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February 27th, 2006
09:29 pm - Royalty
I am aware that for many people outside south Louisiana (and many here as well, for that matter), the fake royalty of New Orleans Carnival seems especially silly. For that reason, this story may seem equally silly.
I watched the parades tonight in the same block of St. Charles Avenue where I was Friday night and where we've often watched parades in the past. On Friday I found myself standing next to a woman who was clearly a grand lady of New Orleans. She greeted the costumed horsemen in the Krewe D'Etat with an easy familiarity, bidding each "Good ride! Have a good ride!" (this being a phrase particular to the oldline krewes). She was there with what seemed to be her daughters and granddaughters, and the 10-year-old girls were well-trained in the art of scrambling for beads. We exchanged comments about the satirical targets of the parade; she noted approvingly that the Napoleonic figure who reigned as "Dictator" of the krewe was the sort of leader New Orleans needed now.
Feeling the lack of my parade-going New Orleans companions tonight, I sought out this friendly group again. After she shared a friendly conversation with a passing official of tonight's super-krewe of Orpheus, I was emboldened to ask if her family was involved in any of the krewes, "Oh yes, I was Queen of Proteus," she told me with a twinkle in her eye.) Her father was Rex, she added and his brother and her husband and her sons were all variously royal and involved in krewes. We shared a friendly conversation as the parade progressed and her daughter offered me a cocktail. They invited me to join them again tomorrow; perhaps I will.
In such a time of turmoil and loss, there's something oddly incongruous and yet comforting about this chance meeting. The very artifice and fragility of the tradition of Uptown Carnival royalty serves foregrounds the continuity of past, present, and future: will one of those young girls scrambling for beads tonight be the Queen of Proteus or Comus or even Queen of Carnival a decade hence? I don't know that, but I do suspect that 50 years from now and more they will bring their children and grandchildren back to this same block to watch parades under these same oak trees on a late winter evening, when the chill air is perfumed with Confederate jasmine and sweet olive.
Current Mood:  pensive
Current Music: Pete Fountain, 'When We Danced at the Mardi Gras"
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