is ca-razy – wild, liberal, fun, partying, the absolute opposite of her buttoned-up lawyer dad.  She selects the outfits each year, and always picks something out of a red-blooded male’s fantasy.  He adores her, and couldn’t care less that she’s nothing like him.  I love it.  Anyway, Mabby (as she’s called, her initials are MAB) invited us over to her place for cocktails by the pool before the parade.  I met my law school classmate to walk over there together.  We knocked on the door, and it was opened by a girl dressed as a French maid with boobs out to HERE.  I knew we had the right house!  We all went upstairs and were immediately handed both a beer and a Bloody Mary.  We curled our hair, traded around mascara and lip colors, admired each others’ outfits, and selected shoes.  (Everyone wore sneakers.  I was tempted to wear heels, and Mabby looked at me and said – do not wear those.  So I didn’t, and I’m glad.  It was, after all, about a 6 mile walk.)

After a few hours of primping and drinking by the pool, we collected our fellow walking men (men walked as well, dressed as skeletons) and caught rides from the neighbors.  It was a little surreal, being dressed as we were and climbing into the car of a respectable older gentleman and riding, beers in hand, to the start of the parade as we listened to NPR and chatted about politics.  Did I mention that I love Mardi Gras?  Nothing phases people.

The parade lines up a block from my house, so a few of us ducked in to use the restroom one last time.  I dropped off my clothes and grabbed my pink Puritan Rodeo flask, a gift from the boys in the band I used to sing with.  I tucked it into my leotard, made sure that my ID and cash were safely zipped into the passport pouch I’d strapped on under my skirt, and marched myself over to join the group.  It was then that I figured out what being “walking security” means.  There was a group of about thirty men dressed in tophats and tails who were going to do silly dance moves to LMAO’s I’m Sexy and I Know It.  We were situated between floats 11 and 12.  Usually between floats the crowd can tend to press in a bit, which is ok if your group is small.  Since this group was large and required the whole road to do their dance moves, we had to walk along the side of the road and push people back onto the curb and out of the way.  The ladies were to flirtatiously use their feather dusters, the men would look scary and intimidating with their skeleton outfits and scoot anybody who didn’t obey the women.

So that’s what we did.  A trailer followed us – it had a porta potty, an enormous cooler full of hot fried chicken, and about five coolers of lite beer.  Anytime one wanted, one could drop back to the trailer and do a rolling climb-on to use the facilities – which maneuver got more difficult as the night went on (and the beers piled up in one’s system!)  Hopping off while rolling was even harder.  Luckily, we dainty females typically had several men offering a hand to help us down.  The first float in the parade actually had a lot of trouble that night and kept having to stop, so we spent a lot of time not moving anyhow, making a jog back to the trailer a frequent and easy occurrence.

I had the time of my life.  I dusted people out of the way, put blinking and beautiful beads on children and called them the Most Beautiful, skipped and danced and walked and just had a ball.  We’d been warned to expect being objectified, grabbed, pinched, and all the rest, but actually the crowd was very polite (I think our male skeleton crew helped in that regard).  Many a saucy boy called “I’m dirty baby, dust me!” and I would dust him with my feather duster, but nobody grabbed or pinched.  I saw friends all along the route – they would rush up and give me a hug, and I’d shriek in drunken excitement and hug them back, and then keep on skipping.  My job was also to remove large obstacles from the dancers’ path, so I kicked beads and bead bags and cardboard boxes out of the way.*  At one point, I was kicking a bead away and ended up falling down hard on my knees.  My stockings were ruined, my knees scabbed and bleeding, but luckily it didn’t really hurt until the next day, so I was able to hop back up and keep walking.  (They still hurt now!  Swollen like crazy.)

I’ve never experienced Mardi Gras all the way downtown – we stay here in uptown every year – so it was cool to walk past the viewing stands (where the mayor sits, ceremoniously greeting the kings and queens of each parade), to march down Canal, and to end up in the Quarter.  We skipped and pranced our way all down the route to the end, where we all congregated on the side of the street and ate the last of the fried chicken.  My lawyer professor took us all to a ballroom in a nearby hotel (which I couldn’t say) to show us the Krewe dressing room, where a bunch of men were wandering around (fully dressed, by the by) drinking and talking and extending the party.  We checked it out, and then my sober driver wanted to go home, so we all walked to her car and got driven home.  I was tucked into bed before 1am, happy, only tipsy (all the walking helped metabolize the beer), guzzling water and noshing on toaster waffles.  It was so fun, I felt blissful all through the next day, even though I was mildly hungover and had to be a solo parent while the Professor worked all day.

That day the pouring rain caused a cancellation of all of the day parades, and since it was still raining come dusk we skipped the night parades as well.  So that takes us to yesterday – Sunday – the best day parades.  And I’ll get cracking on that post soon- complete with lots of pictures!  (Are you tiring of these yet?  I write them for me as much as you, so I will continue to describe each parade, but I promise a return to my normal scintillating content in just a couple of days, when Mardi Gras ends, Lent begins, and I start finalizing preparations for my trip to Brazil!   2012 is being awesome so far!)

*Everyone throws their trash in the street, because immediately behind the parade rolls a brigade of trucks and people with rakes, and the street is completely cleaned in minutes.