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After a weekend where everyone is off from work and partying, Lundi Gras is a lull.  Most businesses are open, and there is opportunity to get practical things done.  Johnny Angel and myself went to do laundry, and found the laundromat quite busy – the busiest I’ve ever seen the place, all the driers being used (I’d been there on a Monday around noon before, and there was only one other person there).  I dropped off my clothes and headed off to shop – a New Yorker, always multitasking – while he took a seat in the corner and looked as cool as a man can look in a laundromat.

I headed to an AT&T store, to replace my cellphone, which after nearly four years of good service lost power to its screen.  It still worked, but I couldn’t see any data, phone numbers, or the like.  For a few days I could still make calls to numbers I didn’t remember by figuring out where in my call queue I had dialed them, but eventually that got too complicated and I couldn’t remember anymore.  The service representative thought my old phone was funny – “Man, you’ve had that one for awhile!” – and proceeded to recommend to me what must be the worst-designed phone in human history, whose up-down scroll keys are functionally the same as the enter key, causing endless misprision between me and the phone.  Well, he got rid of another one, I suppose.  In the meantime, I learned yet again that I should trust my own instincts rather than relying on the advice of “the one who knows” in the shop.

The parades didn’t roll until evening, and I met up with friends at Napoleon and Chestnut.  This uptown location was mostly families, a nice crowd, but the crowds were now so large there was no real good place to see or catch things.  If you came when the parade started you could be guaranteed to be several rows deep in the crowd.

Orpheus was the main show of the evening.  Orpheus is one of the newer krewes (founded 1994), and is unusual in that it is almost fully integrated – whites and blacks, men and women.  The integration of the Krewes, which are private clubs, was at the time a major political issue.  The city had passed a law denying parade licenses to groups that did not pass a certification that they did not “discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.”  The certification, amongst other things, would have required the Krewes to reveal their membership.  At least two major Krewes – Comus and Proteus – ended their parades.  Proteus returned after federal courts declared the law unconstitutional, but Comus, which was apparently the real creator of Mardi Gras as we know it and the most prestigious and esoteric of all the krewes, has not returned, though the krewe exists and holds its ball still.  No other parade has taken its Tuesday evening slot.

Integration of the krewes is still a long way off.  Indeed, to my eyes Orpheus appears to be the only major one that is not segregated, either de iure or de facto on the basis of either race or gender.  Indeed the Orpheus solution appears to be the one that works: not to try to force the old krewes to change, but simply to start new ones that better reflect the spirit of the age.  Mardi Gras history is littered with krewes that no longer exist; like people, they get replaced by other ones.  And is this not the way with all things?  Birth and death change many more things than persuasion and conversion.

Orpheus is in every respect a modern krewe, not only with respect to its membership but also in its floats, which are the most technologically advanced and expensive of all the krewes’.  They look like they were made for Universal Studios, with huge moving parts, exquisite lighting, speaker systems, and the like.  The kids at the parade were absolutely mesmerized by them.  On the other hand, they were also modern in that they seemed more show than substance, though perhaps this was a failure of my own understanding: their general theme was “hows and whys” and featured floats like “how the camel got his hump” and other stories I did not recognize.

Orpheus also enlists a number of celebrities to ride on the floats.  Joan Rivers was there, as well as the cast of Reno 911.  I’m sure there were others I did not recognize.

Right at about this time the mayor of the city was meeting the King of Rex to hand over the keys to the city.  On Tuesday the city is (symbolically) governed by the King of Carnival, the “Lord of Misrule.”

After the parade I headed to meet up with a fellow Latinist and his wife and some of their friends at a nearby party.  The “party”, as it turns out, was not really happening, and they had arrived at a stranger’s house to find a couple putting their kids in the bathtub and readying them for bed.  Undaunted, however, this couple started putting out king cake and warming up leftovers for them!  When I arrived, the scene was pleasant but my friends were a bit embarrassed, and the mutual friend, the link between them and this couple had decided to go elsewhere, so we all headed out, laughing about the experience, and went to a nearby Mexican restaurant.  One of our little crew was a Yale graduate and reporter for the Times-Picayune, and was another interesting New Orleans voice.

From there we went to a nice bar and met up with another group of people, including yet another artist (a painter) and a boatbuilder (not the sort of person you meet every day).  The painter was about to do her first big show, and we discussed the problem of crossing the threshold: when you are no longer potential but merely someone with very definite, bounded, and ultimately limited achievements.  It’s terrible to cross it, but fata ducunt volentem, nolentem trahunt.

Then back home.  The next day I would be up early.

By Samedi Gras I was exhausted by new experiences, so I puttered around the house a bit, worked in the garden, and “made groceries.”  In the supermarket I saw one of the downsides of Mardi Gras – people running around buying things, wanting to make sure they got to the parades on time or had enough food for their parties.  The stress was probably measurable – I feel certain that I had not seen people in New Orleans move this quickly before.  (In general, this city makes me feel like such a New Yorker – even in slow mode, I am zipping past people on the sidewalks).

Around four-thirty or so I biked off to Midcity to meet a friend at Delgado Community College and City Park, where the Endymion parade was launching.  Midcity is in the center of the New Orleans landmass, and is functional and middle-class rather than historical or cool.  City Park is huge – one of America’s largest urban parks – and unpopulated, making it feel like Cunningham or Van Cortlandt Park in the Boroughs of New York.  Delgado Community College looked a bit like a high school.  I saw a sign offering $15 one-hour massages at the College’s Massage School, which seemed like a promising idea.

By the time I arrived, the crowds were huge, but of a different sort from what I had seen previously.  Endymion’s Midcity route is completely different from other parades, and the crowd is much more middle-class families.  Each one stakes out a little area for themselves, often with orange plastic tape or fencing, bringing chairs for the adults, ladders with specially adapted bench seating for the little kids, and coolers and coolers worth of food.  It is as if they recreated their suburban neighborhoods along the parade route.  They stay within their property and make the acquaintance of the enclaves on either side of them.  And the Saturday afternoon timeslot offers leisure to set up and sit around doing not much but eating and gabbing about family, giving the whole a kind of Fourth of July picnicking at the park kind of atmosphere.

Since my friend was single and had no family here in New Orleans, he had joined for the day the family of his supervisor at work, which adopted me for the day as well.  The family was from St. Bernard parish, known locally as “The Parish” and having a reputation for blue-collar people who are very obvious – sort of the Queens or New Jersey of New Orleans.  It is true that the accent I heard was different – louder for sure, the vowels with a Southern flavor but much more staccato and crisp.  And did I say louder?  It was a bit of a parody of the “ugly American” accent.  But that is not something I am ashamed of.  I was treated as an honored foreign guest, and was plied with food as if they believed I had not eaten in weeks.  I ate my first King Cake of the season, something I had looked forward to with relish: the well-baked King Cake is one of America’s most admirable confections.  It is not much more than a giant Cinnabun with less cinnamon and more sugary frosting, but it is deliciously simple and served only at Mardi Gras, and I have a soft spot for dishes that point to the mystery of recurrence in time.  Inside each cake is baked a figure of a baby; the person whose piece contains the baby is supposed to provide the next cake.  I have heard that the baby has some kind of Christological meaning, but I merely pass that on and do not vouch for it.  Everybody wanting to hear the foreigner’s opinion on Mardi Gras, and by the way they asked you could tell they were quite certain that I would be impressed.  Nor were they wrong.  But two separate family members also asked, “In New York City you must have big parades, no?”  I tried to explain to them that even though we did have parades, in fact we had nothing in the least bit similar to a Mardi Gras parade.  I could tell from their faces that they had heard this answer before, but still didn’t quite believe it and planned on asking the next New Yorker they met the same question.

The parade’s scope was astonishing.  Endymion is one of the “Superkrewes,” with 2,500 riders on

Here comes Endymion!

gargantuan floats – one, the “Captain Eddie S.S. Endymion,” a segmented float made up of three or four sections of Mississippi Riverboat, preceded by Endymion with a horn and followed by the Father of Waters as rivergod pulled by an alligator, was 200 feet long if it was an inch (and perhaps quite a bit longer).  When you factor in the marching bands – who might well be the numerical majority of the parade – the number of people involved in the parade becomes quite astonishing.  The floats were prepared with the greatest care and had mostly mythological-cultural themes, such as “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” led by Bottom in ass-ears, or “Pharaoh’s Dream” with Egyptian men in colored coats.  My personal favorite was the Vergilian (Homeric) “Gate of Horn and Ivory,” which as a theme for a float in a public parade is simply astonishing.

The Krewe of Endymion takes pride, as the story goes, in the throwing virtue of its members, and I was

For the little girl in the front row.

impressed.  They must have all been pitchers and quarterbacks in high school.  The riders launched necklaces, footballs, frisbees, and cups hundreds of feet into the crowd, and dumped materiel with an enthusiasm and frenzy that was hard to imagine.  The crowd, as usual, soaked it up spongily.

When the parade was largely passed, I went with my friend downtown to the Mayor’s viewing stand at Lafayette Park, where a friend of his was watching the parade.  We hopped on our bikes and headed downtown, easily bypassing most of the parade.  Since the parades have so many marching bands, it stands to reason that they must move slightly slower than walking pace, to allow troubles to be resolved and the bands to march and play without getting separated despite whatever troubles may have to be resolved (from tying shoes to getting a drink or going to the bathroom – special trucks follow along with Port-o-potties, called here Port-o-lettes).  On our bikes we moved quickly, especially as we were rolling, now at night, through some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the United States.

How many people here know/care who Bottom is?

Downtown we saw more of the public image of Mardi Gras: drunk people from Dallas and Houston fighting local children and old women for beads.  The drinking, coupled with the formidable throwing powers of the Endymion Krewe, made for a certain amount of danger.  The Krewe kept firing beads into the crowd like lasers, up four stories into balconies and to specific receivers in the crowd.  At times these beads or even bags of beads scored the faces of people who were drinking or chatting, or smashed into their beverage hands, splashing alcohol everywhere.  It being Carnival, it was hard not to find this funny, though it sometimes made the victims a bit angry.  We talked with all our neighbors in the crowd, funneled our beads to little children and women without them, and in general had a fine time.  When the parade ended, we made our way past mountains – mountains – of garbage slowly being raked up by Hispanic workers, and biked on towards home.

But the evening was not done.  I got in touch with a friend from college, who was originally from New Orleans but currently living in Brooklyn.  She had returned for Mardi Gras, and I got together with her at the Columns, a venerable 19th century hotel with a chic bar uptown.  With her and her cousin, another New Orleanian in exile (in San Francisco as a hedge fund manager), I got a burst of New-York-style conversation, about books and ideas and music (I call it New York conversation, but in fact it is merely upper-crust conversation; the kind of conversation Tolstoy mercilessly records), especially the books Cadillac Desert and John McPhee’s The Control of Nature. It was fantastic, and completely unlike the rest of the day.  We were there for an hour or so, then went home, as it was to be a fairly early morning the next day.

The joys of living in New Orleans.  If you have a mortgage, you need flood insurance – which in certain areas is like another mortgage.  Plus high taxes.  And no jobs either.

And the famous water and sewer board, where nothing gets done.  New Orleans water is famously filled with all of middle-America’s effluent.  Certain things like pesticides and (my personal favorite) prescription drugs can’t get filtered properly.  A geotechnical engineer I know here doesn’t even advise showering in New Orleans water.  “I guess once or twice isn’t so bad,” he said.  “But I wouldn’t do it every day.”

But perhaps it’s not as bad as Chicago!  We’ve got this thing and it’s (expletive deleted) golden!

But can the city withstand economic crisis, the collapse of the music recording industry, the uncertainty of weather, the vagabond ways of the Mississippi, the intractable race problems, political incompetence and malfeasance, on top of all the other evils flesh is subject to?