“On Sunday, I volunteered for registration at the dog parade, Barkus,” Leigh Ann wrote. “My favorite sighting of the event was seeing a woman dressed à la Anne Rice in a vintage all black ball gown. She wanted to register to walk with her dog. When I asked where the pooch was, she showed me the urn. She paraded in mourning with her deceased dog, Sebastian.”
Leigh Ann’s emails reminded me that we all had a unique story from New Orleans. Mine was my mugging within minutes of landing on Bourbon Street at 8:00 a.m. for Jazzfest one year. I fought back against my attacker, managed to hang onto my valuables, and then proceeded to lose my wallet an hour later at the Jazzfest fairgrounds. A few days later, a friendly local left me a voicemail saying she had found my wallet. New Orleans remained a giver.
But it was Leigh Ann’s favorite story from Mardi Gras 2007 that reminded me as to why New Orleans was still one of our favorite cities in the world, no matter how much its people and land had been abandoned.
“On Mardi Gras day, you are home by 3:00 p.m. because you start at 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. on foot with a Bloody Mary. You just take off into the city in your costume and wander around, and by 3:00 p.m., you’re done. I always “mask” (the terminology in New Orleans if you costume) and I went to the Zulu and Rex parades and strolled back through the Quarter at the end of the day. I came to a street on the edge near my neighborhood in Bywater, near Marigny, and saw this guy holding his trumpet. I said to him, “Play me something, Mister” (as a play on words to the traditional saying that you scream at the floats, “Throw me something, Mister.).
He said, “I’m played out and I got to walk all the way to the Bywater.”
So I said, “Where you going?”
“Louisa Street,” he said and I told him I had to go to Independence. “I’ll walk with you.” We set off for about a forty-minute walk, and after a daylong Mardi Gras celebration, we were tired.
