Of Booze, Beads and Blondes

I wanted to escape the snow, the cold, the hell of Boston in February. I wanted to reconsider certain aspects of my life at a distance. I wanted to celebrate, to scream to let my wild side out.

Where else to go but Mardi Gras?

Yes, that would be the New Orleans Mardi Gras, the mother of all Fat Tuesday celebrations. The ancient, non-p.c., tradition-ridden Carnival, where beads fly and alcohol flows and people try not to remember what they did last night.

This wasn't my first Mardi Gras--I went last year for about a week and enjoyed myself thoroughly. But my trip last year was practically last-minute, coming in the form of a Christmas gift. Afterwards, though, I knew I had to return for another Mardi Gras, come hell or high water or classes or Crimson.

As winter swung into full gear this year, I began pulling out my itinerary more and more just to reassure myself that it existed. With each new foot of snow that fell, I thought of a new strategy to procure maximum beads at the parades. With each bad Harvard Dining Services meal, I thought of the craw-fish and seafood gumbo that awaited me in the Big Easy.

This may sound as though I was overemphasizing the importance of the trip. After, all I was scheduled to be gone only five days, not three weeks. I knew I'd miss a lot of Carnival.

But the significance of a journey cannot be measured by its length. When I reached Logan at 7 a.m. Saturday morning (February 12) and was told that my flight to Detroit (from where I would connect to a N.O.-bound plane) was canceled, I thought briefly of hijacking a plane to get there. Instead, I went back to my room and slept the entire day, getting up at 4 a.m. the next day to make a 6:20 a.m. flight. I knew I had to get there, and I did.

Logan was filled with harried travelers and blasts of cold air. But when I got off in New Orleans on Sunday, I could hear a (live) jazz/ragtime band playing nearby. There was no snow on the ground. At that moment, I knew that the trip would be exactly what I needed.

And it was. No hotels for me, thank goodness. my mother and father, when choosing my godparents, had the infinite wisdom and foresight to pick two people, each with their own spouses and homes, who both live in New Orleans and have children very close to my age. And my aunt had the good sense to pass down the genes for attending Loyola University in New Orleans (the alma mater of my mother and my aunt) to my same-age cousin Anne. They all have a strong sense of Southern hospitality. I was set.

Going to New Orleans always revitalizes me in a curious way. When I return to Memphis, my hometown I feel a sense of utter belonging that comes with complete familiarity I've lived there for 20 years, after all. But when I return to New Orleans, where I was born, I feel as though I'm back in my rightful place. I may not know the layout of the streets or the location of the best restaurant, but I feel as though it's all there somewhere in my subconscious, accessible after drinking few hurricanes.

I arrived just in time for Bacchus, run by one of the oldest and most influential floats. Its king was Jean-Claude Van Damme--who earned my eternal good will be, at one point, dumping most of a box of doubloons on my section of the crowd. I sat on the shoulders of random men and screamed "Throw me somethin', mister!--the classic Mardi Gras cry.

It seemed as though I was Losing my individuality, melting anonymously into the crowd as just one more of the thousands of blonde female undergraduates standings alongside the parade. It was more or less mindless. It was fun.

The next night I attended Orpheus, a brand-new parade of brand-new krewe that my godfather had helped to found. (Some guys named Harry Connick Jr. and Dan Ackroyd also played a part, but who cares about them?) Orpheus is a replacement for one of the three krewes that stopped marching a few years ago when a city ordinance ordered that any krewe using public facilities for parades had to integrate.

This was perhaps the closest anyone came to serious analytic thought during Mardi Gras. Some people mourn the loss of the venerable Comus, Momus and Proteus parades, and say that, as private organizations, the krewes, fair or not, shouldn't be controlled by the city. Others say that it was high time that a move towards integration was jump-started, and point out that the city spends much money cleaning up after the parades.

Whatever. I found the third option--going to the integrated Orpheus krewe parade and screaming my head off for some beads--to by favorite solution. When in doubt during Mardi Gras, go with the flow and celebrate.

Mardi Gras day is almost anticlimactic--everything shuts down and everybody crowds the street beginning in the wee hours of the morning for the Rex and Zulu parades, which are during the day. Most watchers are either bleary-eyed revelers from the night before or chipper family members hoisting their costumed kids into boxes on the tops of ladders for better bead-catching.

I rested. I ate. I sunned. I caught beads and doubloons.

Except for a 40-year-old man dressed as Tonya Harding, there were no reminders of Boston, of the Northeast, of any-thing outside of Mardi Gras. It was hedonistic and loose.

It was sheer bliss.

But all good things must come to an end. At midnight, long after the last beads had been thrown, the bars were closed and the cops kicked everyone out of the French Quarter--an annual ritual. I packed my suitcase and headed for the airport early the next morning. Fat Tuesday was over and Ash Wednesday was upon us.

strangely enough, though, I didn't actually mind (too much) having to return to Massachusetts. For New Orleans is not a very Lenten location to be. It can manage sobriety and exhaustion, but not austerity. New Orleans is the place for celebration Boston is the place for penitence.

I waded through the snow that night to get my forehead ashes and go to section, feeling appropriately somber. My timing was good. But from the desk in my office now dangle three long sets of flat beads in purple, gold and green--the colors of Mardi Gras. Lent will pass, another year will go by and the time for revelry will come again. when it does, you'll be able to find me on St. Charles Ave.., precariously perched on someone's shoulders, smiling a big smile and holding out my hands for some beads. Mardi Gras is balm for the soul.