Krewe du Vieux

Krewe du Seuss may have been my favorite krewe.

Krewe du Vieux is the first parade of the Mardi Gras season, and the dirtiest. After all, “Krewe du Vieux comes early.” (As such, this post is not entirely safe for work. Somehow I have a feeling that’s not something I’m going to write often on this blog.)

I went down with a large collection of Michfest women and we staked out some prime real estate pretty early. It was funny to see how a whole crowd of people who’d been standing on the curb or behind it in a very orderly fashion for more than half an hour quickly gave up on that and pressed into the street as soon as the parade started. Krewe du Vieux is also apparently the only “walking parade” left of the Mardi Gras parades. (I gathered all these tidbits in pieces from the women I was there with, each of whom seemed to know some different fact about the history and culture of this parade, and how it fit into Mardi Gras as a whole.) This means that it’s easy to get right up to the paraders, and frequently someone parading will see a friend in the crowd and stop to give a hug and hand out some of the more special swag that isn’t just thrown about. Then they have to go jogging along to catch up with their Krewe. (The whole parade is called Krewe du Vieux, but it’s made up of smaller Krewes that come up with themes together, thus Krewe du Seuss above, as well as Krewe du Mishigas and Krewe du Muumuu and etc. This piece of trivia also brought to you by the people standing around me in the crowd.) After all, it doesn’t do to have someone dressed as a vagina to be walking with the group of people dressed as chickens. You’ve got to stick with your theme.