http://thebeginningfarmer.com/page/51/ After a weekend where everyone is off from work and partying, Lundi Gras is a lull. Most businesses are open, and there is opportunity to get practical things done. Johnny Angel and myself went to do laundry, and found the laundromat quite busy – the busiest I’ve ever seen the place, all the driers being used (I’d been there on a Monday around noon before, and there was only one other person there). I dropped off my clothes and headed off to shop – a New Yorker, always multitasking – while he took a seat in the corner and looked as cool as a man can look in a laundromat.
buy provigil online 2018 I headed to an AT&T store, to replace my cellphone, which after nearly four years of good service lost power to its screen. It still worked, but I couldn’t see any data, phone numbers, or the like. For a few days I could still make calls to numbers I didn’t remember by figuring out where in my call queue I had dialed them, but eventually that got too complicated and I couldn’t remember anymore. The service representative thought my old phone was funny – “Man, you’ve had that one for awhile!” – and proceeded to recommend to me what must be the worst-designed phone in human history, whose up-down scroll keys are functionally the same as the enter key, causing endless misprision between me and the phone. Well, he got rid of another one, I suppose. In the meantime, I learned yet again that I should trust my own instincts rather than relying on the advice of “the one who knows” in the shop.
The parades didn’t roll until evening, and I met up with friends at Napoleon and Chestnut. This uptown location was mostly families, a nice crowd, but the crowds were now so large there was no real good place to see or catch things. If you came when the parade started you could be guaranteed to be several rows deep in the crowd.
Orpheus was the main show of the evening. Orpheus is one of the newer krewes (founded 1994), and is unusual in that it is almost fully integrated – whites and blacks, men and women. The integration of the Krewes, which are private clubs, was at the time a major political issue. The city had passed a law denying parade licenses to groups that did not pass a certification that they did not “discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.” The certification, amongst other things, would have required the Krewes to reveal their membership. At least two major Krewes – Comus and Proteus – ended their parades. Proteus returned after federal courts declared the law unconstitutional, but Comus, which was apparently the real creator of Mardi Gras as we know it and the most prestigious and esoteric of all the krewes, has not returned, though the krewe exists and holds its ball still. No other parade has taken its Tuesday evening slot.
Integration of the krewes is still a long way off. Indeed, to my eyes Orpheus appears to be the only major one that is not segregated, either de iure or de facto on the basis of either race or gender. Indeed the Orpheus solution appears to be the one that works: not to try to force the old krewes to change, but simply to start new ones that better reflect the spirit of the age. Mardi Gras history is littered with krewes that no longer exist; like people, they get replaced by other ones. And is this not the way with all things? Birth and death change many more things than persuasion and conversion.
Orpheus is in every respect a modern krewe, not only with respect to its membership but also in its floats, which are the most technologically advanced and expensive of all the krewes’. They look like they were made for Universal Studios, with huge moving parts, exquisite lighting, speaker systems, and the like. The kids at the parade were absolutely mesmerized by them. On the other hand, they were also modern in that they seemed more show than substance, though perhaps this was a failure of my own understanding: their general theme was “hows and whys” and featured floats like “how the camel got his hump” and other stories I did not recognize.
Orpheus also enlists a number of celebrities to ride on the floats. Joan Rivers was there, as well as the cast of Reno 911. I’m sure there were others I did not recognize.
Right at about this time the mayor of the city was meeting the King of Rex to hand over the keys to the city. On Tuesday the city is (symbolically) governed by the King of Carnival, the “Lord of Misrule.”
After the parade I headed to meet up with a fellow Latinist and his wife and some of their friends at a nearby party. The “party”, as it turns out, was not really happening, and they had arrived at a stranger’s house to find a couple putting their kids in the bathtub and readying them for bed. Undaunted, however, this couple started putting out king cake and warming up leftovers for them! When I arrived, the scene was pleasant but my friends were a bit embarrassed, and the mutual friend, the link between them and this couple had decided to go elsewhere, so we all headed out, laughing about the experience, and went to a nearby Mexican restaurant. One of our little crew was a Yale graduate and reporter for the Times-Picayune, and was another interesting New Orleans voice.
From there we went to a nice bar and met up with another group of people, including yet another artist (a painter) and a boatbuilder (not the sort of person you meet every day). The painter was about to do her first big show, and we discussed the problem of crossing the threshold: when you are no longer potential but merely someone with very definite, bounded, and ultimately limited achievements. It’s terrible to cross it, but fata ducunt volentem, nolentem trahunt.
Then back home. The next day I would be up early.
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