Laissez les bon temps rouler

I didn't know if I'd bother blogging this trip to New Orleans. But it's Sunday morning, I'm sitting in the sun in the French Quarter, scotch and soda for breakfast making its way through my veins, and I haven't a clue where my companion is. Of course, since my companion is 30-something, the idea of actually planning the day was an anathema. So I guess I have time to write. The guy across the street is playing slide trombone, the lineups for beignets at Cafe du Monde goes down the block, so I guess I'm in N'awlins. 
 
I tell people I'm here secondarily for Mardi Gras, but primarily for Limmud. So far, the secondary act has been pretty good. And I've already become a critic. I don't know how much you know about Mardi Gras - I actually knew very little before coming here - but the weeks before see a variety of parades (organized by different societies called Krewes). The other night I parked myself on one of the streets, beside a visiting Norwegian couple on one side and a Black family on the other, waiting for the floats. Frankly, the floats weren't all that exciting - large double-level platforms with some giant Greek mythic figure on the front and a dozen masked riders throwing things to the waiting crowd. The whole parade is about the throws. Folks clamouring for strings of beads (the most common throw) or glow balls, or medallions, or, in the high profile parades, decorated coconut shells or elaborate glittering shoes. 
  
 
I had been told that women needed to raise their shirts and flash their tits to get beads, but all you needed to do was breathe! There were so many strings if beads being thrown that it was impossible not to get some, so many in fact that your neck began to bend under the weight and the street was littered with piles of trampled beads and the torn plastic bags they came in. Mardi Gras is basically an underwriting of the Chinese kitsch economy and an assault on the campaign against littering city streets. 
  
 
 
Today's parade was different. A gathering of 20-something and 30-something musicians, cross-dressers (not mutually-exclusive categories), LGB, unicycle-riders and the like who gathered at sunrise in an industrial riverbank, greeting the day with a massive a capella women's choir followed by a big funky brass band of men in leotards with drums and women with tubas and a variety of dubious dress styles. Then we all marched to the French Quarter where, after a stop for scotch and soda at 8 AM, I lost track of my companion.
 
  
 
My companion, Jakob, is my host here in NO. He's part of the Limmud New Orleans committee, and we met at a Limmud organizers' seminar last June. That's when the idea of "Limmud Tourism" first got floated - that we would couch-surf each others' Limmud events. I hadn't realized quite how literally that idea would manifest - but after several nights on the living room couch at Jakob's it's beginning to feel quite like home. Though I admit it might be nice to sleep with my legs fully extended again. Jakob has also put his bikes and car at my disposal so I've been down to the French Quarter a few times to hear the music in the bars and take in some parades and street life. Yesterday I cycled to the City Park to flop down on the grass in the warm sun and study my script for the theatre midrash I will present at Limmud. Jakob, on most of those occasions, stayed home working on the costumes for today's parade. You should see my headdress of incense sticks and coloured glass.
 
 
I'm also wearing a lovely floral skirt. Not quite used to the wind blowing around my bare legs as it billows. Friday morning was a run to the Goodwill Store to shop for our costumes. There I was, pawing through racks of skirts and dresses on hangars, when it washed over me again. The Wave. The Wave of grief and pain. Whose skirts were these? Which women had chosen them for specific parties or outfits, only to have them relegated to a bunch of strangers, seeking bargains, and not seeking the stories? Who were these women and why do they not have these clothes ? Who by Katrina and who by Cancer? And what will I do with a the lovely clothes still in my closet? Dear God, will they also be bargain shmattas for uncaring strangers? Why am I here in New Orleans without you?!! Please, Ruthi, come back to me! How can I not cry?
 
Laissez les bon temps rouler!