Last week: ‘tit Rex. In which a bunch of dorks take the traditional New Orleans elementary school exercise of making floats out of shoeboxes and drag them along an actual street route.
Last night: Krewe of Freret, my first parade with Actual Floats since I’ve moved back here. Unless catching Zulu and Rex last year before looking for a place counts? I’m gonna say nope.
-
- I was at the corner of St Charles and Poydras at first but I decided I didn’t wanna wait, so I hopped on my bike and went up to Lee Circle.
-
- The view here was much better but the barricades were a ways back and a lot of the throws didn’t make it all the way behind them.
-
- Ah yes. High school marching bands. I have not stood next to a high school marching band in full blast since something like the mid-eighties and, damn, that sound shook something deep inside and had me on the verge of tears. Clear out the old year, get ready for the new.
-
- Freret has a mix of the “lots of little subkrewes” model of walking parades like Chewbacchus or Krewe de Vieux and “one big krewe on huge floats” model. Kinda weird. It was founded after Katrina so I’m not surprised it’s a bit different from the traditional krewes.
-
- Freret’s theme this year was “music” and all the floats that weren’t the royalty and their court had giant statues of various musicians. Trombone Shorty, Louis Armstrong, Professor Longhair, Dr. John, Elvis, Jimi Hendrix… and more I missed the title of.
I said I was kind of in a shitty location for catching throws, and I was, but I still caught a ton more than I expected to.
All but a couple of those strands were snatched out of the air, too, something I could never do when I was a kid. I kinda quit going to parades in my early teens, so I was still, you know. Short. back then. Now I am a tall adult and I can just grab ’em. I’m pretty sure they have more magic in them when you catch them like that. I cannot even begin to imagine what kind of haul I will end up with if I get a better location for catching stuff.
I could have stuck around for Knights of Sparta and Pygmalion along the same route a little later, but I was tired, and out of phone battery, so I just went home. Today’s all day parades, looks like. Do I wanna go to the Quarter for the absurdity of Barkus, the Dog Parade? Or go explore a different part of the Uptown-to-CBD route and catch part of Femme Fatale, Carrolton, and King Arthur? Also why the hell is King Arthur uptown instead of across the river on the West Bank where it used to be? Never mind that Carrolton goes nowhere near the neighborhood it’s named for. Things have changed since I was a kid, there’s been a lot of route consolidation in the name of scarce city resources to manage traffic, keep the peace, and have emergency services handy…
Or I might just stay in. I dunno.