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 …)