The Pantagraph from Bloomington, Illinois • Page 12

Sun.k April 1, 1972 Pantagraph A-12 Bkximington-Normal, Mardi Gras indescribable-you must see if i ii mn 1 '4 i A Av VP (J i -( i i' 1 doesn't know about aspiric consumption since tills Is nlso the flu season. Said one clerk: "Now if they had Mardi Gras in summer. Police overtime was estimated at $1 million by the department's budget analyst, Luis Gomez. Some 300-400 people are employed full time making floats for this year's parades, sewing 50.000 costumes for 63 balls and minting 432 different doubloons. It isn't all wasted: the Alhambra krewc.

for instance, sells its costumes to the folks in Homer, for use in their festivities next year. Ex-Kcxes are wont to put their used finery in a glass case "generally in the living room" says Edmonson and, says a disenchanted anti-Mardi Grasian, "whenever he feels blue, he can put on his crown and train and wave his scepter, and it will all go away." Duration varies There's also profit for the nimble lrotn royalty's largesse. While it wouldn't even buy a boll weevil in Memphis, in New Orleans a silver doubloon from this year's Babylon krewe's parade, for instance, trades for $0.50, which ain't possum feed in a city where 5 cents buys a phone call, 13 cents a trolley ride and a buck or two a meal that actually tastc.4 like food. The cost of sins of the flesh is incalculable. I'nder old French law, adultery' during Mardi Gras was not deemed an offense.

"We don't get too many hookers coming in," said Gomez. "New Orleans has enough to take care of its own, and besides Mardi Gras is amateur night." "i -T x- -1 i i i in i ii ii mi mi ni- lift nil Ii i i till Hi 1 ii) Uiiiiril nun i wi. i.i.i.h i mill will be asked to be queens, princesses, dancing partners II trumpeting out "Born Free" a pointy-capped, polka-dotted family of harlc- tit i-i-y'M- sm- Gras-rrencn tor iai niesuay relishing it all Lke measled jesters the since it the last gorge before the Lcn- k. i I sVf Jf V-V i-Zil ten fast-is actually onlv one dar. Car- CW r'f constant nightroar of Ue kids of Bourbon nival is the period from Twelfth Night to At Ci Ii 4 pierced by rebel yells in Uie city-Fat Tuesday, and.

since the latter wan- KV 'V' jjVTJ thc' cM "The Big Easy," swIlUng ders around the calendar like a drunken Tx 'r I Fflrm, grabbing flesh, rappim? camel in the desert, Carnival has vary- AU', tV A with cops who apparently have decided ing lengths. It is a period of balb, which iif-; Tf' the way to beat them is not over the start even before Carnival, and at the Iz' 'l I end a quickening period of parades fiT A rj SKtA but the mouth: climaxed on Mardi Gras itself by the fj T. A jty 1 "We re just chaperones," said patrolman Zulu coconutathon; Comus, tlic Olympus V'V G. H. Huth up all night all week.

The of social ascension and Rex, whose king '4 r-y Jefferson Cify Buzzards, a neighborhood is top dog of Mardi Gras and chosen 4, Vt 0, Vj club, starting off an eight-hour march from civic achievement, even though A when Rex and the king of Comus meet XAi 'A rdi Gras day with a toast of Jax beer 1 at a.m., marenmg to a hospital for the Spectators reach for 'throws' By Sid Moody AP Newfturti Writer NEW ORLEANS. La. (AIM Mardi Gras Boom! Ta-Boom! Boom! -is a gooey gumbo: Of public and private snobbery: of sequlncd maskers and stonyfaccd strippers; of midnight at Anionic's with champagne and candles and dawn in a doorway and lovers entangled; of eurb-to-curb rubble of kids, cans and glass and black-cowled nuns pray inn at Mass: of kings, queens and dukes dressed in rhincstonc glitter while the inol) down below implores from the litter: of blueblood baits and sidewalk brawls: of debs tn silk and fags in (Iran: the last of the brass bands, old now and bent, and the words of a whore, her body for rent; of the reek of sweet wine puked in an alley and a ride down St. Charles in the city's last trolley; of blacks in blaeker face and skirts made of grass and a Hurricane Special at three bucks a glass; it's a hair-pull and dress-up. drinkdown and love-up.

beer bust and rock fest; an aristocrat's pavane, a Pan-tagruel's orgy and a child's nirvana: it's a myth made of tinsel, yet a real way of life to those proud of Trench lineage whether existent or not. proud of their city "That Care Forgot." It hapens r.nom! once a year. One thing-it's big It happens in a city that worries about being Fort Lauderdahed by scruffy kids on the one hand and lloustonicd by crass commercialism on the other. And that it happens at all bothers cops who stand 12-hour shifts for 11) days running, street cleaners who have to sweep away Ulin.Oo) tons of ground-up gutter litter. French Quarter merchants and residents who have to elbow their way through a wall-to-wall horde of drunk or drugged kids, not mention the no small number of the city's more thoughtful citizens who think Mardi I'ras lias bred a snobbish, elite and secret caste system in which a phony royalty toasts itself in champagne and waltzes in stately and private elegance while the mob howls outside the gates and the city's business life goes to hell.

Mardi Gras has to be seen, heard, smellcd. tasted, drunk, felt, inhaled, danced, marched, shouted and survived to qualify one for a campaign ribbon. Fvcn then, one's viewpoint depends on whether he saw it through a lorgnette at a society ball, the air-slit of a paddy wagon or the eye-mask of a clown costume. Five viewpoints The viewpoints arc roughly five: The college crowd, about jO.Oon strong, who arrive unshorn and Levi ed and. eventually, unwashed, to drown in beer, cheap wine, pot and, if they're lucky, somebody's arms.

Some get lucky. the tourists who jam hotel halls with airplane luggage, ice buckets and each other because they'd always heard it would be fun. It can be if you don't mind an un-Phasc 2 leap in prices and grew up inside an overbooked 747. The blacks who have their own. parallel celebration embodying both the best and the worst of the whites'.

The best is the Zulu parade, a takeoff on those of high society whites. The King of Zulu's courtiers toss gilded coconuts instead of dime-slorc trash to the crowd and rubbed it in even further one year by dispensing jars of hair straightencr. The locals of any color, who dress up in costume on Mardi Gras Day with Mom and the kids and funnel into dow ntown to watch the spectacle, ride in a truck float decorated by a neighborhood 97 Has to be seen, tasted Lavish parades A hi I 1l "Ii iiw sgm in quins perched on retarded to hand out doubloons, then in through the back door of the Ed Brauner American Legion Post for a refill and out the front with the band at their heels all the while blasting "The Saints" the ball of the Vikings, a Negro krewe, at lormal as black-tie Saturday night with the Junior league Mardi Gras, what Calvin Trillin called the Y'ale-llarvard game for homosexuals, and, strutting like peacocks in exquisitely embroidered trains and soaring headdresses that scrape the overhanging balconies, the nonheteros ffaunt, safe, for once, behind their masks a strapping man in little girl organdy with an immense pink bow in his wig airily roller skating through the crowd an oasis in a Quarter patio where a private party is serenaded by the Olympia Brass Band, one Booker T. Glass, 90 years of age, whamming the bass drum strapped to his chest the divine right of kings: the monarch of Proteus halting his float to toast his queen with champagne and then splintering the goblet on the pavement just like the profanum vulgus and the drunk-sick woman staggering past the bored faces in a night club to the powder room and a few minutes later a drunk-sick kid on his knees and a beaded stranger hovering over him asking "You all right, brother?" the college student with $450 in his jeans who spent two nights at the bus depot "We call it the Greyhound Motel" and one with a girl whose name he couldn't recall the parade of Bacchus, a newly organized krewe with a more open membership that pointedly named Phil Harris, a Jew, as its king After the ball Boom! Then it is midnight. It all just stops.

The players vanish. A few last revelers lurch off into the shadows. Bulldozers snort at the rubble, pushing it into soggy mounds. Strip-joint barkers, free now to lure their more usual clientele, make a tentative reappearance like spring groundhogs onto the nearly empty sidewalks. A blue and white patrol car rasps a requiem over its loudspeaker as it crawls down Bourbon St.

"Okay. Mardi Gras is over. You can all go home. Mardi Gras is over." Boom. bust, rock fest V4, mn- ,1, ni.nl Queens in rhinestones group or march with dumnishing directness from bar to bar accompanied by a pickup brass band and a bottomless thirst.

The royalty, who take very senously being a duke or a king or a queen for a day since they spend all year planning and paying for it. One might also include the Jewish viewpoint, which can be quite negative, since the best clubs called krewes don't have Jewish memljcrs or guests at their balls. Jewish emigration Irom town during Mardi Gras is probably the only tiling that keeps the crowds Irum sinking the city beneath the bay (uis. Orgy of money The viewpoints rarely mingle, although there was at least one meehng this year when a hippie type with a whitey-fro hairdo reeled up to a startled tourist complete with suit, camera, wife and two children and said: "Vcy, Dad, ya wanna get "Excuse me?" "Ya know: stoned, zonked." "Er, no. I don't think so.

thank you." It can be said on highest authority, however, that a lot of citkencry gets zonked during Carnival. But, as Tulane anthropologist M. S. Edmonson points out: "New Orlea.is is a city that knows how to behave as a drunken mob." Quantifying the ingredients of this 'outdoor orgy is a bit like counting the drops of water in the Mississippi, but some details emerge. The Chamber of Commerce figures $20 million changes hands: S3 million for the booze bill.

If anyone invested in the Boone's Farm winery of Modesto, before this year's blast, his future is assured and likewise with the people at Eudweiser, known here as "the breakfast of lodging and food get another million: $4 million plus for parades including several million for the "throws" or trinkets flipped to greedy-spectators. Many sidelines Since the Rex parade started doing it it's been the rage to throw cheap aluminum coins called doubloons which have become collectors' items. Other marginalia: the Loubat Glassware and Cork Co. Ltd. imports a whole carload of extra glasses; Pat, O'Brien's in the Quarter sells about 24,000 handblown glasses Mardi Gras weekend for $1, the Hurricane within adding another $2 the next weekend sales dip to Walgreens says it along streets Jamme itionally at midnigl has to visit Comus which some think says something about priorities Way Down Yonder.

Tradition brought in Mardi Gras is older than New Orleans. When the Sicur d'lberville sailed up the Mississippi in 1699 he came ashore on you know what day and named the spot Mardi Gras Bayou. With the Latin tinge, New Orleans has long bad something brewing for Mardi Gras, a European tradition that wanders back directly or indirectly, to such grand blowouts as the Roman Lupercalia when one and all scurried about raping, guzzling and whaling each other with strips of goat. By 1827, young bloods home from Paris dolled up in their sisters' dresses and began parading through the streets. Parading has gone uninterrupted ever since save during wars, including the Civil, except in 18G2 when the mayor, his city about to fall to besieging Yankees, permitted festivities but forbade masking "to prevent spies from coming among us in disguise." Gradually other krewes wre formed, including Rex in 1372 whose first king, Louis Salomon was Jewish.

Rex has some Jewish members, but top-ranked krewes like Comus, Momus and Proteus, uhn-uhn. Rex was hastily formed to honor the arrival of the czar's brother, Grand Duke Alexis, who had come to America to pot buffalo but instead was Parade goes on spectators s' ft 1'' myth" that those who control the bration also control New Orleans. clc- They stay apart "There arc many other groups who underestimate their strength." he said. "But the people who could provide leadership, who happen to be active in clubs, by not participating in the community provide a negative veto." "This is not an ideology or power base that is doomed to succeed." adds Edmonson. Crescent City aristocracy is rather frayed around the crinoline, he opined.

Unlike other major American cities, there has been little of their mass immigration and consequent social upheaval. There has been a usurpation by Faulkner's Snopscs, parvenus from the outback, of the city's aristocratic Sar-toriscs. "But it took time. The Snopscs saw the status quo was a good thing, and they are the thoroughly trained to the establishment and its preservation. "So Mardi Gras has come to express the underlying structure of the city.

If we didn't have this dream world, we'd be another Houston. Some day this New Orleans will be swalfbwed up, but not so fast you have to worry about next year's Mardi Gras." A safe prediction. But no sooner had the last gutterload of all that once glittered or gladdened been forklifted off to the dump than Councilman Peter II Beer rose in chambers to ask if the cost of Carnival in terms of private energies and public overtime was worth it. Council stood moot. But Chai says many of those he interviewed privately conceded the harmful aspects of Carnival, although they wouldn't admit it publicly for fear of losing their crowns if not their heads.

On with the parade And so, the parade goes on, a week at Carnival a blurred view of the world seen from a whirling carousel the ambiguity of it all as an all-black high school band swings onto Canal St. jfiSUffjS '-JiJ jU-wrw It's hair-pull, beer WMMwwf p.fi jlr smitten by a thrush named Lydia Thomas who trilled a then hit parader titled "IF Ever Cease to Love" which is now the Mardi Gras theme song. Lydia was due to sing at Mardi Gras and wherever she went. Alexis was sure to go. Sic Rex.

Krewe membership is shrouded in secrecy. The identity of Rex, the only unmasked king, Ls so guarded prior to enthronement that even his seamstress isn't meant to know. Each krewe has a captain who busies himself during the year choosing a parade theme, supervising float and costume creation, working up a tableau for the ball and dickering about which debs and other worthy ladies will be asked to be queens, princesses, dancing partners or only in New Orleans permitted to sit in the bleachers at the Municipal Auditorium and watch undanccd and unwincd while unbasking in the glow of the more chosen. Men do planning Uniquely it's the men of the krewes and not the women of the social teas who pick the debutantes. Said one prominent local figure: "A week after Mardi Gras the men I sit down to lunch with start planning tableaux, costumes, guest lists.

The men, mind you." Ben C. Toledano, an old family Oceanian and recent mayoral candidate, hcresicd from the safe refuge of Birmingham: "Too often business and social life are tied together. The men get together, play gin rummy, drink and discuss really important things like whether Dr. So-and-So's daughter is entitled make her debut because her mother's an Italian." The year 'round absorption of so many business leaders with Mardi Gras worries many thoughtful citizens. Too much energy fcthat could go into public problems goes instead into private pleasure.

Culture suffers. And causes, Too much money for floats, not enough for fund drives. And the caste system secret, as well seeps into the business world. The extent to which New Orleans' love affair with Mardi Gras is the cause or effect of relative stagnation is a debated point. But such preoccupation is unique to the "Otherwise you'd have this in Dubuque, too," says Edmonson.

Tulane political scientist Charles Y. W. Chai, in a survey of hundreds of city influential, cited the "Mardi Gras syndrome" as a factor in a lack of leadership although he believes it "a It's dream world 4 tjt' f- Jit AH Iti ST If 4 4 Wv A a v- sXT'.