Rouses_January-February-2018
the Mardi Gras issue
“ If you run out of MoonPies, you might as well just lie down on the float. You can throw beads for a little while, but the people will start calling for MoonPies.” —Mobile City Councilman Fred Richardson
catch them, so the next year, everyone on the float threw them. The crazy thing about these legends is that they’re likely all true! By the 1960s,Mobile’s Mardi Gras season was two weeks long and featured 17 separate parades, each with numerous floats, making it highly likely that different people on different floats in different parades all began throwing MoonPies (or local versions of them) at around the same time. Yet, regardless of who threw the first one, how did MoonPies rise to dominate the throws and become a staple and symbol of Mobile Mardi Gras? To understand this, we have to look back at throw history. Early Mardi Gras throws,dating to the 1800s,were French bonbons or trick prizes like small bags of flour that burst when caught. These were eventually banned, and throws did not
play much of a role again until after World War II, when they became an increasingly integral part of Mardi Gras parades. In the 1940s and 1950s, taffy candy and serpentine (rolls of unraveling confetti) were the most common throws, and it was considered a feat to catch a whole roll of serpentine. “Throw me a whole roll, Mister!” became a common parade shout heard on the route. In the late 1950s, city officials banned ser- pentine, claiming that people choked on it, but some Mobilians insist the serpentine actually choked the gutters — not people — and thus was a chore for the city to clean up. To replace the serpentine, float riders began throwing new items like rub- ber balls, beanbags, candy kisses, doubloons (coins bearing mystic society insignia), bags of peanuts, bubblegum, hard candies, Cracker Jack and, of course, MoonPies.
cause the sharp corners of the boxes were injuring spectators. Since they were soft, easy to throw and catch, affordable, and had been a Southern favorite for decades, MoonPies became the perfect substitute for the hard boxes of Cracker Jack. “Oh, to catch a MoonPie!” says Marie Arnott, who attended parades in the 1970s, “Something that was actually edible and sweet! They were doled out sparingly and the chant in the crowd was always for MoonPies.” Over the next few decades, MoonPies grew into a Mobile Mardi Gras institution. Today, each float rider throws roughly 900 MoonPies during a single parade, estimates Stephen Toomey, owner of the primary Mardi Gras supply store in Mobile, Toomey’s Mardi Gras. Toomey’s alone sells 4.5 million MoonPies each Mardi Gras season. And though the streets are littered with beads at each parade’s end, there are usually no MoonPies to be found. For months after Mardi Gras, Mobile children find MoonPies in their lunchboxes and trade each other for favorite flavors. Local newspapers and magazines print MoonPie recipes. In 2003, Doris Allinson Dean published her booklet Death by MoonPie — a cookbook full of creative ways to consume post-Mardi Gras MoonPies. And on New Year’s Eve in 2008, the City of Mobile sponsored the first “MoonPie Rise,” raising a giant, 900-pound, illuminated banana MoonPie (constructed by Mardi Gras float builder Steve Mussell) over the city of Mobile at the stroke of midnight. The following year, 25,000 people attended the MoonPie Rise, which is also branded by the city as “MoonPie Over Mobile.” When I ask Fred Richardson why he thinks the event was (and is!) so successful, he credits the universal appeal of the MoonPie: “Cracker Jacks are for kids, but MoonPies are for everyone. The MoonPie cuts across barriers of age, race, economics. The MoonPie brings people together. If I had picked some other object, it could have divided the community. But nobody has anything against the MoonPie. Everybody loves the MoonPie.”
But MoonPies hit their stride as throws in the early 1970s, when the city of Mobile banned Cracker Jack (the then-favorite Mardi Gras throw) be-
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MY ROUSES EVERYDAY JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2018
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