As I mentioned last year, Mardi Gras can be extremely family friendly, if you want it to be. Go to Canal street and you’re seeing some b00bs, but stick to certain well-known areas of the parade route and you’ll be surrounded by wagons and juice boxes and those ladders with a little high chair at the top (which we are SO getting next year). The drunken debauchers stay out of our area and we stay out of theirs.
We maxed out the Mardi Gras madness this year, attending at least one parade on pretty much every day they ran. There are forty or fifty parades total, and it’s impossible to attend all of them because of their locations and times, but we hit a pretty respectable number!
Sunday, Feb. 20th – we hit Perseus in Slidell with the fam. The first parade of the season, this was a fun one because all of the family attended. It’s a bit rinky dink, to be blunt – the floats are not professionally done, and the bands and dance troupes are mostly young kids – but it was still great fun. See below post for pictures of that one!
Friday, Feb. 25 – this was the night we headed over to the West Bank to catch Cleopatra with some friends. The West Bank is a suburb across the river (to the north, actually, because of the horseshoe bend in the Mississippi that makes this town the Crescent City), and so parking was better, traffic was smoother, and there was lots of space for us to spread out. This was actually one of my favorites! I didn’t take any photos at this night parade, because my camera doesn’t do nights well.
We didn’t catch any parades the following two days, because the Professor was working. No matter – the biggest and best were coming up the following weekend!
Wednesday, Mar. 2 – this was the night that Druids rolled, and the Professor rolled right along with it. Druids is one of the cheaper parades to ride in, and we were lucky enough to know a group that was looking for people to fill up a float, so the Professor got to join in the fun! And what fun it was – riding in a parade (at least in this one) is an all day affair. He texted me all day, sending pictures and messages of what a great time they were having. It started with lunch in the Quarter with fellow riders. They all then assembled in a loose walking parade behind a band and marched down the streets to Tipitina’s, tossing beads and stuffed animals to the kids and tourists (and, oddly enough, a group of Town and Country silver haired folks who were standing on Bourbon street in pearls and suits, cheering primly as the group went by and drunken revelers stumbled out of the bars and strip clubs around them). At Tipitina’s the guys (this is an all-male parade) had a drink or two and then all got dressed in their costumes – all black, with white masks and gloves and pointed wizard looking hats covered in glow in the dark stars and moons. It was impossible to tell them apart wearing this getup, and they looked pretty spooky. As a side note, it is against a city ordinance to remove one’s mask during a parade, and if you do, you receive a $150 fine! It sounds like one of those laws that nobody enforces, but we know someone who was actually fined last year. New Orleans takes its parading traditions very seriously – and I’m glad they do. I would hate for these special events to devolve into drunken sloppy affairs. I mean, more than they already do. Anyway, after getting dressed, it was time to head to the start of the parade route (which is directly outside our house) and load up the floats. Another wife of a rider came over to our place with their two year old daughter and their kick-butt wagon-with-roof-and-cupholders, and we dragged the kids just outside and across the street to go watch. The Professor was riding on float #5, sidewalk side (aka the passenger side – the other side is called the neutral ground side, or the driver’s side). He had bought a shark to toss to Jack and a lion to toss to Liam, and I was ready and waiting as #5 rounded the turn and headed towards our spot. But as I noted, all of the guys looked the same, and apparently all of us parade-watchers look the same, so by the time we figured out who was him and he figured out that us was us, he was already past. I followed as close as I could without ramming into other parade watchers, and managed to snag the lion, but some other kid ended up grabbing Jack’s shark. I felt so bad about it, after the parade was over I went over and begged the kid for the thing, telling him that it was my fault I didn’t catch it. That sweet kid said earnestly “I gave it to my little sister, but I’ll go check if she’s ok for me to get it back,” and then he went and fetched the shark for Jack. And Jack loves it. I’m so glad I was able to recover it – and next year, we’re making a sign with the Professor’s name on it, so he’ll know just where we are and can get the stuffed animals out and ready. He continued on his way for several hours, while we all watched the rest of the parade and went home. He finished the night with one more drink with the guys, and then came home at a respectable hour, having had a fabulous day. I wish I had a picture of him in his getup to share, but this was another night parade, so no camera.
Thurs., March 3 – Muses is an all woman parade that is extremely popular, and also happens to roll right by our house. The Muses theme is shoes – they have beads with shoes on them, floats with shoes on them, and they even decorate real actual honest to goodness shoes with glitter and feathers and what-have-you. To catch a Muses shoe is a big deal, it’s hard to do, and people treasure them. We went to this one, but didn’t catch much of anything, because the crowds were so thick and we stayed to the rear of them. Still, the Muses floats are pretty clever, and done by a professional float painting company here in town. One of them was a huge bathtub, one of them was an iPod. It was way cool. Our upstairs neighbor Sabrina met us for this one, to watch her friends in the Camel Toe Lady Steppers (a dancing group that marches between floats in Muses).
Fri., March 4 – yet another parade went right by our house, and this is probably my favorite. Its floats are just as clever and satirical as the Muses floats, and its throws are just as nice, but about half the people attend D’Etat. This year’s floats included one with Brett Favre looking down his pants with cell phone in hand, Steven Seagal and the Russian “masseuse,” Nancy Pelosi presiding over a declining Democratic party, Rummy and Cheney clinking glasses over the ruin of Iraq. They even had one making fun of the Muses girls. No one is spared, and that’s why we love D’Etat! Our upstairs neighbor Brian came to this one, with baby Owen in a front-pack, and brought us beers to enjoy while we watched the biting satire roll by!
Sat., Mar. 5th it rained, so though my SIL and BIL and niece had arrived for the festivities, we decided not to go to anything. But Tucks is a favorite – they throw toilet paper, which was probably a soggy mess on this day!
Sun., Mar. 6th was the last day of parades that went by our house, and we caught them all. Okeanos, Mid-City, and Thoth rolled by right in a row. This day is when all the above pictures were taken – it’s a good day to bring a camera, since it’s family friendly not ridiculously crowded, and a good long time. Mid-City throws hearts, and Thoth throws spears and hatchets. Yes, you heard that right. We caught several of each, and I promptly sent them all to friends up in South Carolina. We have a stash of spears from last year that I’m still hiding from Jack. I’m running out of room for off-limits toys.
After these three parades finished, we took the kids home for naps and then three of us went to catch Bacchus, another big parade that usually has someone famous as its captain/king/queen. This year’s parade had WWII as its theme, and our friend who works at the WWII museum rode in a WWII era jeep, dressed as Rosie the Riveter and sitting next to her Navy husband dressed in his whites. We saw them go by, and then left – paraded out for the day!
Mon., Mar. 7 – Lundi Gras – the Professor and I went to about twenty minutes of a party on the Proteus route this day, but didn’t see much of a parade. Lundi Gras is the night of the Orpheus parade and ball, and since my brother in law and his family are heavily involved in planning Orpheus, we always get tickets to the ball. We dressed in our formal wear and dragged our rolling coolers up into the convention center (since the ball is always BYOB), and then enjoyed the musical stylings of Lover Boy while waiting for the parade to roll through the party. It actually finished off in the convention center, rolling past all of our tables and offloading what was left of the beads and throws onto all of us in our formalwear. The entire cast of Treme rode in this parade (as well as the mayor and Jennifer Coolidge, aka Stiffler’s Mom), and the Professor caught a blinking Treme bead from Kim Dickens, which made his night. We danced and partied into the wee hours, until coming home to essentially nap for an hour or two before the kids got up. The next morning was rough.
We woke up hurting a bit on Mardi Gras day. 6am comes early when you’re up late catching beads, but what can you do? You have kids, you do what you gotta do. And you’d better believe we put on some cartoons that morning, while we put ourselves back together and prepared for our final day of parades. Mardi Gras day hosts a number of parades in different locations, but we were only interested in one, THE one – Rex. There’s a lot of mythology behind Rex – oddly enough, our pediatrician is an expert on the parade and actually wrote a book about it – but I won’t go into it because this is already quite long. Instead I’ll just say it’s a fun parade, and it starts at 10am which is not too terribly early. One of these days we’ll get up at 5 (or, rather, stay up all night) and go catch Zulu, the all African American parade where they throw you a coconut if you hand them a tall beer. Zulu is extraordinarily popular, and though it rolls at 8am, you have to get down there hours early if you want to have any hope of being close enough to see the floats. We didn’t make it this year. Maybe next time. Anyway, Rex was super. Everyone dresses up like for Halloween – we saw some chess pieces, a couple of dragons, some people dressed as the 610 Stompers (a silly men’s dancing group that marches in lots of the parades – their motto is Ordinary Men, Extraordinary Moves, and please click on that link if you want to laugh at grown men dressed in 70s attire sweating all over a parade route). One year we’ll dress our kids up, too, but this was not the year.
And after Rex, we all went home and flopped on the couch and ate a salad. And that’s the end of my recap. Laissez les bon temps roulez!
I wish I was there for all that!