How to Buy the Adulation of Thousands (At Least for a Few Hours)
Part of a Series of Travel Stories: Five Truths and Two Lies
For hours, I felt intensely desired and appreciated, like Madonna just before an encore. There was a deafening roar as thousands of people called out and tried to catch my eye. College boys told me they loved me and threw kisses and sometimes, just sometimes, I threw back beads to them because I had the power…the power of the bead.
Dressed in a red crawfish costume and tossing out beads like manna from heaven from a Krewe of Tucks parade float, I was leading the pack in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. This was my second time at Mardi Gras and my first time on a float.
At the 1991 Mardi Gras, I stood on a French Quarter balcony one night as a male stranger in the crowded street below completely undressed before my eyes, because he wanted the white plastic beaded necklace that I dangled teasingly from my finger.
Needless to say, I brought more beads this time.
In fact, my two friends and I loaded boxes and boxes of purple, green and white beads onto the float — a flatbed truck, covered by paper mache, and pulled by a farm tractor. The float had a second floor that reminded me of climbing up into my attic, and a “bathroom” (spelled bucket) in a little doored cubicle. On the top of the float was a huge paper mache man’s head, with the rear end of a crawfish sticking out from his mouth. The man looked a little like Bill Clinton, and big black letters on a handwritten sign proclaimed the name of our float: “Suck ‘Da Heads.”
Not just anybody can be in the Tucks parade, one of the 70 parades held during Mardi Gras each year. I was invited by old friends Rich and Ellen who live in New Orleans, and they in turn were invited by a friend of theirs who owns a catering company. He served us a wonderful little pre-parade buffet lunch of jambalaya, pork, and crawfish cheesecake, laid out on a card table on the sidewalk near where the float was parked.
Then, we had work to do. Boxes of beads purchased earlier from Oriental Trading Company had to be opened, taken out of their bags, and hung on the huge bicycle hooks and nails that ringed the inside of the float. I alone had 1000 strands of beads ready to throw, along with cups, ladies panties, doubloons, stuffed animals, and small toys.
People on my float kept walking around with small 2 ounce plastic lidded cups, which I assumed had some sort of red face makeup for us crawfish. “Try one,” my friend said. Turned out they were red “jello shots” — jello and vodka — a drink that you toss down all in one sweet jiggley gulp.
When we were ready to roll, we still had time to check out the rest of the parade before we left — we walked past rehearsing high school marching bands, waiting policemen on horseback, and napping tractor float drivers. A streetful of 20 floats were lined up and ready to go.. Clintons with cigars in their mouths, black-wigged Monica Lewinskys, brown-robed, beer-drinking Friars, and a float full of Elvises looked down and waved.
One float had a giant toilet big enough for Godzilla, designed to attract beads with its sign on the seat lid — “How’s Your Aim?” A “Sanitary Engineer” next to the potty caught me staring up at the float, and fired off a round from his machine gun water pistol onto my pants.
Finally, on our way at 2 PM, I saw thousands of faces looking up at our float. Almost everyone was smiling and expectant, with their arms up to catch beads, plead or wave. It was fun to pick people out and try to throw beads to them. I puffed with power.
The Frisbee wrist flick was my favorite toss technique because of its distance and accuracy, but I felt particularly devil-may-care when I turned my shoulder and tossed the beads backwards like a coin into a fountain. Our float was near the end of the parade and just before a beadless wasteland of a high school marching band and a firetruck, so people at times seemed almost desperate.
One young man followed me for blocks pleading for a necklace I was wearing, until I was completely won over by his earnest perseverance. People stood wherever they could — on shoulders, double-decker platforms, in front of houses, and on step ladders with kids perched in little seats at the top.
Like a movie is made up of thousands of stills, for me the parade was thousands of tiny, stimulating interactions. As a group they produced a steamy aura of attraction and power. Most exchanges were just eye-meets-eye, but I did get a chance to talk to a few spectators and ask where they were from (Washington DC, New York, and “here”).
“You were interviewing people?” my friend and co-crayfish Richard said after the parade, partly amazed and partly disgusted. I laughed and nodded my head, pretending to be ashamed.
I was not the fastest bead tosser. Sometimes I totally missed the crowd and hit the inside of the float, then tried again. Other times I ignored the bead bunches hanging from the hooks to scoop up and toss the stragglers that kept falling to the floor, so I wouldn’t slip on a bead and fall on my face when the float lurched. At times I felt like Lucy, in that episode where she was in the production line in the chocolate factory, where she started stuffing her face with chocolates because she couldn’t keep up.
The crowds got bigger as we neared downtown and filled entire intersections, but I couldn’t rip open those bags fast enough. I knew we were in trouble because we were way past the half way mark of the route, and there were still boxes up to my knees. I was barely making a dent as I was tossing them out a dozen at a time, ripping off the little paper ring and watching them swirl through the air like smoke rings.
I guess there are times to go slow (in a construction zone) and times to not go slow (taking the SATs) and times when it doesn’t matter that much at all, like a Mardi Gras parade. Near the end I realized I was so excited that I was dancing as I tossed, swaying like Ray Charles to the pounding beat of the music that was blaring out from the top of our float.
Too soon it was over. We were downtown, stopped between the New Orleans Sheraton and the Marriot, and there were crowds like you’d see at Times Square on New Years Eve. Policemen stood between us the and the barricaded crowd, warning us to “stop throwing,” which must have been for crowd control reasons. I looked down at the neatly stacked beads in boxes at my knees, hoping they’d be put to good use next year — after all, I still had to pay for them, used or not. We grabbed a few souvenirs off the float as we got off and went into the parade party at the Marriot. I may not have been the champion bead tosser of the day, but I loved being a part of “The Greatest Free Show on Earth.”
P.S. In an age of COVID-19, the closeness of crowds is almost hard to believe. But Mardi Gras has been happening since the 1600s in some way or another, and I’m guessing that COVID-19 won’t stop that tradition in 2021. We shall see.
This story is part of a Series of Travel Stories: Five Truths and Two Lies
