Happy Mardi Gras! ........Oh! My! Thirty-three Years Ago!

 

 

This is a re-post from a January 28, 2008:

Our first trip to New Orleans was in 1991. Before digital cameras, because we don't have jpegs of the trip. We were visiting my sister the Sister and got to stay in a guest cottage on the grounds of a large convent across Lake Pontchartrain. We rented a little GeoMetro and tooled around the City and countryside. There were parades going on all week, some in the City, others in surrounding towns. We were invited to go with a group of Nuns to the Big Parade on Mardi Gras, "Fat Tuesday" the last day of celebrations before Lent. We had to leave about 5 AM to get there on time, which I recall was about 6.

What made the offer attractive was the fact that they had connections at a New Orleans funeral parlor on the parade route that would provide both parking and toilet facilities. This is important, of course, as the crowds would make finding a parking place nearly impossible and, although drinking alcohol is allowed anywhere and everywhere, bathrooms on the parade route are scarce. McDonald's and other quick stops were known to lock their facilities for the duration of the parade. 

Some folks would drive their pickup trucks, with their own private Porta-Potties, into the City in the wee hours and park near the parade route. While we were guests of the Undertaker, we were provided the "luxury" of relief stations: the women had access to indoor plumbing while the men were relegated to a large canvas tent in the back parking lot, in which was a wooden box trough filled with sawdust. This set-up was not for the pee-shy. By mid-afternoon, the sawdust was saturated and recycled beer was seeping through the wooden box, onto the asphalt and slowly out from under the tent and into the parking lot.

Meanwhile the townies were hoarding beads and trinkets thrown out by Rex, Zulu, Orpheus and Endymion. Little old ladies would crush your fingers with a quick stomp if you were foolish enough to reach for a stray doubloon. It's all in the technique. You stomp on your prize, THEN reach down to retrieve it. Beads on the "G" rated parade routes were generally most accessible to those closest to the street, on stepladders or with feminine charms that were not explicitly exposed. We've heard that elsewhere in the City, exposure, for both men and women, is heavily rewarded, depending on the crowd. Alas, we were in the Nun section.