Glitter to glitter and ashes to ashes
The end of Mardi Gras week, or: participation mystique from Technicolor to neutral gray
On Fat Tuesday, Newbie Orleans and I walked with La Société de Saint Anne down to the river, an experience that was giddy and poignant. It was a very sunny day, and light zinged off sequins and metallic fabrics and jewels and glitter. When I shut my eyes, I saw spots; around noon, I felt like those scintillations had burned themselves on the back of my retinas. And I didn’t mind. Especially later that day, when walking down St. Claude. We encountered a group of out-of-town revelers who asked us for a bottle of water. A guy in their group, a weeping, red-eyed satyr, literally had glitter in his eyes. We had no water to offer, sadly. Hopefully his natural tears finally did the trick. Some temporary floaters seemed just fine by comparison.
On Mardi Gras, glitter is a costume if you wear it right
The Friday before Mardi Gras, The Guardian published this preview of “Poets in Vogue,” at the Poetry Museum in London. It’s all about the totemic power of clothes and identity and art. Sylvia Plath’s tartan skirt, Audre Lorde’s caftan (which she had altered after undergoing a masectomy), Anne Sexton’s red “reading dress,” and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s costume for her performance of “Aveugle Voix” (Blind Voice) are all part of it.
It got me thinking hard about Mardi Gras, partly because our friend J., another transplant from St. Louis, warned us weeks ago that we couldn’t hit the streets in street clothes on Fat Tuesday. Did we have anything? Wigs? Goofy hats? Boas? Glitter? Glitter’s a must. Stockpile glitter!
We had some St. Louis friends staying with us over Mardi Gras; all pros, all landing with outfits planned for each day. Having spent a goodly chunk of my life as a Neutral Nancy like Sylvia Plath, rather than St. Anne of the red reading dress, I did a lot of fretting, panicking and overthinking.
On Lundi Gras, as we walked down Franklin Street, I impulsively trashpicked a flowered headdress. The crown-maker popped out of her house as I pulled it from the box at the curb. She gave me her blessing, telling me it’d just come in and out of the attic every year, and she was happy to pass it along.
Clearly she was a Mardi Gras pro. The crown’s beautiful, sturdy and comfortable. The problem was: what to wear with it? I thought about it too much, and not enough.
On Mardi Gras morning, Newbie Orleans quickly pulled together a pitch-perfect getup: purple shirt, bright yellow socks, and green shorts (to match the very necessary hat) plus some meaningful Mardi Gras beads.
In the same span of time, I tried on and took off: two dresses; four pairs of pants; two or three shirts; three pairs of shoes. I’ve haunted thrift stores since high school, so there are lots of weird, sparkly things in my closet. But I’m rarely brave enough to wear them. I opt for the rolled jeans, the blank T-shirt, the tartan skirt.
That’s the gift of Mardi Gras; we Nancies get to be Annes, sainted or otherwise. And so red — or coral — it was. A too-short red dress with shiny beads sewn on the sleeves, and a pair of red capris I bought back when I worked in an office and couldn’t walk around looking like a wastrel. That was topped off by beads made by our friend Matthew. He’s a member of the Krewe of Dystopian Paradise, and when he gifted these to us, said, “Part of my mission is to save the world from sh*&#@y Mardi Gras beads.”
Here’s a funny pic Newbie Orleans took that day, where I don’t look like a wastrel, but maybe like someone who just ran away and joined an off-brand circus:
That morning on the parade route, there was a lot of glitter, and lots of cleverness. I saw a woman dressed as an angel covered in 10,000 googly eyes; a guy dressed in a suit decorated in squiggly fishing lures; a man dressed as Savory Simon with a crew of Hubig’s pies; a guy wearing a grocery bag with Makin’ Groceries crudely written on it with Sharpie. We didn’t wear glitter, but saw people in basic summer clothes rocking it all over faces and arms and bellies, like the embodiment of the Glitter Spirit. And that was a costume. How you wear what you wear matters more here than what you wear.
By the end of the day, my shoulders were so sunburnt they matched my dress. My eyes and head felt completely stuffed full with color, sparkles, music, voices, music, smells, metallics, and sunshine. By 3:30 p.m., I felt like I had tinsel flowing through my veins instead of blood, and my nervous system went on strike. We went home and took a nap. I think this is what’s supposed to happen. You are overfull. You finally understand, headwise and heartwise, what “enough,” feels like. Just in time for Ash Wednesday.
All Americans need a little of this!
Some people say Las Vegas is like New Orleans, because both cities tolerate vice. But Vegas is New Orleans’ dramatic foil (the shiny kind, of course). We spent 22 mostly unpleasant hours in Vegas last summer, and I’ll contend it’s nothing but a 24-hour service station for hungry ghosts. New Orleans, especially during Mardi Gras season, people drink too much or do things they can’t get away with back home. In both places, people spend too much money or end up throwing up in a gutter. But if you do NOLA right, it’s never the phony, lonely experience of Vegas. What happens in New Orleans doesn’t have to stay here. It’s yours to take home. It’s one of the few places in America where you can lose yourself, engage with other people in a totally different way, and return to mundane life, reinvented and transformed. As VieNolaVie wrote:
“Costuming is a way of letting go and plugging into the community in a way that isn’t really acceptable on a day-to-day basis (even in New Orleans where norms are not really typical norms). It’s a way of dressing yourself up, masking your face from the world in order to tap into what might be hiding under all those layers of material and skin. And, it’s an invitation to connect. If someone is wearing a furry suit that looks like the blanket from your childhood, there’s little to stop you from asking, ‘Can I touch that?’ and them most likely exuberantly responding with an ‘Of course’ and an extended appendage all for your liking.”
I’m sad a lot of Americans don’t experience that. I feel like if everyone did, we’d be living in a different country. The closest thing most people get to this is through sports or Halloween. There’s some convivality there, but it’s essentially Vegas-y in spirit — you party and let your id out for a few hours, but only in the name of Having Fun. There’s no lysis.
Luckier people find a niche at Burning Man or at Sci-Fi cons, though both have become so commercial they are heading toward Vegas territory, too. And they are fragmented — not part of a larger cultural fabric. After Mardi Gras, Ash Wednesday is the logical next scene in a circular story that happens every year, a coherent story about the city, about the culture, about the people who live here. We are new arrivals and new particpants in that story, but even tourists, if they engage consciously and not as vice hounds, can and should be active characters in that story, too.
Tourists, after all, help keep this city alive — financially and otherwise. Drink the hurricanes and take the ghost tours and buy the boob T-shirts. But do yourself, and this city right; be brave enough to chuck the Id and even the Ego. Be happy to be very small and insignificant — even if you’re covered in sequins — so that you can be part of something bigger: one human in a sea of humans, in a very curious and magical place.
As Anne Sexton wrote in “The Red Dance:”
She had on a red, red dress
and there was a small rain
and she lifted her face to it
and thought it part of the river.