Why New Orleans Matters by Tom Piazza

Author:Tom Piazza
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-07-12T16:00:00+00:00

6.

I never thought that much about Mardi Gras before I lived in New Orleans. I dismissed it, out of ignorance, as another manifestation of the Bourbon Street syndrome—the exaggeration of the obvious, a chance for ordinarily straitlaced folks and fraternity brothers to have some kind of toxic sybaritic freakout before returning to real life. And of course there are dimensions to Mardi Gras that fit that description. But it misses the point, catches only a small part of the surface of the day.

James Gill’s book Lords of Misrule lays out the history of Mardi Gras, its roots in the nineteenth century, and the purpose it serves for the city’s business and social elite. To many New Orleanians, Mardi Gras is not just the day itself, but the season leading up to it, in which the city’s Mardi Gras krewes, which sponsor all the parades and balls, hold what amount to a series of debutante cotillions, introducing the daughters of the privileged to the sons of the privileged. In the two weeks before Fat Tuesday these krewes throw their famous parades. Every night, people from every class and neighborhood make plans to meet “at Bacchus” or for Endymion (two of the most popular parades), picking a corner to meet, bringing food and drinks in coolers, and often ladders with specially constructed boxes on top in which children sit to catch the beads and trinkets that spew from the parade floats like water from the fountain of life itself.

Those are the happiest and most festive weeks of the year for almost everyone in New Orleans. The entire city, high and low, gets dragged into things whether it wants to or not; the weekend before Mardi Gras is full of parties, out of town visitors and revelry, all culminating in the Day Itself. What looks on quick examination like a day when everyone is issued a license for the total stripping away of inhibitions is in fact something more subtle, involving not a dulled but a heightened awareness of, or sensitivity to, possibility.

If you have never been to New Orleans on Mardi Gras, I hope that we will both get that chance again. It is rare indeed to have every, or almost every, citizen in a city tuned to the same channel at the same time. Everyone agrees to have a day, the same day, in which no one can be certain what is going to happen. People light out in the morning, often wearing masks or costumes that advance an alternate persona for themselves. They may have certain stops that they know they will want to make, but they are also open to the fact that the winds of the day may lead them elsewhere, and that that is part of the point of it all. One submits to the multifarious flow of chance and felicity, of music and motion.

The best Mardi Gras starts early and ends late. One knows implicitly that all over the city others are doing the same thing, making their preparations to get out into the day, and maybe even encounter you.

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