Save the Artists, Musicians and Weirdos
In the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans, you can tell natives from visitors and newcomers by the way they act at parades. The fresh ones are the skinny, 5-foot, 10-inch-tall (most of them – it’s odd) white guys with short hair and manscaped faces accompanied by big-eyed girlfriends who are always too warm or too cold and think everything is “awesome” except for waiting and crowds and no bathrooms and whatever is making the beers they bought three blocks away get warm.
These bewhiskered manchildren with their hair buns and black tights guard parade viewing spaces and lines of sight to which, apparently, they are entitled, and whine when those are trespassed – a sound not unlike the evening call of the American Bittern.
In contrast, there exist, fewer and fewer these days, the musicians, artists and general-purpose weirdos who claim lower Frenchmen Street and the rest of the Marigny as sacred, ancestral ground, rising rent prices notwithstanding. This species is identified by the way they blend with their environment as an iris is at home in Monet’s garden, and for their need for very little personal space. Why wouldn’t another human being, in a special time of celebration, not want to get close to friends or strangers, share a story, sip from someone’s flask or give a hug?
During tonight’s parade, my wife, Lisa, and I met a friendly local when part of the Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus parade fell behind. He was young, tall, dark and handsome. He smiled at Lisa. She smiled back. He opened his arms and pulled her in for a spectacularly long hug. He had taken one look at Lisa and knew her heart. I’ve seen this happen for 30 years. It doesn’t happen to me. He knew she was someone worth sharing a moment of life with. I trusted her instincts enough not to step in and make it awkward.
Lisa’s new friend turned out to be the founder and bass drummer of the Free Agents Brass Band (he’s on the Treme cable show soundtrack). He wasn’t part of the parade. He was going to work, shuffling toward Frenchmen Street. His band would be playing the 11 p.m. gig at the Blue Nile, which was not going to be easy to get into on Chewbacchus night. He offered to put us on the guest list to make sure we could get in. I said we had to get back to the car by midnight or get our vehicle booted or towed, so we couldn’t go. I didn’t even try to make it happen. That was an epic fail on my part, the kind I may remember on my death bed; when the band offers to get you into a premiere New Orleans music venue during Mardi Gras, the correct response is yes and thank you, thank you, thank you. As they say, the walls we build around us to keep others out also keep us out. Yeah, I know that’s a cliché, but it’s a good one. Not everyone is out to pick our pockets.
When he took off, he was stopped every few feet by Chewbacchus walkers who knew him and had to connect with him, to get one of those big hugs, to ask him where he’d been. Real friends, it would appear, are touchy and smile a lot and their topics of discussion do not seem as important as their togetherness. At 10:30 at night, these were his morning rounds. I pray that at dawn, this cobblestone in the pavement of New Orleans culture does not have to cross a long bridge to go home, squinting at the sun rising over Lake Pontchartrain, to live in the suburbs with others of his kind who also make that trip because their native lands in the city have been sold to prospectors.
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.