Rouses_January-February-2018

MARDI GRAS

feels somewhat less than celebratory, and brings the same sort of joy as using the self- service checkout lane at the supermarket. In response, personal or handcrafted throws appear to be ascendant and more valuable. One friend made 200 handcrafted throws at home to give away at the Chewbacchus parade, which is loosely inspired by S tar Wars . I marched in a parade a couple weeks earlier called Krewe du Vieux, and our foat crew decided this year to abandon beads in favor of useful pencils and rulers with a slogan imprinted on them. (Our theme was a variation on “misbehaving teachers.”) Tonight, three parades pass within a few blocks of my uptown house, including one of my favorites, Muses, which is an all-women’s parade. Riders spend weeks leading up to tonight hand-decorating old sandals, boots and pumps, painting and gluing gewgaws on them and giving them a carapace of glitter. Many are small works of art, fit for the mantelpiece. Yes, we do realize it’s just an old shoe that in any other city would have been thrown out or donated to Goodwill. But without resurrection Carnival wouldn’t exist, right? This story first appeared in The American Scholar .

out by the metric ton, it becomes devalued. More and more riders now hurl unopened bales of beads into the crowd. These are the size and weight of patio pavers, often requiring parade goers to undertake swift evasive measures. Whether this trend is indicative of a potlatch mentality — look how much I can give away! — or sheer laziness is unclear. Anyway, having to extricate them from the package yourself

Krewe of Muses shoe by Mollye Hardin Photo by Romney Caruso

Where do the beads end up? By the end of next week we will have bags of beads piled against walls inside our house, bringing to mind leaf season in New England. We’ll eventually drop them off at a center a few blocks away, where they will be sorted and repackaged and sold to float riders so we can catch them again next year. The more unfortunate beads end up stuck in shrubberies and trees. During the 40 days of Lent, these will bleach in the sun and take on a gray pallor, looking like something thrown from the hand of the Grim Reaper himself. They thus become the sad beads that remind us daily of our own mortality. At least that’s my interpretation. My sense is that New Orleans may have already reached “peak bead.” I’ve noticed growing resistance to all this gaudy plastic — perhaps because once you start heaving it

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