A Confluence of Messengers on Parade

“Can you feel that?” the Chief asked, pointing to the sun. It was ninety-five degrees with ninety-five percent humidity.

“That’s my grandfather.”

Like many new New Orleanians, Chief was a transplant. Years earlier he had left the Menominee Indian Reservation, Wisconsin's largest reservation and started working as a carpenter in New Orleans. We drank beer next to a porch he helped build, trying to stay cool while relaxing under his ancestor. His open shirt exhibited a dark smiling crescent sunburned across his collar bone.

“Back home they called me Bullshit. Here I’m the Chief. Why the fuck would I go back home?” His sentiment was commonplace in the backyard of a local Mid-City gathering. While people leave New Orleans at a rapid rate every year since Katrina, many outsiders fill their place and fall in love. Natives accept the newcomers as neighbors and together everyone expresses this love in the best of ways: the parade.

The local Krewe de Palmyra’s Barmuda Triangle parade was hardly advertised. To know about it, your neighbor had to tell you. I didn’t know what to expect when I threw on my most colorful summer clothing and bicycled down Palmyra Street, looking for the onset of a marching party. When I arrived, I found an old augury parked in front of a house, the absurd symbol that helped negotiate my affinity for a new city, the Space-Age Phallus from Krew de Vieux (see last blog entry). The same people responsible for this hyperbolic vulgarity were spiriting a more local celebration through the quieter streets of Mid-City.

On the front lawn the brass band tuned up. I recognized the tenor saxophonist from a gig in Pittsburgh. It was Roger Lewis of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. When I moved back to Pittsburgh a year ago, DDBB played a free show on the Point, where the Ohio, Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers confluence. The band was shameless in their Big Easy pride, and between songs they sang a clear and simple message, “Come on down to New Or-leans!” I remember dancing and quietly agreeing, that yes, I would think get there sooner or later.

In the backyard was a beer truck and I gathered with all my new neighbors and the Chief and stayed cool by drinking. Some people dressed up with no purpose but to be colorful while a group of older women dressed themselves as cocktail trays and served themselves freely.

When the Phallus began to spearhead the parade, the band followed behind. I danced between my two messengers, feeling reaffirmed in my decision to uproot and move here. I was not only in the right city, but on the right street at the right time.

It was a sweaty ordeal but the march was slow-paced and brief in distance. At Canal Street, the Dancing Man stopped traffic with his moves. If there is a crowd and live public music, the Dancing Man is there, a shirtless kinesthetic madman. At each of the three bars we entered the band led the way. The rest of us shuffled behind them to grab cocktails, use the bathroom and dance around the pool tables. After three songs the band would lead the exit and we would march to the next bar. BaR2D2, who made his debut at Mardi Gras’ inaugural Chew Bacchus Krewe, supplied all beer from a kegerator inside his large robot body.

Marvin the Martian hauling Bar2D2 from his cruiser

After completing the BarMuda Triangle at sunset, the parade returned to its beginning, at the house at the end of Palmyra Street. A buffet of local foods was uncovered and a new band set up on a stage that the owner of the house had built for such events. For the next two hours the band played and the strong continued to dance under a smiling crescent moon.

Only a wooden fence separated us from the clean and beautiful Cypress Grove Cemetery, where many party-goers went to relax and smoke along the elevated vaults. Cypress Grove was built almost two hundred years ago to honor the city's firefighters that perished on duty. But in a city where the deceased are often accompanied to their resting place by marching jazz bands, there is a respectful ease in the relationship between the living and the dead, and there is nothing so solemn that it demands silence. Absolute seriousness is the antithesis of absurdity, and so it is expressed sparingly.

Like many New Orleans nights, it is always possible to outpace the moon and drink all night long, but it is equally acceptable to start early and end early. The band left the stage around ten o'clock and all the day's participants left to deliver their energy elsewhere or retire. I exited the yard with two friends and passed Bar2D2, the phallus, and all the other floats of Palmyra parked outside, and I soon said goodnight, too. I needed rest for the next day's festival.

The King and Queen of Palmyra (above)

The Dancing Man stops traffic