Newhouse News Service

NEW ORLEANS – When the flood came, the question sprang almost instantly from the lips of reporters and pundits nationwide: Will Mardi Gras roll? Will New Orleanians dare party in the ruins?

Louise Maloney, now eagerly preparing for a ride with the Krewe of Muses and a march with the Society of St. Ann, remembers thinking just as instantly how absurd the question seemed.

Carnival, after all, is no mere “party” that can be switched on and off with the stroke of an official pen. It rises organically from thousands of traditions, held sacred by krewes and families and embedded in the boulevards, balconies and backyards of a metropolitan area that more than a million people still call home.

Maloney turned to her husband and told him, “I’ll get a red wagon, fill it with beads and walk down the street. I don’t give a s— what anybody else does. I’m having my Mardi Gras.”

When the parade season launched last weekend, with the bawdy, biting satire of Krewe du Vieux, Maloney wept as she watched the parade move past throngs of locals.

“This is what we do,” she thought to herself. “We take tragedy and make it into beauty and hilarity. And we’re also showing pride in being New Orleanians and expressing ourselves like never before.”

Yet Maloney and other Mardi Gras devotees know well that more is riding on this year’s Carnival than a psychological renewal for locals.

It’s a kick-start for a crippled economy and a test to prove to the world the city can still hold massive events.

Moreover, the TV cameras are coming, and reporters worldwide already have displayed an irresistible urge to juxtapose images of a riotous Bourbon Street against those of the suffering and the enormous rebuilding task ahead.

That leaves Maloney and many others fearing the city will get smacked with a public-relations black eye, based on a stereotype perpetuated by drunken, breast-baring tourists and the throngs that egg them on and not what she sees at the true soul of Carnival: the unification of the city in its highest expression of culture.

She also knows well that this year’s Carnival will be populated by a new class of rookies – contractors and other workers who might view the stereotypical behavior as tolerated, even expected. So she and others in the local chapter of the American Marketing Association have launched a guerrilla marketing campaign, hoping to highlight the diversity of the celebration and shortcut drunken stupidity before it festers on national television.

The association, with the help of Peter A. Mayer Advertising, has printed 10,000 fliers listing 10 “Carnival rules,” with the mission statement, “For many, it (Carnival) has become a deadline for putting Katrina behind us. … Remember, Mardi Gras isn’t paid for by the city – it’s a gift to the world from the people of New Orleans. You owe it to us to be nice and have a good time.”

The rules prescribe etiquette for the vast majority of Carnival’s events, populated by children and grandmothers who have no interest in examining the bared privates of over-served amateurs.

“Remember the kids,” one rule reads. “The children of New Orleans have been through a lot. If you see a stuffed animal flying through the air, don’t grab it for yourself. Make sure it falls into a child’s hands.”

“Keep it clean,” says another. “Just because we live in FEMA trailers doesn’t mean we want to be trashed. Pick up after yourself.”

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, along with the City Council, decided in October that Carnival would roll, after briefly questioning the ability of police and other city services to handle the event. He still has some concern about the city’s image as the season cranks up.

“It’s a two-edged sword. It’ll send out the signal that New Orleans is not dead, that we’ve honored our tradition of 150 years,” Nagin said. “But it also sends the signal that we’re OK, and “There they go again, partying when they have serious challenges.”‘

Hopefully, the mayor said, this year the country will get a taste of all of Carnival’s many and varied traditions. Nagin quoted Wynton Marsalis, describing New Orleans recently in a way the mayor believes applies especially to Carnival 2006.

“New Orleans is a true American melting pot: the soul of America. A place freer than the rest of the country, where elegance met an indefinable wildness to encourage the flowering of creative intelligence.”

Given Mardi Gras’ Sodom and Gomorrah image in some corners, the notion of Mardi Gras as a family event causes some outside the city to chuckle in disbelief. But it best describes the season for most locals.

That may be because Carnival also has featured a kind of segregation between locals and tourists, said Elzy Lindsey, a veteran of 40 Fat Tuesdays, now living in North Carolina and aching at the prospect of missing Mardi Gras for the first time in his life.

“New Orleans does a really good job of keeping tourists away from its real culture. We give them a Disneyland, French Quarter-Garden District version of Mardi Gras,” he said.

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Robert Schultz Jr., a 43-year-old father from Lakeview, won’t be parading this year, either, as he has so often in the past in the Krewe of Caesar and others. He lost his house, and has better uses for his time and money.

But if you want to find him or anyone in his family, just head to the corner of St. Charles Avenue and Marengo Street, where more than a dozen of his relatives gather every year. They always see the same groups of other families and friends they never see, except on the parade route, where they share drinks and food.

“How often can you get all of your kids out in the street at 8 in the morning?” he said. “That’s the key to it, the annual celebration with family. I haven’t seen a lot of friends and family since the hurricane hit, haven’t had a chance to give them a hug.”

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Downtown, in the flooded 7th Ward, Otto Dejean, chief of the Hard Head Hunters, will assemble his tribe of Mardi Gras Indians at Bullet’s Bar. Though he now lives in Slidell – and others in his tribe live in Dallas or Atlanta – they will return to march through the ruins of their old neighborhood.

They will pray before the march, then stop along the traditional route at the door of Allison “Tootie” Montana’s house to pay tribute to the late big chief of the Yellow Pocahontas and undisputed “Chief of Chiefs” of all the tribes who make up the century-old African-American masking tradition. Montana died in June at age 82.

“The prayer this year is going to be emotional,” Dejean said. “There’ll be a lot of tears of joy out there, just to be able to march.”

As they march through a flood-ravaged neighborhood, the crowds may be smaller – or they may not, Dejean said.

“A lot of people have been calling me, people I didn’t even know had my cell phone number, to see if we’re participating in Carnival,” he said. “Some of them are going to drive in from Dallas or Atlanta just to see us march, and then go back the same day.”

Alphonse “Dowee” Robair, gang flag of the Red Hawk Hunters tribe, will start his march from the foot of the Claiborne Bridge over the Industrial Canal, right next to the levee breach that wiped out the Lower 9th Ward.

“It’s about keeping up tradition,” he said. “I’m going to continue to do what was taught to me as a child.”

Tourism officials hope the more than 800 reporters – perhaps the largest number to descend on the city in Carnival history – will capture the nuances of the celebration, which coincides within a day of the six-month anniversary of the hurricane.

In recent years, stereotypes of Carnival have been burned into the national psyche, with the proliferation of “Girls Gone Wild” videos, Mardi Gras-themed photo spreads in racy magazines, and live Internet Webcasts that provide far-flung viewers real-time eyefuls of Carnival’s wildest side. With New Orleans under a microscope, a lot rides on the way Mardi Gras plays to the outside world, said Jeff Anding, director of convention marketing for the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau.

“Prior to Katrina, we really didn’t care how the rest of the world thought of us. But it has become a practical problem – the perception of New Orleans,” he said.

In the sort of description that makes Anding cringe, a writer for The Daily Telegraph in London described people watching last week’s Krewe du Vieux parade as being mostly “New Orleans residents, fueled by Hurricane cocktails and marijuana smoked openly in the presence of tolerant New Orleans policemen.”

Anding believes more such cliched reporting is inevitable, as reporters stroll from their downtown hotels and point their cameras toward Bourbon Street, the overpriced, neon-rimmed caricature of the city that made it world-famous.

“You’re going to have people baring their breasts in the French Quarter. You’re going to have fights,” he said. “The last thing we need is a portrayal that New Orleans is irresponsible.”

Hoping to steer visiting media into neighborhoods where Mardi Gras celebrations draw children and families, the Convention and Visitors Bureau hosted a media workshop last week at its headquarters on St. Charles Avenue. Speakers included Mardi Gras guide publisher Arthur Hardy, float maker Blaine Kern Sr. and representatives of some of the city’s biggest krewes.

Much of the national media coverage of the decision to stage Carnival has focused on an apparently small number of evacuees who questioned the propriety of holding the celebration while the city still lay in ruin. Some reports cast the debate in almost exclusively racial terms, saying it laid bare fissures dividing black evacuees and white residents who had returned to the city.

A Feb. 9 Chicago Tribune article declared that a “deep unease has settled over the Big Easy” as Mardi Gras approaches, bringing “disturbing juxtapositions.” The article further pronounced the city “starkly segregated.”The Tribune indicated such old-line krewes as Comus and Momus who refused to comply with a 1991 ordinance requiring them to integrate their ranks, still “preside” over Carnival. But those krewes haven’t thrown a parade in 15 years, thus becoming largely irrelevant to the vast majority of New Orleanians, black and white alike. Regardless of whether Momus and Comus ever pledge not to discriminate and return to parading – as Rex and Proteus already have – discussions about those prospects rarely come up in New Orleanians’ conversations about Carnival.

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Indeed, the past 15 years have seen the rise of more inclusive super krewes – who essentially take anyone with the money and desire to ride – and, of course, Zulu, the predominantly black but substantially integrated parade that rivals the popularity of Rex, the titular King of Carnival, on Fat Tuesday.

Henri Schindler, a Carnival historian float designer, lamented that Mardi Gras has become yet another vehicle for the out-of-town press to oversimplify the city’s complex race and class dynamics.

“Everybody that comes here wants to examine New Orleans by race and class, as if those things exist nowhere else,” he said. “In terms of the number of people riding floats, high society is skimpily represented. Most people riding the floats are middle- and working-class people.”

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Though hardly rising to the level of major controversy, Carnival has indeed engendered resentment from some displaced New Orleanians struggling to get back to the city. The peak of the protest, said Nagin, came at a town hall-style meeting he held in Atlanta soon after the storm. Since then, they’ve steadily quieted, the mayor said.

“I’m not hearing much noise anymore saying we shouldn’t have Carnival, not since we’ve gotten Zulu on board,” he said. “Now we’ve got krewes asking if they can do more, and wanting to expand their routes. … Those are all good signs that people are getting into it.”

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At the daily band practice of the newly formed Max Band, a collection of about 100 high school horn blowers created by a merger of three traditionally African-American Catholic campuses, many students have left their displaced families for the privilege of returning home to school – and to the parade route for Carnival. They’re staying with friends and relatives, and looking forward to having their mothers, fathers and siblings return to see them march.

Made up of members of the renowned St. Augustine Marching 100 and the bands from the all-girls St. Mary’s and Xavier Prep schools, the Max Band has had just five weeks to memorize 26 songs, and to learn to play together, said band director Lester Wilson as he listened to the band blow the “March Grandioso” outside Xavier’s campus.

“I’ve heard a lot of (displaced) people saying, ‘The city’s having Mardi Gras, but what about us?’ ” he said. “But the upside is it shows the city coming back, with people from all walks of life. You got to start somewhere, if it’s Mardi Gras, so be it. … For the kids, it’s an opportunity to prove they can overcome adversity. You’ve got kids coming from Baton Rouge just to go to school, and staying late for band practice – that’s commitment.”

Gregory Malone, 17, goes back and forth each weekend from Houston, where his mother and sister are staying. At times, he misses the many bandmates from St. Augustine who have not returned and the traditions they shared, as he works to fashion new traditions with the combined band.

“I get discouraged sometimes, but my peers cheer me up and get me excited again. It’s my senior year. I’ve worked hard for four years, so you have to march.”

Malone said none of his friends in the St. Augustine band has expressed any anger about Carnival marching forward without them, and many plan to attend. Beyond the exhilaration of marching to cheering crowds, Malone hopes he can play a small part in reminding visiting New Orleanians of their city’s former glory and the need to invest in its uncertain future.

“It’ll bring a lot of money into the city and help the rebuilding,” he said. “I’m hoping we can bring a lot of people back home, so they’ll see it’s not as bad as people are saying, and come back and rebuild.”

JL END THEVENOT

(Brian Thevenot is a staff writer for The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. He can be contacted at bthevenot(at)timespicayune.com)

(Keith Darce contributed to this report.)

AP-NY-02-24-06 1435EST