Inside View of Mardi Gras
13 March 2000
I grew up in Houma, Louisiana - about an hour south (that's right, south) of New Orleans. Houma is not really the little town it was when I was a kid, but it's certainly not the size of New Orleans, either. Mardi Gras in smaller towns is very different from the City - much more of a family affair. Nobody shows any body parts to speak of. Young girls wear halter tops and that's enough to get them inundated with beads and trinkets from the floats of the men's krewes.My sisters who still live there are very active in the Mardi Gras celebration. I would say that their social lives revolve around it. There are fund raisers, like weekly bingo games, all year long. The 'krewes' (as a Mardi Gras club is called) are broken up into float units. The members of a 'float' stay together from year to year and are very close friends. Some people belong to more than one krewe! (These people are serious party animals.) Belonging to even one krewe involves a long string of parties. If someone is on the court, whether or not they are the king or queen, they attend parties given by each float as well as the parties thrown for the entire group. All of these parties really come to the boil after Christmas.
Since Fat Tuesday is the last day to party before the onset of lent (on Ash Wednesday), the date of Mardi Gras floats (no pun intended). It's 6 weeks before Easter. Some years Mardi Gras is in February and the weather can be very cold, others in March. This year it was in March and the weather was spectacular. The azaleas were blooming and the temperature was in the 70s with a high of 80 on Mardi Gras day.
My younger sister was the queen of the Krewe of Aphrodite this year. Each year members of the krewe 'put their names in' for queen. One person's name is drawn. This year her name was drawn. This was a very important occasion to her. There were 5 daughters in my family - All of us were there. Not to attend would be like not going to her wedding. Only this is waaaaaay more fun than a wedding!
I arrived late on Thursday night. Queen Eileen's parade was on Friday night. She woke up very early, had her hair done and was dressed to kill, in a beautiful white dress (not the ball gown) with her crown on when the 4 women who were the Court showed up at her house. Just as the court was assembling in Eileen's house, a dozen Shriners showed up on yellow and green Harley Davidson motorcycles to escort the ladies. They were all lined up, parked at the curb when the white stretch limo arrived to ferry the ladies around for a full day of partying. The limo driver brought Queen Eileen a dozen long stemmed roses to add to a house already loaded with flowers. With the sirens on the motorcycles wailing, they took off, first to a breakfast with the entire krewe, then on to stops all over town. They visited kindergartens, rest homes, a bar where they were entertained by male strippers, and who knows where else. By 6:30 pm, they were dressed in their costumes and on the floats. Needless to say, the Cajuns are serious drinkers. I don't know how they stay vertical.
VIPs (like me and the rest of the family) received special invitations to watch the parade from the viewing stand. The stand is built across the front of City Hall. Inside City Hall there was a buffet and a bar set up for the guests. A sound system was set up on the viewing stand as well. Since the parade route is about 5 miles long, it takes about 5 hours before the parade reaches the viewing stand and we were dancing and having a party on the stand. The music blared everything from "That Old Time Rock and Roll" to hiphop. Even the inevitable "YMCA". All the people who come to watch the parade create their own parade and we watched them and they watched us. Friends of the VIPs would stop to chat, have a drink, and a good time was had by all.
The first sign of the parade is a cadre of police officers on motorcycles who ride back and forth up and down the street, sirens blazing away, signaling that it's time for everyone to get out of the way. It's wonderfully effective crowd control and the policemen are very much a part of the parade. Following the policemen are a few open convertibles with the past queen and court and then the Shriners motorcycles. The Shriners don't just ride up and down like the cops - they do figure 8s! I loved the motorcycles!
The Queen's float is next and, when she arrives at City Hall, the float stops for a champagne toast to the queen. A gang plank is put across from the float to the viewing stand so that the family of the queen can walk across for the toast. Not only did all of the sisters have to walk the plank, but our 82 year old mother who bullied her way out of the hospital for the occasion, strutted out there for her turn too!
I should tell you that my sister's costume was really an awesome sight. A really gorgeous white ballgown with a back piece about 6 feet in diameter (I'm not sure what you call this) of white feathers that was strapped on to her waist and rested on her shoulders. I'm not describing this very well but the effect as the float came toward us down Main Street was of a beautiful white butterfly. (In fact, as we were toasting her at City Hall, a gust of wind nearly blew the butterfly off the float!) That thing weighed about 50 pounds and she not only carried it for some 6 hours but she did it with the wind blowing.
After the queen came the float with the Court, also done up in outrageous costumes of all different colors.
Then, interspersed with marching bands from all the high schools and junior high schools, came about 15 or so decorated double decker floats with the costumed krewe throwing stuff to the crowd. The main objects that are thrown to the crowd are strings of beads and there are no lengths to which people will not go to acquire these things. Beads are not the only things that get tossed to the crowd, however. They throw lingerie, they throw stuffed animals to little children, they throw harmonicas, super balls, footballs, plastic glasses specially decorated with their pictures. They throw dubloons (sp?), which symbolize the Pieces of 8 of pirate days and almost any other trinket you can think of. But, mostly, they throw tons and tons of beads. When they spot a friend in the crowd, they throw armfuls at a time or they throw unopened cellophane packs of beads, with maybe 12 strings in the pack. It should be required that anybody with a friend on a float wear a hard hat! And everybody in town has friends on the floats!
(There must be at least 10 krewes in Houma. I figured that at least 5000 people directly take part in this mayhem. Since I didn't get there until Thursday before Mardi Gras, I only got to see 4 of these parades. But at every one of them, my family carried home sacks, like laundry bag sacks, of throws which they will sort out and use for next year's parade.)
The parade wends it's way through town, ending up at Aphrodite's den - a very large building which belongs to Aphrodite and is where they work on the floats - for the final party of the day - the Bash. An excellent, live band was playing as we walked through the door. These folks don't need encouragement to dance. The entire krewe, still in their costumes, was on the dance floor when we walked in. The Court changes into casual clothes. This is not the Ball. The formal ball was held about 3 weeks earlier. The Bash is a strictly casual affair. A huge buffet was set up, everything from gumbo to chocolate cake. We danced until the wee hours of the morning. After the Bash, some of Eileen's closest friends came over to the house - loathe for the evening to end. We finally hit the sack at about 5 am and got up the next day for more of the same.
Next year we'll do Carnival in South America. Not Rio, but every Catholic country has a carnival. Yahoo!
Jeanne
