Mardi Gras: Beads, Belles, and Balls

© 2010 Jack Beach. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 3/29/2010

ISBN: 978-1-4259-0357-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4634-6964-1 (ebk)

WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING:

Wonderful and really weird! ——

—The Burneydot Junction, Illinois, Weekly Bugle.

"A ‘Fruit of the Loom’ kind of book." ——

—— Men’s Underwear Monthly.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Mardi Gras and were too drunk to ask.——

—— Charity Hospital Recovery Unit.

I couldn’t put it down (but I do most of my reading in the tub). —— A Friend.

"Beach has captured it all: the wild abandon, the tears, the raunch, and crunch of humanity celebrating this zany moment in time, passage of the years. It’s all about us—why we came, why we stayed, and why we may never be the same again. Take a copy home with you. Take two. Take a dozen! We can use the bread. Whooppee!"

—— Bonnye (Sandy) Beach, sister of the author.

OTHER WORKS BY THE AUTHOR

BLEAK HIGHWAY (poem)

In The Garret, 1946. (Published at age 19 upon promise to purchase five copies.) Out of print.

THE THREE-MILE BRIDGE:

Across Pensacola Bay on a Span of Poems. Author House, Bloomington, Indiana, 2001.

I LOVE YOU, PENSACOLA:

Seasoned Verse: 2002. Out of Print.

BITS AND PIECES:

Poems of My Scattered Life. Upteem Press, New Orleans, La. 2002.

THE GRAND TOUR:

A Steamer Trunk of Verses. Author House, 2002.

WITHOUT A NET:

Stories of Our Risky Flights Towards Love, Loss and Home. Author House, 2004.

DEDICATED TO:

All of you who came to Mardi Gras

bright-eyed

from the hinterland

seeking:

The face behind the mask

The heart beneath the padded bra

The lover beyond the thongs;

The child lurking behind the

bottle-cap cloak

dyed Asian ostrich plumes

spangled flesh—

The pure kernel of YOU!

The Author

If Carnival hadn’t existed, New Orleans would have invented it.

Carol Flake: New Orleans: Behind the Masks

of America’s Most Exotic City.

Contents

DEDICATED TO:

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREAMBLE

JUST WHEN IS MARDI GRAS?

MARDI GRAS ORIGINS:

ITS INEBRIATED PROGRESS

DOWN THROUGH THE CENTURIES by ANON.

HOW DOES ONE RECOVER

FROM MARDI GRAS?

Pre -Mardi Gras Day

Friday Before Mardi Gras

SATURDAY BEFORE

Sunday Before Mardi Gras

Fat Monday

Mardi Gras Day

HIGH

MARDI GRAS

NOON

MARDI GRAS

NIGHT

MIDNIGHT

Ash Wednesday

* ADVISORY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks and a string of exotic Mardi Gras beads to friends who brushed shoulders with this manuscript, leaving behind the imprint of their wit, candor, and critical savvy: Barry Benson, Maureen Henry, Mary Hood, Roy Swayze, Leonard Temme, and Peggy Kolo. And, most recently, to the convivial members of our Wednesday Writers’ Workshop, who, clustered around the long table at the Cultural Center on hot summer afternoons, assisted in polishing many of these pieces.

And a golden pendant and fistful of doubloons to each of two co-conspirators who kindly helped edit and proof with trusty blue pencil at the ready — French Quarter neighbor Sheila Bauer and Emerald Coast crony Rick Adams.

I also thank two organizations: A Mardi-Gras cup to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Pensacola which, all those years, lent moral support and facilities to our West Florida Literary Federation-sponsored Reader’s Showcase. When many of these snap-shots and poems were literary orphans, they found a lively audience and welcome shelter there.

Lastly, a gilded Zulu coconut to Nancy Harris and the Maple Leaf Bar’s Sunday poetry readings in Big Easy, where many of these poems had the audacity to expose themselves in the very heart of Mardi-Gras Land itself!

And in the end of it all, bouquets to Teri Watkins, trusty guide, and Emily Hurford, magician, of Author House.

PREAMBLE

When I was young and innocent (anytime before age 58), sprung as I was from the enlightened soil of rural Illinois, I believed with all my heart and soul in Honest Abe, cities of the big shoulders, Adlai Stevenson, Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, corn-detassling, Tom and Huck, God and Mom, and triple-feature Drive-Ins. If anybody mentioned Mardi Gras, I would imagine an event that was one day long with one ball, and one big splashy parade. Pretty naive, huh? But the only images I had to draw on in those days were Hollywood-inspired, drawn from three movies of the day: Louisiana Purchase (1941), with Bob Hope and Vera Zorina riding a glitzy float down Bourbon Street singing the title song—or so I recall; a quality drama, Flesh and Fantasy (1943), in which poor Betty Field becomes an endangered species during a claustrophobic Mardi Gras street revel; and a 1958 musical called Mardi Gras with Pat Boone spooning and crooning to Sheree North in a place that one day would be called Big Easy. There were, of course, subsequent tantalizing sneak peeks at real Mardi Gras mayhem on February’s Late-Late News, once TV reached the hinterland. But I was evidently too busy getting myself through Grad School, married, involved in teaching, and starting a family to pay much attention.

Then in 1975—two decades and one divorce later—I accepted a teaching position at a women’s college in Atlanta, Georgia. At last within striking distance of New Orleans! But I was on a short academic leash and unsuccessful in convincing my Board of Regents that spring break should be moved to coincide with Mardi Gras to accommodate pent up co-eds and gamy professors. So near and yet so far.

Yet, undeniably, I was getting closer, and unbelievable stories of real Mardi Gras wafted my way, inflaming the imagination. These were most vividly conveyed by an old crony, Luther Bachman, who wouldn’t have missed Mardi Gras if his mother found herself in the cardiac arrest unit at Sacred Heart. Every Ash Wednesday, he would awkwardly detour through Atlanta on his way back to Montgomery, Alabama, for a free night’s collapse and snooze, as he had to get his wits about him before facing Baptist friends and family back home.

Luther was always in a high-octane mix of excitation and exhaustion: eyes maniacally bright, energy frenetic, and his stories unendingly full of detail that ran from the sordid, through the tawdry, to the spectacular. It didn’t take long to realize that Mardi Gras was not the single-day event I had been led to believe. Indeed, it was a vast panorama of weeks of wild parties, fantastic balls, and parades of giant floats backed by bands and plumage—all culminating in a giant mounting wave of pure carousal and carnality, which crashed ashore on Fat Tuesday in a climactic explosion heard ‘round the world’ (this fair part of it, anyhow).

And always, as Luther’s graphic account neared the throbbing-heart of Mardi Gras Day, it was not the merrymaking of Louisiana Purchase or events chronicled on the Smart Set social pages of the Times-Picayune he remembered. It was the unabashed sexuality and the beads; the gay balls, bared breasts, and lowered pants; beads, booze, Beads, carnal knowledge on pool tables, BEADS, clogged streets, and, BEADS, BEADS, BEADS—coupled with the mundane human urgency to find a toilet or to collapse into the horizontal back at the pad and sleep it off.

Well, along with retirement came the freedom to confront the monster Carnival face-to-face; at first, thanks to sofas and sleeping bags on hard parlor floors of generous friends. Later, I viewed Carnival from the third-floor balcony of my very own three-room slave-quarter apartment on the corner of Royal and Saint Ann, just behind the Cathedral.

Each year, notebook in hand, I would catch some of those swirling kaleidoscopic images and rush home to the old Smith Corona while they were still fresh. Thus, our book is composed of memory-samplings from two decades of making it through Mardi Gras. They range from fantastic to farcical, foolish to phallic, and sacred to the scatological.—not to mention sudden excursions into the realms of high drama along the way. These memories suggested a range of poetic styles laced with confetti-sprinklings of what I call prose snapshots to effectively capture the multi-faceted world into which we have plunged headlong.

I’ll be happy as a tick if I can show you the real Mardi Gras (if you didn’t make it this year), or help you to relive the marvelous bash in years to come, if you did.

The human need for physical and emotional release through the grape and riotous abandon can be traced straight back to the ancient Greeks. I am confident that randy old carouser and playwright Aristophanes would have cheered our endeavors and been the first to lift an elbow to toast us on our way.

MARDI GRAS ANSWERS DEEP

HUMAN

YEARNINGS

THAT CAN BE TRACED BACK TO

ANCIENT GREECE

MARDI GfRAS à la Grèc

Aristophanes got off his knees

To challenge the catharsis

Of classic Attic tragedies

With his own home-writ phallic farces.

My countrymen, he wryly quipped

"Are in a culture rut:

Dished out hubris, doom and gloom

When all they really want is smut."

Old Aristoph’ knew every man

Seeks life’s full breadth and depth;

If Tragic Muse tilts too