Robin and Mary’s Not-So-Excellent Mardi Gras Adventure, Part I

     As we approach Easter, I have finally gotten around to writing about Mardi Gras.  Well, Part 1 of Mardi Gras, anyway!  I found there was no way I could tell my tale in 950 words, which is about as much space as anybody can get away with in a newspaper column, so I broke my story into segments.  Here, then, to be published in this week's Sentinel, is the first installment in  ...

Robin and Mary’s Not-So-Excellent Mardi Gras Adventure

(Featuring Pink Feathers, Perdition and One Sinister Frenchwoman)

By Robin Ford Wallace

 

I’ve been thinking about sin.

It’s mostly the timing.  One Sunday, in the interest of journalism, I was pulling on my old purple dress to attend a Baptist church where women wearing pants was judged a sin and homosexuality right up there with murder and rape.  An eye-blink later I was in New Orleans, where even the manliest men wore tutus or flippy little cheerleader skirts as they staggered through the French Quarter, drinking cheerfully.

And this was a religious observance, too. 

Well, sort of.  Mardi Gras is part of the Roman Catholic calendar, the mad “Fat Tuesday” celebration just before Lent.  One of these days I’m going to look up the holiday’s history and how on earth it led to people dressing the way they do.  I was unprepared for it, though my friend Mary and I had been told if we wanted pink feathers we had better bring them with us, because by Mardi Gras there wouldn’t be one pink feather left in New Orleans. 

Pink feathers, my blue-jeaned butt!  Pink feathers are the Mardi Gras equivalent of black dress and pearls.  Yes, people wore feathers in their hair, or in their lurid blue or purple wigs (often topped with devil horns); but on the rest of their bodies they had on nothing even recognizable as clothing in Dade County. 

One man wore a barrel, like in the cartoons to signify poverty.  Other people were dressed as animals or types of food.  A woman had added another pair of secondary sex characteristics to the ones she’d come by naturally, all four proudly displayed in skintight Spandex as she followed her adult beverage down Bourbon Street.  And one man had costumed himself as a certain prized but usually unexhibited feature of the male anatomy, the whole effect intensely embarrassing but oddly reminiscent of U.S. Rep. Scott Desjarlais.

            Enter your narrator, alone and peering myopically at a street map.  I had asked a cop how to get to the French Quarter and he’d said:  “Three blocks that way.  You gone know.”

            He was right, I did know, not just because of the quaint architecture but because of the reproductive organs reeling down the street swilling liquor.  There were also plenty of people dressed as pirates and sorceresses and skeletons, and I remember thinking that New Orleans was sort of a Disney World for your drinker.

Me personally, I wore the usual blue jeans, spectacularly dirty by now.  In planning the trip, I’d been worried about my lack of sartorial splendor, and Mary and I had bought pink feathers and even purple wigs.  But by Mardi Gras proper, we’d been separated from our luggage for days, ever since I rode with Mary in the ambulance  –

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  I haven’t even told you about the bicycles. 

This, then, is the story of our Mardi Gras misadventure.  I wanted to tell it here because people keep making knowing little comments like:  “I imagine there was alcohol involved.”  Ha!  Like we ever got that far.

That had, of course, been the general idea.  Neither of us had been to Mardi Gras before, but we’d heard stories and read exposés – music, drink, dancing in the street – and we wanted in.

Mary is an artist and I write, which means a double case of shallow pockets, and we never could have afforded the trip except that back in September we’d learned that if we booked far enough in advance, we could ride the Southern Crescent to New Orleans for $42.  Plus Mary had a friend in New Orleans, a Frenchwoman, who invited us to stay at her apartment.  A gracious offer, but the Frenchwoman (as in so many New Orleans stories!) was to be the instrument of our downfall. 

Our hostess had grown up in Paris and moved to New York, two places where a car is more liability than asset.  So she’d never learned to drive and she got around New Orleans entirely on bicycle.  We hadn’t fully grasped that, nor the scope of the city.

            The Frenchwoman had borrowed two bikes for Mary and me so we could tour the city with her.  Both were large.  I took the bigger because I’m a bit taller, but the other was still too large for Mary and she had trouble starting and stopping. 

Are you beginning to sense doom yet?  There had been portents even before! 

First, the train:  The Crescent was canceled altogether for track work the first day we booked.  Then, the day we rescheduled, our train killed a man walking on the tracks further north.  There was an investigation, and the train was delayed for 18 hours.  We despaired, but at the last minute Amtrak put us on “alternative transportation,” meaning:  a bus. 

We’d been looking forward to the train ride, but:  a bus?  I’ve always thought when I die and go to Hell they’ll send me there on a Greyhound.  Still, we climbed aboard; then, on a desolate stretch of highway somewhere in Mississippi, the bus broke down. 

In the end, a kindly Cajun in a rusty Ford pickup with barbed wire across the front grille stopped and fixed the bus.  Still, the message was clear:  Don’t go!  Or at least:  Drive.

But we did go and we didn’t drive, so let us return now to that Saturday, our first day in the city immortalized by Tennessee Williams, where the streets have names like Desire and Gentility so that at one corner you can stand where Race meets Religion.

And where, in Part 2 of this epistle, Mary and I climb on our bicycles and follow the Frenchwoman to where Hope meets –

Splat!      

(To be continued …)

No Kale In Cabbage: An Earnest Treatise on the Root of All Evil

I’m afraid this is a little prissy.  Thus the title.  Sometimes one is impelled to state the obvious, even at the cost of wit and charm.

           I was struck in New Orleans, where I spent Mardi Gras hanging around two hospitals after my friend Mary was scraped off the pavement, how silly it was I couldn’t ask the clean, efficient medical people who bustled around me there for help with my own wounds.  I’d been hit by a car moments before Mary had her accident.  I’d walked away, but as I sat in the hard little chairs in the waiting room my leg started to swell and throb until I was crippled and every fifth word I said was AUGHHH.
          (I’m working on an account of “Robin and Mary’s Not-So-Excellent Mardi Gras Adventure” for a future edish, by the way.  Hold your breath!)

But the hospital people didn’t even offer to help because they understood the problem:  Money.  Poor Mary had no choice, but I could wait until Monday and limp off to where the bill was something my credit card, if not checking account, would cover.

So it’s stupid!  Whether it’s because medical costs are artificially inflated or because people at the top are robbing people at the bottom or for whatever reason, the money system prevents hospitals from taking care of hurt people, just like it prevents most humans from doing whatever it is we were put on earth to do.

The system doesn’t work!  It’s broken!

OK, that’s not prissy, it’s rabid.  I’ll leave you to read the column already.

               No Kale In Cabbage:  An Earnest Treatise on the Root of All Evil

By Robin Ford Wallace

You can’t be much of a writer if you care about money.

Everyone dreams of writing the breakthrough novel but for most of us the reality is nobody pays you to write anything amusing.  The best-paid writing job I ever had was for a company that told car dealerships why their customers hated them: 

“You treat them like dirt.  Next!”

Not really.  That would have saved time, but instead I had to blather on for 20 to 30 pages about listening skills, crap like that.  Still, it beat the gig before that, penning PR pieces about plastic pipe for plumbing publications. 

I was desperate enough for fun to enjoy the alliterative possibilities:  “PVC, pliable and practical, puts paid to plumbers’ persistent partiality for pricier products.”  But they didn’t let me get away with much of that and in fact they didn’t let me get away with much actual English.  If I wrote “cheap,” they thought it made the product sound – well, cheap.  They liked phrases like “relatively inexpensive” and “innovative yet affordable,” which if you are any kind of writer at all is the kind of thing that makes you ache for your old job waiting tables.      

Writers wait a lot of tables. 

So do artists.  You can’t be much of an artist if you’re interested in money.  You may have noticed that the ones who fetch the serious bucks tend to be dead.  The living ones tend to cut off their ears.  What earthly use are ears to an artist?  It’s hard to concentrate on painting with the noise of trucks whizzing by over your home bridge, to say nothing of everyone yelling at you to get a real job.

            We can go on with this.  Tony Hillerman, author of the Joe Leaphorn Navajo novels, wrote in one of his books that you couldn’t have money if you were much of an Indian.  Indians must listen to the land and their sacred spirits, not the siren call of the big bucks.

            I read in the newspaper recently about Atlanta policemen moonlighting as bodyguards for drug dealers.  They patrolled parking lots during narcotics sales, and one even volunteered to shoot people if the drug lord gave him the high sign.  You can’t be much of a cop if you care about money. 

How many politicians lose their power when they get caught selling it for money?  How many evangelists?  No, you can’t be much of a leader if you care about money.

You can’t be anything real if money is what you want, not even a basic person.  Mothers don’t get paid for birthing babies or fathers for nurturing them.  Farmers have never made squat for growing food.  Hardly anybody gets paid to think.

This isn’t new!  Jesus was fussing at the moneychangers 2000 years ago.  Everybody knows money is the root o’.  It’s why priests and nuns take vows of poverty and lamas carry begging bowls.  Yet we keep basing civilization on money anyhow.

I maintain, though, this is finally going to change.  Money was originally a placeholder, to facilitate trade:  Instead of swapping your carrots for cabbage, you’d get a coin you could use either to buy cabbage or save for a later purchase of bricks or camels or a new wife.  It was handy.

Now, though, we don’t think of money in terms of stuff it will buy but stuff in terms of how much money it’s worth, even quite necessary stuff.  That’s why farmers grow soy and corn for the processors instead of produce that will keep people healthy:  There’s no money in carrots and cabbage.   

So money isn’t handy anymore, it’s topsy-turvy.  A couple of weeks ago, that was brought home to me when I was dragging my leg like Quasimodo, occasionally yelping in pain, because I’d been hit by a car.  Meanwhile, I was in a hospital surrounded by doctors and nurses whose training and education, whose whole purpose in life, was to take care of hurt people. 

But they didn’t help me and I didn’t ask them to, because everybody knew I couldn’t pay the thousands they’d charge to treat me.  Instead, they referred me to a clinic across town and I limped off into the crazy world. 

You can’t be much of a hospital if you care about money.

But that’s not why I think things will change.  That’s normal. 

It’s the free stuff!  The trend has been toward commodifying things that used to be free, like death – old women in the family used to lay out corpses; now we pay $12,000  – but now technology makes things free that used to cost money. 

Information, obviously.  Why buy reference books when there’s Google?  But entertainment, too.  Writing this, I’ve been listening to a medley of music custom-mixed for my preferences (protest songs, what did you think?) by a free Internet service that did a better job than a DJ, or my husband, could have. 

And now there’s this “3-D printer” thing that’s basically a Star Trek replicator.  Put in a little toner and it spits out anything, not just “Earl Grey, hot,” but tools with moving parts, or human ears and vital organs, all with no manufacturing costs.

Add to that the existing social organization – at that hospital, if I’d been on welfare or in prison, they’d have looked after me gratis – and you’ll admit that money is no longer a logical way to organize the world.  

I don’t have an alternate plan, but I’m rooting for a system that allows farmers to grow food, mothers to mother, doctors to heal, police to protect the innocent and maybe even writers to write.

But never more than 950 words!  So:  Until next time.

END