Mardi Gras in Theory and Practice

Mardi Gras did not seem like it would be my kind of holiday. It is characterized, in popular stereotypes, by three things: beads, beer, and breasts. As a teetotaler, I do not drink beer. As a person of taste, I am disinclined to cover myself in plastic beads. And while I am theoretically pro-breasts, I feel no particular need to see them publicly displayed from second-floor balconies. Making the prospect even less appealing, my apartment is in the heart of the French Quarter, a place with unpleasantly high quantities of debauchery even in the off-season. (A man peed on my house the other week.) Mardi Gras promised to be a loud, messy spectacle, the worst of New Orleans magnified and multiplied. I had friends who were leaving town to escape it. They seemed wise.

I also quickly began to realize what everyone from here knows already: it is not just a single day, “Fat Tuesday.” It is Carnival Season, a month-long celebration beginning in early January on Twelfth Night and lasting through Ash Wednesday. We are not talking about an afternoon of unusually heavy drinking by a throng of tourists on Bourbon Street. We are talking about over 50 parades, an influx of visitors that multiplies the city’s population by four, and a billion dollars in Mardi Gras related spending. A few weeks before everything descended into chaos, local news reported that the sewage department had extracted 92,000 pounds of leftover Mardi Gras beads from the city’s catch basins. I honestly did not understand how that many pounds of Mardi Gras beads could end up in the drainage system. I would soon understand.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: Nathan J. Robinson
[ed. Wonderful essay!]