Day 5

New Orleans parade night #2! This trio of krewes was parading on their originally-scheduled night, and I joined Rett and Josh (who had gone out for a sushi dinner) where they had met Brielle again at her saved-spot on St. Charles Avenue.

First up was Knights of Babylon, who pitch themselves as very traditional parade, meaning their floats are smaller like they used to be (including even a horse-drawn one!) But they also had something we haven’t seen in Mobile or in the rescheduled parades here: dancing crews of adults! It seems like they’re essentially clubs formed to be able to participate in parades, without the overhead of the big expensive floats. And they added a lot of fun and variety.

There were still high school marching bands with their own dance troupes, and I enjoyed how well the young men bashing the hell out of their drums (or swinging their trumpets) would reclaim the full width of the street that rightfully belonged to them, after the crowd on this fenceless section of the route would squeeze in to better-grab throws from the passing floats.

But it was difficult to not notice the racial disparities. Most schools had a couple of adult chaperones, and sometimes they might come by a few steps ahead of the dancers and band to squeeze the audience back. But a rare all-white school suddenly had an entire phalanx of chaperones, very sternly forming essentially a human fence to wall off their dancers. On the one hand, it might have just reflected differing levels of parental involvement across different school systems, but on the other hand, it was hard to avoid the gross feeling that they were shielding their precious white daughters from being snatched up by imagined black super-predators in the crowd (which had zero chance of actually happening).

Next up Knights of Chaos. One of the first floats featured a frail-looking Joe Biden at the front, making us fear the political statements from this all-male, all-white crew that we would have to endure. And yes, the float featured plenty of crude insults toward Biden and other Democrats. But the next float featured Trump, and similar insults. It quickly became clear that this was equal-opportunity Chaos, a group skewering anyone they could think of, from the Catholic Church to social-media influences. Overall the “everything sucks equally” attitude still felt a bit sophomoric and anti-intellectual, but at least it was yet another angle that did a good job of differentiating this parade from any others.

Now at our final parade, we made a concerted effort to not catch anything, but sometimes it was still hard to resist. Unrelated to keeping an item, there is just something inherently satisfying about the athletic act of catching something flying through the air, and in the absence of playing catch in the backyard with Dad, playing catch with an unknown masked man standing atop a fake pyramid is apparently the next best thing. I understand there are some krewes in New Orleans that throw an insane volume of stuff, but those that we saw threw significantly less than the krewes we’d seen in Mobile. And the biggest difference was that Mobile threw a lot of food items (nice because they’re actually consumable), whereas New Orleans had very little.

It’s hard to call old guys who get dressed up in masks and flamboyant feathered costumes “stodgy”, but with some of these exclusive clubs being around for 100 years and having membership dues that only the affluent can afford, there is certainly a tinge of “conservatism”. The final parade, the Krewe of Muses, brought that into focus by yanking Mardi Gras in the completely-opposite direction, assembling something much closer to the spirit of a Pride Parade than anything we’d seen so far.

Their signature floats (that nearly brought Rett to tears) had a completely-different fairy-fantasy aesthetic than anything we’d seen before (though as a relatively-new group they’re still building up, and most of their floats were more-conventional). Their signature throw is similar to King Arthur’s, hand-decorated by individual members. But instead of a plastic chalice as the base, Muses throws bejewled high-heel shoes. This was obviously the real “holy grail” for both Rett and Brielle, but despite Brielle’s highly-strategic efforts (and essentially looking like the absolute best person to throw a decorated high heel too, IMO), and plenty of people nearby being handed/tossed the coveted item, tonight they came away empty. I guess that’s just the luck of Mardi Gras!

Rett and Brielle weren’t the only ones interested in the shoes from Muses. A woman had squeezed up next to them, along with her half-dozen kids ranging from 5 to 15, effectively budging the girls out of the way. Rett did an admirable job of standing up for Brielle and explaining how early she had gotten to the parade route to reserve this spot, and (thanks also to the budger’s credit), a potentially-acrimonious uncomfortable situation was de-escalated to a friendly understanding. Well, at least friendly for us; she began shouting at her kids to keep them all behind us, rather than spreading out in front.

Thirty minutes later, she began shouting again, but apparently it was involving another mother’s kids, and in that conflict, the opposite of de-escalation happened. The two women suddenly began grabbing, pulling hair, and immediately when their fists started flying, their kids also came windmilling into the fray, and the whole violent mass churned down onto the ground as a couple of the younger kids backed away with tears in their eyes.

Perhaps I should have been more concerned for our personal safety and someone pulling out a gun, but I stood by the little kids to give them some protection in case the pile came lunging their way. Despite there being a massive police presence at the parade (there were two cops who had been standing directly in front of Josh and I the whole night), it felt like it took a long time for them to respond. But eventually they achieved a critical mass (including armored FBI guys with their M4 assault rifles) to start pulling still-whirling bodies off the pile. I don’t even know how they sorted anything out, but Mom and some of the kids were led away in cuffs. Meanwhile, the parade continued on, with the bands and floats squeezing over to the far side of the road to avoid the scene.

The saddest thing was that the kids weren’t crying in a “I don’t even understand this scary thing that’s happening!” sort of way, it was clearly more “I can’t believe this is happening again.” And obviously the older kids knew exactly what to do when mom starts brawling. So it might already be too late to undo the lessons they’re learning. Despite this ugly incident happening right in front of our faces, it still felt like a weird outlier, and didn’t at all diminish my impression that these parades are family-friendly events, and I don’t think it should discourage anyone from attending.

The women in the float above baring their breasts bring a nice closure to my journey through Mardi Gras and New Orleans. Before coming to Mobile, literally the only thing I “knew” about Mardi Gras was that guys on Bourbon Street would throw beads to you if you showed your tits. I didn’t even know that there were parades, much less that the parades are the true source of the beads. And other, highly-sought-after signature items, that people like Brielle camp out and make signs for (and apparently some women brawl over) in the hopes of influencing a parader to throw one of their treasures their way. And the paraders really do throw to people who express interest in the item in their hand and appear somehow “worthy”, so whatever you can do to communicate your desire and commitment during the brief passing will improve your odds.

So that is the then completely “logical” explanation for the origin of breast-baring. What better way to “win” the competition, especially if it’s a guy deciding who to throw to. I certainly didn’t see anyone doing it, and I doubt it even happens on most of the parade route, but at some point it became disconnected from that context and turned into a thing for drunk girls to do on Bourbon Street, for items of far lesser value. The parades don’t even run down Bourbon Street, and barely kiss the French Quarter, so most of the girls probably don’t even understand what non-tradition they’re wrongly participating in, but at least I know now!