I think New Orleans has kind of ruined me for parades. Saturday was the Fremont Solstice Parade, and like a good collector of local culture, I went to see what it was all about with a friend–who has also experienced New Orleans parades, having lived there once upon a time. Both of us were perhaps a little too jaded from these experiences to really get in to the spirit of Fremont’s parade.
There was a day in New Orleans that was the perfect example of why I try not to turn down invitations. (And also why I should never leave my camera behind, no matter what I think I’m going to be doing.) A friend, who lives in Providence, but happened to be in New Orleans while I was–I don’t suppose it’s that strange to find people flocking to New Orleans during Mardi Gras–told me she had a friends from Rhode Island playing at the Cake Cafe and asked if I wanted to come see them with her. I envisioned a couple of folks with acoustic guitars sitting in a coffee shop and singing something that sounded suspiciously like Mumford and Sons. I should’ve known better.
My original assumption that this parade would have something to do with dinosaurs (since ‘tit is pronounced is tee. French. I will never comprehend you.) was misguided. In fact, ‘tit means small. (There’s actually a whole story behind why it’s an ∂ in the parade’s name, and not an e, as well. Apparently Rex is the king of the Mardi Gras parades and they, quite literally, sued the little guy to protect their “brand”. You can read all about it if you’re so inclined. Am I being biased in giving you ‘tit R∂x’s account, maybe, but like I said, they’re the little guy. Who doesn’t root for the underdogs? Anyway, this parade’s name is obviously very complicated in a lot of ways.) So, ‘tit means small and this is a small parade. The floats are built on shoeboxes and pulled down the street. The parade got started a hour late because the patrol car that was supposed to escort them didn’t show up. Eventually they got sick of waiting and paraded along in the bike lane while cars continued to drive past them. Shortly after they set off their escort vehicle pulled up behind them and no one was quite sure how to proceed. Continue reading
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.
I wrote this post yesterday (well, sort of yesterday, if one judges days as being what happens between periods of restful sleep instead of exactly 24 hour periods) but then in my protracted state of “in between” didn’t get around to posting it. So here it is, only slightly delayed, still smelling vaguely of the incomprehensibility brought on by sleep-deprivation and the sterile smell of fluorescent lights bouncing off a linoleum floor.
—
I left Canada today. Getting out was a fair bit easier than getting in, which only makes sense I suppose. I’m in the Buffalo bus station now and I’ll be staying the night here, before heading on to Pittsburgh. When given the choice between a 20 minute turn around and a 16 hour turnaround I chose the latter because, as I’ve mentioned many times, buses are never on time.
I was conceived in Portland and my mother has told me before that she was working on building a community here that she would want to raise a kid in, before life got in the way and she moved to DC to take care of her mother. So this whole visit has partly been an experiment in alternate realities. What sort of person would I be now, how would my childhood have been different, if the Portland Observatory was the landmark that dominated my skyline instead of the Washington Monument? What if Congress Street had been the road I went adventuring on when there were errands to be run, instead of Connecticut Avenue?
On Halloween I went to meet the people I would’ve grown up surrounded by if life had pursued the expected course and to take part in an event that the Mirror Universe Eowyn probably considers a ritual. Shoestring Theater’s Halloween Parade.
fictionalizedhighways.wordpress.com 
