Mardi Gras day

It's been the Mardi Gras season here in New Orleans, which means a lot of different things. It means parades and costumes, the parody of current trends and observance of historic traditions. It means drinking and noise, it means excess that would seem shocking and all of it leads up to the Ash Wednesday, which is the first day of Lent. It's the feast before the famine and people revel as though it may very well be their last chance to do so. They make promises the week before about what they'll give up on Ash Wednesday and then pursue those things until it comes, with a ravenous hunger. "I swear I'm giving up drinking right after Mardi Gras..."



I've had a friend who leaves in what becomes an unreachable neighborhood (hi crime and too far/dangerous to walk from, no available cabs during Mardi Gras), so I offered to let her stay with me until Carnival was over. She works on Bourbon street, so she'd been meeting me in the quarter and then I'd walk her to work, but sometimes the cab situation would mean it would take hours for her to get here (with me waiting to go with her to eat or have a drink), so we just agreed she'd stay with me instead. After the first night I gave her a key, because she'd often not come home until nine in the morning and it was easier just to have her let herself in. She worked every day until Lundi Gras and then stayed with me so she could enjoy Mardi Gras without fighting to get back and forth. It was an fast friendship that we shared, she and I, despite how unlikely it might have seemed that we would. We went to the parades together, she came with me on a Noisician Coalition march and we stayed out late, drank, ate gluttonously and had fun together.



Mardi Gras day we stood on Canal street and I did something I haven't done in well over five years and probably closer to ten: I ate a Lucky Dog. I'm normally opposed to the very idea of them, but there was something about seeing a parade early in the afternoon, putting together costumes, having drinks, chasing down doubloons from Rex that made the indulgence of a Lucky Dog seem not only acceptable, but almost necessary to really have had the full experience. Oh, and we touched the Saints superbowl trophy and hi fived Sean Payton

We stood against the metal barricades, waiting for the floats to pass and I smiled, my belly full of gluttony, that I was back in New Orleans, that this time I was experiencing Mardi Gras as a reveler and not just as a bar owner waiting for it to pass. I looked down and saw a little girl with the most piercingly blue eyes that I'd ever seen, smiling at the beads she'd just caught and it gave my smile further reason. The sun was in my eyes, but I didn't mind. The crowds were thick, but that was ok too.



I looked up and saw a float passing, one with a Venetian Carnivale theme. I thought of people in Venice, sharing that day with us on the other side of the world and it made me feel connected to them because of all the places in between that don't celebrate the way that they do, the way that we do. It made me sad for a moment, to think that I'd planned on living in Europe this year, celebrating in Venice on this day, but it passed because i was in New Orleans celebrating it and really, that's pretty wonderful.




The end of The night brought another tradition; the clearing of the streets by police when Mardi Gras Gives way to Ash Wednesday and Lent begins. The come through on horseback, clearing Bourbon street. It's the only day, the only time people are told to leave and they do so in typical New Orleans an impressive cavalcade of mounted police.