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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Mardi Gras For The 12 Days Before Fat Tuesday, The French Quarter Of New Orleans Becomes A Huge Outdoor Bar, Side Show And Costume Party

I’ve just recovered from my trip to New Orleans after sleeping about 48 straight hours, slumbering open-eyed through work and crashing on my bed by 7:30 p.m. Everyone wants to know if I had a good time on vacation.

But Mardi Gras isn’t a vacation. It’s the Party Olympics, and damn if I didn’t train enough.

My five days in the land of Sodom and Gomorrah were spent with about a dozen people, most of whom I didn’t know before the trip.

In that lost weekend, we drank more alcohol than we had in our young adult lives. I’d like to say we ate good food, but the meals were sparse, merely stomach stuffing on our hunt for good beads at parades and the next bar.

During Mardi Gras, New Orleans was swollen with people and peppered with costumes. Street cars were stuffed. Restaurants were booked. The French Quarter turned into the largest, wildest outdoor bar I’ve ever visited. Streets were blocked off in The Quarter, and a teeming stream of people flowed in and out of the dozens of bars and drink stands. Everyone held a drink.

We slept about four hours a night, body to body, stuffed like a D-cup in an A-cup bra, fearing the random puking of people and the bladderimpaired path of Abby the overweight-but-lovable dog.

Officially, Mardi Gras is a religious season that starts Jan. 6, the day the three kings visited the Christ Child, and ends Fat Tuesday, the day before Lent starts.

“It’s a season of revelry and romance, of madness and music, of parades and parties, of comic costuming in the streets and grandiose private masquerade balls,” according to the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce.

But what Mardi Gras really is - especially if you’re under 30 - is an excuse to drink and loosen your morals. We saw no masquerade balls, no romance, no grandiosity. We saw plenty of madness and parades, lots of comedy and an oceanful of alcohol.

Mardi Gras is also a chance to grab cheap jewelry for free, great for souvenirs for friends. For the 12 days before Fat Tuesday, more than 60 parades march through the metro area. And almost everyone on parade floats throws beads - especially at well-endowed blonde women on the shoulders of strapping men.

Beads are a funny thing in New Orleans. They’re cheap, they’re plastic. Most are probably made by foreign workers paid 3 cents an hour and most fall apart quickly. But everyone wants them, probably because they turn into a seedy currency, traded for kisses and glances and pictures of body parts.

We bought some beads and finagled others. Most of the time, we scored at parades. We stalked floats down the street, ruthlessly yelling at the people throwing beads to toss them our way.

The trip was Rachel’s idea.

In December she decided to gather friends from across the nation to spend Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Rachel used to live in Spokane, and now she lives in Detroit, but she likes to lie to strangers. She’ll tell one she’s from San Francisco, another she’s a Spanish teacher, and anyone who’ll listen that her name’s Candy.

Through luck and friends of friends of friends, about a dozen of us ended up crammed in Jen’s apartment. Jen is a New Orleans chanteuse in high-heeled boots and a miniskirt who’ll sing anything for tips at Patty O’Brien’s, including “Piano Man” four times in one night.

Coming from a place like Spokane in a month like February, New Orleans looked different - humid, exotic, dripping with beads, beer and body parts. An older man with a protruding belly sidled up to me at the airport. Sipping a 32-ounce plastic cup of Budweiser, he told me that this was his 16th Mardi Gras.

The airline had lost three of his four bags, but he was used to problems. He was an insurance adjuster for disasters and hadn’t been home to Oklahoma City in almost a year. He flew in from the floods in Portland, and he combed his thinning gray hair over his crown.

“The disasters can wait,” he leered. “It’s Mardi Gras.”

Which, in a way, is its own disaster.

That first night we started at The Boot, a bar near Tulane University. I claimed my first beads, a red plastic set with a medallion proclaiming “Orpheus” that hung from a tree.

We downed beer, played pool and hung out with a large dog that sported many beads and a flashing red light. Rachel and David arrived. We drank more, and we crashed on Jen’s floor, her wall, her ceiling - anywhere that would have us.

The days flowed into nights. By the time everyone was awake, functioning and sometimes clean, the clock had hit 3 p.m. The night is when we happened. We were vampires of fun.

That Friday night, we crammed into Tipitina’s for George Clinton and P-Funk.

The show started at 11 p.m. and didn’t stop until 4:30 a.m. I waited for Yvette, my photographer friend from Chicago who allegedly was arriving at the concert after a broken-down bus ride. I never saw Yvette at the show, but she was there. She bummed a cigarette off a P-Funk member with spotted hair, who then proclaimed her his girl for the evening.

Yvette was led to a back room with other band members and several big-haired women. A small-haired woman, she quickly left.

On Saturday, we hit our first profitable parade, where the necklace to snag was green with a drinking-monk pendant.

The Enigma, the quietest person in our group, was a bead maniac, reaching between an old woman’s legs for a strand and knocking over small children.

Decked out in a red fur jacket lined with fake leopard skin, I scored well, beseeching a bearded fellow to toss me a football-sized plastic bag filled with about 20 drinkingmonk necklaces.

My shoulders hurt from the beads’ weight.

That night, we hit the French Quarter for the first time. It was a crowded concert, but without a band. Instead, the show was in the balconies, where women lifted shirts and men dropped trousers for beads.

I bought a red boa, and Yvette picked up a black one. Rachel pulled on a Carmen Miranda stocking cap dripping with lemons, oranges and grapes. Lisa grabbed a gold “Showgirls” hat.

We ate fine Cajun food.

Our group splintered in two, and we tried to find a place we could dance. Kisses were exchanged for beads. Photos were snapped. Rachel grabbed the microphone from the singer in a bar and started shouting in it. She told somebody she lived in San Francisco. She introduced me as “Zirconia.”

By the time we arrived to our resting place that night, most spots were taken. I curled up on the newly swept kitchen floor.

On Sunday, we missed the afternoon parade, but arrived at the evening Bacchus parade in time to see a mummified Dick Clark smiling and throwing red medallions to the crowd. I sat on Matt’s shoulders and tried to catch one, but nearly tipped us over.

The mood grew ugly, and New Orleans started to wear. We caught few beads that night and ended up walking miles and miles, from Tulane University to the French Quarter.

I bought a wig of multicolored tinsel. Rachel grabbed the rear end of every male she passed. She didn’t pinch them; she chunked them.

It was serial whiplash, as dozens of men turned their heads to find The Chunker. We tried to stop her, but we couldn’t, even after one guy threatened to beat up Rachel’s friend David, the logical suspect. Another yelled that his wallet was in his front pocket.

Others were alarmed.

“Hey, that’s not right,” a long-hair muttered. “It felt good, but it’s not right.”

We tried to buy tickets for “The Live Orgy” but the sex show was closed. The doorman told us to a rent a hotel room. By that time, we were ready for sleep. We grabbed a cab for Jen’s place.

Rachel and David flew home Monday, and the rest of us talked about another early evening. That didn’t happen. I donned the tinsel hair and the red boa. Adam duded up in the gold bowler out of “Showgirls.” The Enigma picked up a new Cat-in-the-Hat cap to replace the one stolen earlier by a gang.

We ended up at Patty O’Brien’s, where we sat next to Jen as she played the piano. We sang and clapped along with the music, which included covers of Janis Joplin, Frank Sinatra and more Billy Joel than I could stomach. Not that I puked. That came later.

We didn’t plan to drink anything, but the shouting, dancing drunken clientele - all refugees from sororities and fraternities - forced our hand. We drank red Hurricanes and blue Skylabs.

I developed a new bead-getting method - the straightforward approach. I walked up to one man and asked if I could have a large set of beads, huge pearls studded with gaudy colorful hearts. His friend asked me to lift my shirt. I said no. He gave me the beads anyway.

I started making deals, a bead trader more ruthless than Michael Milken. For one fine strand of clear beads, a couple of small colored necklaces and a kiss on the cheek, I snagged all of Matt’s necklaces. I grabbed all of Kevin’s jewels for a cheaper trade - only a kiss on the cheek.

It pays to be the only woman left at the end of a Mardi Gras trip.

The Enigma fell asleep in his chair, snoozing in the middle of show tunes. Someone started drawing on his face with pink lipstick. Several of us grabbed some of his many beads. I scored plastic blue beads with a “Thoth” medallion. Four songs were dedicated to him.

Adam, Kevin, Matt and I left to play pool. We stayed out until about 4 a.m. and caught our last glimpses of excess. One woman was passed out in a bathroom stall. Another woman touched a man more than she legally could in Spokane, right next to our pool table. The bartender called me “water slut” for asking for about 10 glasses of water.

At the apartment, we crashed for 45 minutes, packed, folded up $100 in a card for Jen and drove to the airport.

Adam slept on the flight. I tried, but the turbulence combined with bad eggs was a little unsettling to my nervous stomach. It was the bumpiest flight I’ve ever been on, and when I spotted Aaron Neville in first-class, I worried.

Everyone knows rock stars either die of drug overdoses or in plane wrecks.

My stomach pushed me over. I puked in the first-class bathroom, thousands of feet in the air and 30 feet away from Neville.

It seemed a fitting end to Mardi Gras. Now, I need a vacation.

, DataTimes MEMO: Kim Barker, 25, is already planning her next vacation in Mexico. She plans to see the parades for the Day of the Dead, a fitting follow-up to the parades for Day of the Drunk.

This sidebar appeared with the story: IF YOU GO WHEN: Next year, Mardi Gras begins Jan. 6 and ends Feb. 11. HOW IT STARTED: The holiday season probably has pagan roots, but the Catholic Church legitimized the festival as a celebration before the penitential season of Lent. Fat Tuesday is always the day before Ash Wednesday and 46 days before Easter. WHAT HAPPENS: Parades. Beads. Drinking. Good food. Costume balls. More drinking. Dances. Fat Tuesday is a legal holiday in New Orleans, when half the city wears costumes to see the other half march down the street in parades. FOR MORE INFORMATION: New Orleans Convention and Visitor Bureau, (504) 566-5005.

Kim Barker, 25, is already planning her next vacation in Mexico. She plans to see the parades for the Day of the Dead, a fitting follow-up to the parades for Day of the Drunk.

This sidebar appeared with the story: IF YOU GO WHEN: Next year, Mardi Gras begins Jan. 6 and ends Feb. 11. HOW IT STARTED: The holiday season probably has pagan roots, but the Catholic Church legitimized the festival as a celebration before the penitential season of Lent. Fat Tuesday is always the day before Ash Wednesday and 46 days before Easter. WHAT HAPPENS: Parades. Beads. Drinking. Good food. Costume balls. More drinking. Dances. Fat Tuesday is a legal holiday in New Orleans, when half the city wears costumes to see the other half march down the street in parades. FOR MORE INFORMATION: New Orleans Convention and Visitor Bureau, (504) 566-5005.