Mardi Gras at 18th St
Yesterday I kept getting emails regarding various Mardi Gras plans, which involved taking the day off work and roaming drunkenly downtown, and I kind of waved them off. We’re kind of busy at work these days, and I’m neither Catholic nor in need of plastic beads. E had mentioned maybe wanting to go to the Kansas City festivities, but I didn’t quite see the point of driving an hour to go see a parade.
“It’s pretty awesome,” said E. “Basically in the past it’s been a mixture of Art Car Parade, drunken costumed anarchy, and a parade with no spectators and everyone is in the parade.” Eventually I got the point that, for nostalgia and other reasons mysterious to me, he really wanted to go, and company as well. So I said all right, and he mentioned that we would need costumes. We borrowed some hats from Krissy’s vast collection: I grabbed a polar bear hat, and E grabbed a dog visor and some white plastic sunglasses. Oh, and he wore this:
E’s President’s day snuggie, made by yours truly out of technicolor googly-eyed dinosaur print fleece.
We suited up, packed a flask of Evan Williams, and drove up to the Art district, where wildly dressed people danced to a huge hoppin’ band. The Pitch has a brief slideshow of some of the people who were there, though it doesn’t really do justice to some of the wilder outfits. The best outfit was a girl in a full crocodile outfit, equipped with some sort of keyboard / bagpipes hybrid, maybe keypipes? There was also a couple who had gutted some stuffed unicorns and wore them as hats, which was an awesome idea that I will totally repurpose later. We also ran into a hilarious guy dressed as Batman, but don’t think that he was in some lame pre-fab costume – his bat-wings were umbrella parts sewn to his sleeves and torso, and he had installed a video camera on his head to film his perspective while doing swooshes. Oh, and he had these lightwands too. It was very high tech! No, the most interesting looking people weren’t captured in still photographs, at least from what I can find in a cursory search on flickr.
Unfortunately E also doesn’t appear to be anywhere online, at least yet – we figured for sure he’d be up on the Pitch or someone’s Flickr, as we kept getting stopped every ten or fifteen minutes by someone who wanted to take a photo of the guy in the technicolor dino snuggie. Also unfortunately, I did not bring my camera, as we were to be walking around in a sketchier part of the city (and we were merely cuddly animal creatures, not the Dark Knight). It was grand fun marching along with the parade and disrupting traffic…but we were definitely less boisterous making the trek back home from the Jazz District. “Where is everyone?” we wondered, but I guess we probably left at an odd time – most folks who had to work left earlier in the evening, and those who didn’t have work stayed to party. Oh, and people probably thought ahead and had buddies with cars to ferry them back and forth between the two poles of the parade. Smart thinking!
Luckily the technicolor radiance of E’s snuggie protected us from harm, and we made it back to our car unmugged. We finished the night at Town Topic, a hamburger hut – calling it anything bigger than that would be seriously generous – that looks like it’s from the 50′s. Not in a schlocky fake Spangles type way, where the walls are crammed with photos of fifties’ stars and they play Perry Como and shit – but in the “man I hope they’ve changed the frying oil since 1976″ sense. E pointed out a pinball machine in the corner that was Sopranos themed, and even that looked old-timey somehow. The Town Topic matron took orders in a taciturn, efficient manner that reminded me of Chicago – no extraneous chatter beyond calling someone “hon” or so. The burger I got was serviceable and all, and I loved the grilled onions on it, but maybe next time I’ll upgrade to a double burger and maybe get some bacon (this is why I have problems fitting into pants).
Overall I was pretty impressed with the intensity of the Mardi Gras party in Kansas City, if maybe not the scope. E says he might actually prefer the Mardi Gras experience in KC over the time he went to New Orleans. For one thing, there’s only one parade, so it’s easy to decide where to go! Also, the KC celebrations are still fairly ragtag and organic, compared to the slightly corporatized spectacle in New Orleans, where people have to pay a thousand dollars to be on a float.
All in all, we had a blast, and since I was the designated driver (for once!), E got to cut loose and dance his little heart out, waving the snuggie wildly in the wind. My only regret was not bringing a camera. (See, chiaroscuro: this is why I need a little pocket camera! The one I have probably seems tiny enough to fancy photographers, but for situations like this I could use something a little easier to transport).
UPDATE: I found us! On this guy’s flickr photostream! And yes, um, E does indeed look pretty crazy:
