FAT TUESDAY

Mardi Gras will come and go before most folk get the news. If you don’t live on the Gulf Coast it can go unnoticed all together. There have been parades and blowouts for over a week but things got serious yesterday. Krewe Endymion dodged the rain last night in New Orleans with their big parade. In the next two days the other big ones will revel to big crowds. Trash barrels along the route will overflow like lava from volcanoes and beads will hang from every tree branch on the route. Krewes Thoth, Bacchus, Zulu, Morpheus, Isis and Rex to name a few, they will all follow suit. In Baton Rouge the Spanish Town parade was dampened with light rain yesterday but plenty of energy from the floats as well as spectators. It’s the “R” if not “X” rated parade. With past themes like, Loose Screw, Slippery When Wet, Blows & Wiki Leaks, this year’s Game of Thongs lived up to expectations. 

Still, ask anybody, Mardi Gras is a Christian, religious holiday. On the last day before Ash Wednesday and Lent, the lead up to Easter, tradition would have it everyone clean out the pantry of all the good, tasty, fat food (red meat), to eat it all so there is nothing good left. That’s what they intend to sacrifice, to go without in preparation for the holy holiday, until Easter. But they went a step farther; they drank all the booze too, which led to revelry and otherwise unacceptable, uninhibited behavior. To keep their debauched identity a secret, revelers wore masks. The next day everybody prayed forgiveness and all was forgiven.  Not much has changed except you don’t have to be a Christian to revel, you don’t have to give up anything and forgotten is even better than forgiven. 

The best story I’ve found for Carnival tradition around the world goes back, way, way back. Kings and generals ruled without much oversight but when the gods got angry, somebody had to die and not just a common criminal or peasant. So the high mucky-mucks with their mucky muck queens, princess and concubines designated children of high birth, at birth, every year or so to be the literal, sacrificial designees. They needed a perfect, righteous person, the right age, trained and skilled for some important purpose, knowing that if and when the gods got pissed off, one or more of this special group would be sacrificed in a show stopping, high profile ceremony. They had a holiday marking their importance as royal blood, aware of their royal fate, sacrificed for the sake of kings and generals who didn’t really want to die just yet. To get broad support from their subjects they included a special day when commoners would be forgiven for acts and excess that were otherwise punished. Infidelity and inebriation would be tolerated by the king but spouses might not have been so forgiving. So people who colored outside the lines on that day wore masks. What a revelation, to discover that your masked partner in lust and drunkenness was in fact your cheating spouse. Great story. It was long with lots of loose ends, some of it traced either to or through the Gypsy line, from Eastern Europe to India before that, over 1,500 years ago. One researcher thought the practice was common in many cultures and modern Carnival tradition is a fusion of them all. 

I like to be in the French Quarter for Fat Tuesday. People dress to the 9’s in Mardi Gras colors with feathers, sequins, plumes, top hats, crowns, plunging neck lines and they behave like high mucky mucks. Not many bare chested ladies but the drunks are hard to miss. I like to take photographs. If I get one or two that go over the top, that’s a great day. If I put away an oyster po-boy and a few pralines, that’s great too. In Baton Rouge at Spanish Town parade, I collected so many strings of beads I couldn’t carry them all home. The miniature sex toys and sexy thong underwear that came with the beads are neat but I don’t have cause to keep them. What will aliens think when they dig into Louisiana land fills?