Mardi Gras Report 2017 #1.1
I write a lot about Uptown New Orleans because that’s where I am most of the time. I don’t live there, but I have worked in the Lower Garden District for 13 years as of this past Wednesday, which has taught me how to park without getting very many tickets and to how to peer at mansions through iron fences with only a little stink eye from patrolling security guards.
I am welcome, legally, to come and go in this historic neighborhood but I do not really belong. I do not pay property taxes in New Orleans, maintain a Victorian money pit, take down and dust chandeliers or lobby for children to get into the right schools. Uptown life is not my privilege. About this leafy sliver of high ground beside the river, I can only write what I see from the sidewalk and what I hear from locals.
A writer who attempts to explain a culture in which he has not long lived is doomed. Only living, loving and long suffering make a person truly a part of a place. Such qualifications enable New Orleans writer Chris Rose to open a vein and share the life blood, the truth, of New Orleans.
There are those who would sniff at the idea that exclusive Uptown has anything to do with their Mardi Gras. They would be correct, mostly. Everywhere in New Orleans and throughout the surrounding communities, from the costliest mansions to the most humble of shotgun houses, live the unseen action heroes of Carnival; mostly invisible until they spill, in all their purple, green and gold glory, onto the streets each year for “the Mardi Gras.” Many neighborhoods and households keep their own traditions, which they sometimes update at whim. They share at least one thing: They will never get all of the glitter from creative projects out of their carpets or from between their floorboards or even off their dogs.
Somewhere in Mid City, in a shoebox under the bed of an insurance agent’s secretary, Mardi Gras waits all year for a sudden need for sequins and a spool of gold thread. Mardi Gras lives in June, as a young man with tattoos sorts sparkling, acrylic gems and bright feathers at Jefferson Variety. In Tremé, a skinny kid practices a dented tuba in September, and after Christmas learns to march in cold winds. Parade krewe members work all year, making hand-crafted throws like painted Zulu Coconuts and glittered Muses shoes to give away on their rides. And on and on. I can see, hear, smell, taste and feel Mardi Gras everywhere I go. It’s three weeks before Fat Tuesday.
This is the Mardi Gras I will never adequately capture in words – this slow, early-season swell of excitement and creativity. January brings very local Mardi Gras preparations that appear on stoops and balconies and hang from iron fences. Muffled notes of school marching band practices arrive in the air from blocks away. Feathery projects taking over kitchen tables. Days-old king cakes molder by office water coolers. Parade viewing stands block downtown sidewalks, and “Happy Mardi Gras” is given by strangers who want nothing from you and have nothing to offer but their lifted spirits.
Happy Mardi Gras, everyone.
Guy D. Johnson is a writer and marketing communications professional. Previously an animation studio owner, daily newspaper editor, reporter and photographer, volunteer fireman, railroad bridge gang helper, FM radio station underling and cave guide. He has lived on farmland trusted to the sun and rain; atop a wooded hill; beside great rivers; upon an arid, high plateau; and at the subtropical coast of the Gulf of Mexico. For 20 years, he worked and wrote in New Orleans.