Lundi Gras

We're sitting by a bridge over a local bayou, waiting for the canoes to arrive. Earlier today we were with them, setting Jakob's canoe into the stream system that winds though the city park. At some point we pulled all the canoes to some woodsy riverbank, followed a trail to a hilltop in trees, and held hands in some sacred circle while one fellow read us poetry of Le Loup - a wolf man of Cajun legend they had all come to celebrate. Not that any of the assembled were Cajun, but it's Mardi Gras and this was one more in a series of festivities I'd been part of which were deliberately counter to the prevailing practice of standing alongside parade routes and screaming for beads and swag from the guys on the floats. 
 

 Anyway, after the mystic circle ended as all good religious services do - with food, though this was a decidedly unkosher pile of cooked crayfish, we paddled to where we could get the canoes back onto the car and went for Mexican food. Normalcy intrudes. 
 
Then some time back at the house where I spent some intimate moments with a hot glue gun working on my costume for tomorrow. Funny, but in knowing I was coming to Mardi Gras, where everybody dresses up, it never occurred to me that I'd actually be working on my own costumes.  But I left decision-making in Vancouver  and simply decided to do whatever Jakob tells me - and he told me we need to make costumes!

Last night he told me we were joining some friends on bikes and going to a parade. "Yes, let's!" said my inner improv. Then I saw the bike I was to borrow. Rat-trap toe guards on the pedals that my shoes didn't fit. Gears that slipped and jumped to interesting settings. A seat whose cushion had dislocated from the base and kept coming off. So I found myself stopping frequently to readjust my ride or regain my balance, and often to swing my leg over the frame quickly to dismount. And all this while, for the first time in my life, wearing a long skirt! Yes, I have bloody scrapes as testimony to my falls.
But the challenge was now to drive though Mardi Gras traffic, weaving around impatient taxis, running red lights, threading through blocks of partying pedestrians, cutting through the police barricades to cross parade routes, past casinos and ship docks and a rapid transit of downtown New Orleans until we came to a quiet park where we could leave the bikes. Why are we here?  Where the Hell am I and what are we doing?
Turns out we were joining a group called Box of Wine. This motley crew of handmade floats being pushed or pulled by marchers (not tractors!) and surrounded by bacchanalian revellers had one clear task. The marchers had bought boxes of inexpensive wine and were dispensing it freely to one and all. I got to talking to one satyr (he had the nicest fur and cloven hooves) who was pulling his 15-month old son in a wagon packed with diaper changes and boxed wine. Naturally I wanted to compare his kid with Erez and we walked together and talked. Then, because he was focused on the wagon and daddy-duty and couldn't be a true acolyte of Bacchus, he handed me a box and invited me to get to it. 
And so I headed for the folks on the sidelines - the families, the old geezers, the sweet young women, the crowds of rowdies, the tourists, the drummers, the cops - approaching each with "may I offer you some wine?"  Most turned me down, usually with thanks (including, of course, the cops) but some were quite delighted to accept. Some had cups ready for pouring into. But for most the exercise usually involved their ducking before me, mouths wide open, as I pour wine directly into them. More or less. This was so much fun! Perhaps I missed out on perverse frat boy behaviour in my youth, but I had never gone into a crowd filling open mouths with wine like a mother sparrow feeding a hungry flock with worms. And of course I got hugged and kissed in payment. I know Mardi Gras gets a lot raunchier than this for some folks, but for me the high-spirited (pun?) interactions were a sustained peak experience I could never have planned for. 
And when it was all over it was back to my skirted bike ride home through the booming parades and cheering crowds throughout New Orleans . 
 

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Oh! I think the canoes are coming! Time to leave the leeward shelter of the bridge (there's a damn cold wind here tonight. I shoulda brought gloves from Vancouver) and peer into the gloom. Don't see anything yet, but I hear music approaching. Of course, in New Orleans that can happen anytime and any place. But I can make out a canoe, with a paddler front and back, with a tuba player squat in the middle. There's another one, two paddlers at the ends, with two slide trombonists in the middle. Playing the same song as the tuba.   Getting easier to see now - that looks like a raft being pulled by two canoes  - and the thing has a full drum set aboard! The clarinet and sax are out there somewhere, and by now I'm there's a whole damn New Orleans jazz band coming my way - and they're playing a mean version of "Bei Mir Bist Du Shoen"!

What was I expecting? "When the saints...?"

Time to send this one off to the blogosphere. I admit I didn't write it all by the bridge - I took a break from costume making to polish the purple prose.  Gotta make it an early night tonight. Jakob tells me we get up at 5AM tomorrow for The Big Day. Fat Tuesday. Maybe I'll write about it if I survive. 

Y'all take care. 

Avi


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