Perhaps you have already seen it. The close-ups of drunken faces, the whooping and hollering, the tossing of the bead and the bearing of the breast. The crowded, raucous, filthy Rue de Bourbon, full of Mardi Gras revelers. Then the cut to the footage of decimated houses, ruined neighborhoods. Finally, the face of a blonde, always blonde, news correspondent, beautiful and ever loquacious, saying, "The drinking and the partying of Mardi Gras goes on, even as thousand suffer . . . "
Here is a word from someone who has seen at least 20 Carnivals: Bourbon Street is not Mardi Gras. For the hundreds of thousands of natives who attend Carnival every year, Mardi Gras is not a drunken, naked orgy. It is a family and cultural celebration.
The French Quarter is the smallest part of Mardi Gras. The parades, and the celebration, begin on Napoleon Avenue, 5 miles away, in a residential neighborhood, and move through the lovely oak-lined St. Charles Avenue. St. Charles is the home of family Mardi Gras, and here you will find the streets crowded for miles with families, their children included, barbecuing, dancing, singing, and enjoying the holiday. Mardi Gras, for New Orleanians, is a celebration closer to Halloween or Christmas in its cultural importance than it has ever been to the foolishness seen on Bourbon Street.
Some people who have never been here, or even a few who have, have trouble believing this. These people are making the same error people make who think soap operas are real -- they are not looking hard enough, and are assuming what they can see is all that there is. New Orleans was the home to 1.3 million Americans before Katrina and just over 1 million now. If New Orleanians were the authors of the debauchery that goes on in the Quarter, we would all have died of AIDS or alcoholic cirrhosis years ago. We make our lives here, and our lives are just as family-oriented and spiritual as anywhere else. Mardi Gras is family-friendly and peaceful. If it were not, we would not have celebrated it for 150 years.
Mardi Gras is the fusion of the three great religions of Southeastern Louisiana -- Catholicism, music, and food. It would be an exaggeration to call it a religious holiday, but it certainly retains echoes of its original purpose as the big blowout before the austerity and prayerful fasting of Lent. In New Orleans, you will see the same faces going to church on Ash Wedneday, the day after Mardi Gras, as you saw on dancing on the streets the day before. The religion, music, and food are everywhere, and the three are never separated for long.
People in New Orleans take food and music very seriously. If you ever come to visit, you can test this theory. Stop any person on the street and ask where you can get the best gumbo in town. In the 20 minute lecture that follows, you will hear a litany of famous and unknown restaurants and dives, including Brennan's, Galatoire's, Clancy's, R&O's, Mandina's, the list will go on and on. This is a city devoted to the simple pleasures in life. It is not interested in excess. Excess requires too much work, and drains away the pleasures of the moment. New Orleanians live the the moment, enjoying each day for whatever delights it may yield. This may not always make life as productive as it can be, and sometimes as a credo it is short-sighted. But it is not destructive. An important side effect of this pleasure-of-the-day mentality is that it spurs people to keep things as they are so they can be enjoyed again and again. This attitude is incompatible with the tourists' desire to burn the candle at both ends, and thus to destroy the substance of living. Mardi Gras is a celebration of constancy, not of extremes.
Perhaps more than any other city in the United States, New Orleans has taken care to preserve its social structures and organizations. Sometimes this means time seems to pass us by, but that is the flavor of our town, and something that every tourist immediately senses, whether he goes to Bourbon Street or not. City life is centered around numerous neighborhoods -- Uptown, the Garden District, the Irish Channel, Treme, Mid-City, Carrollton, the Lower 9th Ward -- and each neighborhood is in turn organized around local watering holes, restaurants, and churches. Music, food, and Catholicism.
The Mardi Gras Krewes that so famously march down the streets of the city are nothing more than neighborhood social clubs gone public with their good will. Rex is an Uptown organization, Endymion originally hails from Mid-City. There is a Krewe of Mid-City and of Carrollton. Zulu, the largest African-American parade, is from Treme. Folks in the French Quarter (yes, the Quarter is a real neighborhood) host the Krewe the Vieux. My old neighborhood of Chalmette birthed Gladiators, Aphrodite, and Shangri-La.
The histories of these Mardi Gras organizations erase any doubt that they are local, rather than tourist phenomema. Almost all of them run charitable funds. Thoth plans its route to pass near homes for the elderly and infirm -- it is sometimes known as the "Krewe of the Shut-ins." Many Krewes, especially Choctaw, Grela, Jason, and Sparta, sponsor children's causes as part of their mission.
It is this peculiar link between religion and fun that makes New Orleans go. Churches hold communities together, and are the social backbone, and Carnival arises from them. No faith and no community, no Mardi Gras. In the last few weeks there has been a great outpouring of grief over the decision of the Archdiocese of New Orleans to close St. Augustine Church in the old African-American neighborhood of Treme. Communities here die very, very hard, which is why the dislocation of Hurricane Katrina has been so difficult to bear.
So, when you watch the news reports and the ads for "Girls Gone Wild -- Post-Katrina Edition" remember that the faces you are seeing are the tourists, not the residents. The residents are the ones off to the side, laughing at the goofballs the tourist flights have brought into town. The residents have their own party, separate from the tourists, there in full view for anyone to see, but subtle enough that the hurried eyes of the media usually miss it.
Happy Mardi Gras, y'all.