January 3rd - Mardi Gras

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Professor Longhair - "Go to the Mardi Gras"

When someone who hasn’t been to Mardi Gras in New Orleans thinks of this debauchery filled day, images of women flashing their chests for beads and drunk guys throwing up in the street are usually as far as they get.

 

Our hero being one of "those guys"...about 5 minutes before he started throwing up in the street

Yes, Mardi Gras is the last day before the fasting season of Lent.  Yes, it is the time to get your sinning done before leading a cleaner, more pious life for 40 days and 40 nights.  Yes, it is a time to get drunk, get laid, get lost, get trampled on, and then head back to your suburban homes in Anytown, USA and think “Well, that was quite a sight to see.”

But that’s not the only thing that Mardi Gras is about, and it’s certainly not all New Orleans is about (well, maybe for the most part, but there’s other stuff there too!), and I wanted to highlight some of them when celebrating today.

Our hero hard at work on Mardi Gras Day

The food
Today for lunch, I had to make do with what was available at this time of year.  I would have loved to have a King Cake, which is a cinnamon-roll like cake that is the center piece for many New Orleans Mardi Gras parties.  Instead, I made a turkey po’boy and some red beans and rice, along with some Zapp’s potato chips that I was lucky enough to find here in North Carolina.

Po’ Boy

To say I'm a fan of these sandwiches would be an understatement (as proven by the above picture where my eyes are rolling back like a Great White Shark attacking a seal).  The etymology of the word “po’boy” is as varied as the city of New Orleans itself.  There are endless stories about who came up with the name of these footlong sandwiches with the crunchy outside/fully inside style of French bread.  The common thread among all the stories is that they were served to the poor, working class of the city, often with the purchase of a beer at a local bar.  The idea that this was a “poor boy’s lunch” stuck, and the Cajun dialect and New Orleans way of speech morphed it into a “po’boy.”

Yes, that's a Lando Calrissian coffee mug in the background...Lando likes Mardi Gras too...

Red Beans and Rice

Traditionally, red beans and rice were made on laundry days at the big southern plantations.  Slaves would make the red beans and rice while they did the laundry (in separate pots…because that would make for dirty laundry and the WRONG kind of dirty rice).

Zapp’s

Ohhhhh Zapp’s.  How I loved thee in middle school.  These chips are a Louisiana original, and have been around since the mid-1980s.  I first learned of them when I moved to a suburb of New Orleans (more on this later), and was instantly hooked.  One of the big fundraisers for our teams at T.H. Harris Middle School (Go Red Raiders!) was to sell small bags of Zapp’s to our fellow students.  The problem was that I liked them so much that my bag of small bags of Zapp’s was usually empty within two days, which meant Mama and Papa Bear Farabee ended up footing the bill (sorry y’all!)

The music
I have never heard better live music than I have in New Orleans (Nashville may be a very close second, but the NOLA has got it on variety hands down). Every bar and every club in the French Quarter, where most of the flashing happens, has their doors open, and it often feels like you’re speeding through the radio dial when you’re actually just sidestepping the puddles of liquid that coat the streets (a unique mixture of water, beer, rum, piss, crap, blood, sweat, puke, and other assorted bodily fluids).

The city buzzes and hums with music.  You can’t just walk down the street there.  Instead, you bounce and bebop and groove.  You can’t just ride in a car down there.  Instead, you have to bob your head and tap your fingers through an open window.  You don’t just go to a bar there.  Instead, you shout over some of the best jazz, blues, soul, funk, rap, rock, country, folk, and zydeco there is to be heard.

The Dirty Dozen Brass Band - "I Shall Not Be Moved"

And this all comes to head at Mardi Gras, a celebration of frivolity and laughter and pageantry and life.

The revelers on Bourbon Street

The parades
Ok, I want to talk about the parades now.  But not the kind that you’d see on an episode of COPS. I’m talking about the ones I went to as a kid.  Because as much as I want my New Orleans experience to have been like an episode of Treme, that just wasn’t the case.  I lived in a small city called Metairie, which was about 15 minutes from downtown New Orleans.  Looking back, while that is still much closer than where I had come from (Bath, ME…about as different to my southern home as you could get), it seems now that it was a world away from the “typical” New Orleans that you see on film and TV.

"Throw me somethin', Mister!"



My experience in the Big Easy was much more family oriented.  The parades we went to didn’t have people taking off their shirts.  They didn’t have the fights and the pepper spray that came along with the crowds at Lee Circle.  They didn’t have the tangy smell of the liquid covering the streets (although that smell was replaced by the mildewing smell of the canals found all throughout Metairie).
 

They were…fun.  You would see huge floats go by, and giant sacks of beads would fall from the sky like glittering rain.  Sleeves of plastic cups emblazoned with the parade’s theme and title would bounce along the pavement, scattering and sending us off in every direction to catch them.  Aluminum doubloons of every color would zing through the crowds.  Trinkets that you would scoff at any other time of the year became more valuable the your little brother’s life (sadly, my little brother Lukas was often thrown an elbow or two to get him away from MY beads).

The aftermath of a parade

For me, Mardi Gras is about more than getting hammered and sloppy and becoming a big smelly mess (although yes, that will obviously always be a part of it, and if I could do this while sitting in my office then I would be well on my way to French Quarter Wasted...thanks a lot, Puritans).  Instead, Mardi Gras reminds me of a surreal time (that adjective, when in reference to puberty, was never more aptly applied).  It also reminds me of a city that has gone through terrible hardships, but still refuses to let the good times stop.

Tom might not be a native son, but he got the vibe down. Yeah you right.




UPDATE:

While I didn't have a King Cake today, I did get a chance to take part in a little variation of the tradition while celebrating two co-worker's birthdays. The King Cake tradition is that whomever gets the little figurine baked into each cake will get good luck, and is then obligated to bring the King Cake for the next party.

I had a chocolate chip cookie and a LEGO Harry Potter.  Close enough.

 

Dave-O and his King Cake Baby