I'm from Cape Cod, MA. The first baseball game I ever went to was at Fenway Park. My father somehow talked Red Sox legend Dwight Evans into calling me the night before my Farm League championship game to wish me luck. Don't ever call me a Yankee...them's fightin' words. But that's where I found myself. No more than one sentence had I spoken, and I was being branded with that most reviled moniker. I think I said, "When's Mardi Gras? I heard it's a wicked good time." The woman tilted her head and smiled, "You must be a Yankee," she said, followed by a wink. Oh yeah, I was in the deep South, I thought...that means a whole different thing here. Was it that obvious I was from the Northeast?
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The Mardi Gras that most people from away think of is in the French Quarter, which is downtown in the city. It's loud, bawdy, kinda smelly, and a great time in it's own right. But we lived Uptown right off of St. Charles Avenue by a huge park and the universities, and that scene during Mardi Gras is completely different. This is the Mardi Gras that New Orleanians cherish. Please forgive me Quarterites, but it's all about the parades. These are PARADES! The likes of which I've never seen.
A parade in my hometown is made up, basically, of a couple fire trucks, 5 classic cars, and a float or two made by school children. These were giant parades with amazing floats, one after another, where you have to pay close attention because if you don't you will get hit by beads, or doubloons, or cups, or a football, or moon pies, or one of the many other things that the float riders throw into the crowd. St. Charles Avenue was lined 20 people deep, on both sides, for miles, everyone vying for these trinkets at full volume. Small children sat at the top of 6 foot step ladders with seats attached to them made specifically for the purpose of catching throws. People set up couches and camped out in the neutral ground (median strip) where the streetcar runs so they could catch all of the two weeks worth of parades, which run pretty much from morning until night for the last week. There was plenty of beer, red beans and rice, fried chicken, and jambalaya to sustain such a regimen. And there's no better dessert than a moon pie that just hit you in the head, trust me. Biggest lesson learned at a parade: Step on any trinket that hits the ground near you, because if you reach for it someone's going to step on your hand... they already learned that lesson.
The high school bands that marched in the parades were deadly serious about it too. One parade had slowed to a stop with Slidell High's drum line right in front of us, keeping time to The Final Countdown by Europe, when my buddy started yelling at the kid on the end, "Shaw's drum line says you guys suck!" The kid stepped out of the line, walked over to us, and ripped into a snare drum solo the likes of which you only see in the movies. Blazing sticks using every part of the drum in one of the most mezmerizing performances I've ever seen. People as far as you could see were silent, riveted. With a drum roll to a rim shot he stopped. The horns blared back into The Final Countdown, the crowd erupted, and then he tipped his hat to us, a huge grin on his face, and stepped back into line as the parade started rolling again . F***ing AWESOME!!! Who knew?
