The Dichotomy of Imbalance; Work and Play in the Big Easy

The Golden Shoes

I have always been a yin and yang man, a big picture-everything comes together-is together kind of man. It has afforded me a perspective of fluidity, an ability to adapt to my environments and see the world broadly, but it has cost me some basic abilities, such as organizing ideas and information, balancing decisions that suggest divergent paths. And that’s because I am forever incompetent of separating things, removing the black from the white, the good from the bad, work from play.

In New Orleans this disposition can be advantageous. Unless you are preparing for something as requisitely unbalanced as first-year teaching in public schools.

A couple Saturdays ago, I was driving to the dollar store with a coworker to pick up teacher supplies when we had to stop the car at City Park Avenue. A week after Krewe de Palmyra, Mid-City was struck again with another afternoon parade.

The 610 Stompers, self-proclaimed to be “ordinary men with extraordinary moves” were leading the second neighborhood bar crawl in eight days. They were eighty male dancers that wore gold sneakers, tube socks, short blue shorts, headbands, and fake (or real) mustaches. They synchronized dance moves while marching behind a colossal traveling stereo on a truck. Three hundred people followed behind them, and they seemed to be stopping at every bar in the neighborhood.

I returned home and drank a beer on the balcony with my roommates, lamenting this issue of balance. I had just finished an eighty hour work week and was about to begin another to prepare my classroom for summer school. There seemed to be no time for play, but I felt uncomfortable letting a parade pass through my neighborhood without my participation.

I grabbed my old festival PBR shirt, bicycled to Parkway Bakery for a catfish po-boy, and joined the parade at Finn McCool’s. There was no live band, just the truck with speakers blaring pop songs and the troupe of male dancers following it, unifying modernized disco moves with deft hilarity. We danced our way down Banks Street and to the final stop at Bayou Beer Garden where a party was ready out back.

The Ghost, a founding member of the 610 Stompers, insisted on buying me a PBR because of my  shirt. We talked about banalities and how the Stompers got started. “We just got really drunk on MLK day a couple years ago and came up with this idea. I don’t show up to many practices. I’m in and out a lot, but it’s just, the truth is…. I can flat out fucking dance."

I went home soon after and started cutting stars from construction paper and preparing tests and quizzes while people drank on my porch. I would skip the party scheduled for a rooftop RV park across the street that night. I would skip the Cajun-Zydeco Music Festival and the Tomato Festival the next day. I would work from my bed the next Saturday while a thousand biking enthusiasts gathered in Abita Springs for the annual Louisiana Bicycle Festival.

There is no doubt that teaching, especially in the first and second year, is sacrificial in spirit and practice. There is hardly time to write, much less party. But if the 610 Stompers, and guys like Ghost, who are just ordinary men, busy men, can go out together "to flat out fucking dance" on hot Saturday afternoons, then I refuse to believe that balance is impossible. Even if the weights are tilted further towards service, New Orleans remains weird enough that there is always some strangeness marching down your street, waiting for you to put your work away and join it, even if only for a few colorful evening hours.

For videos and more info on the Stompers, check their website, it's great.      

The remaining Stompers at the end of the parade

610 ladies

Dinner

After-party dance competition.

With the Ghost