“Don’t worry, I just got it too.”
Quoteth the lady behind me in today’s costume “parade,” the most lackadaisical and at the same time most colorful and art-and-joy-infused event of Mardi Gras '0-10, which is saying something, because New Orleans is all of those things on its own.
Stefin and I are outside of Mimi’s, which is a hip bar/venue where you can get amazing goat cheese tapas with truffle oil and also dance to DJ Soul Sister until 4 am. It is 9:30 am and the place is poppin. An impeccable Bert from Sesame Street strolls along in perfect stripes made from electrical tape... a man towers like a Christmas Tree inside a structure made from paint chips from the hardware store... technicolor wigs, grown up fairies, flamingos, jockeys, ficticious superheros... there was one lady dressed as a boat. We saw three folks dressed as Superbowl trophies- one was made out of cardboard painted silver and towered at probably eight feet above the ground.
We get some water for our face paint, take a seat and get to work decorating each other's visages.
I turned his sort of BobDylanHuckFinn a little Frank Zappa (see previous entry), and he made me glow like a rainbow.
Folks danced around us with beers and bloody maries... it was approaching ten o'clock.
Last year this parade was hands down my favorite event. Caitlin, Nicole, Matt, Ashlee, Adam and I grooved with groups of drummers and horns all the way from Mimi's to the French Quarter. We rolled at about 9 and got central FQ around 10:30. This year, the entire town was just plain worn out.. I mean, the Saints winning was AMAZING... but that means... with this city's tendancy to party... we've been celebrating- and hard- for a good three weeks straight. And I don't know if you realize that Mardi Gras is a 24 hour a day ordeal.
So we're walking around trying to find the parade, which is supposedly coming from deeper in the Bywater (the neighborhood next door to the Marigny). After a few laps we realize we have already passed that rainbow merman with the afro- when he was walking the other way. We were all just bumbling around like the drunken bees in that Wolphin film.
Finally we found a group of about 9 revelers that was pretty steadily "marching" in the same direction. I yelled, "We ARE the parade!" And we commenced dancing as much as our exhausted legs would allow... Stefin beating his makeshift bucket drum (with a remarkably well-constructed duct-tape strap... since his djembe had died an honorable death the night before at another procession of costumes)... and me freestyling, to the delight of those around us (believe it or not. You can tell we were seriously lacking some serious tunes).
We paraded to the Our Bar, which was the other sort of block party this "parade" connected, ran into our sailor-and-wetlands-preservation-specialist-by-day-bartender-by-night friend Jeremy. He was dressed to the nines like a barman from the '20s. He fed us some treats and S and I proceeded to try to catch the end of the Zulu Parade.
No comments:
Post a Comment