House Floats – French Quarter

 “Yardi Gras” is the 2021 socially distanced version of Mardi Gras, where instead of crowding around floats throwing toys and beads, we’ve been wandering the city on foot and by car to see house floats – thousands of homes and businesses throughout the city decorated as parade floats. Krewe of House Floats promoted this safe parade concept, encouraging people to use local businesses and artists to help decorate their places, or go DIY, then register on their map. In the search for these fun and fabulous house floats, I’ve already covered St. Charles Ave.,  Magazine Street, the Irish Channel, Mid-City and the Garden District and Lower Garden District.

The historic French Quarter doesn’t have the luxury of large front lawns to take on their Yardi Gars displays, so lots of people chose to decorate their wrought iron balconies. My favorite is probably the Krewe of Sub-Krewe house with it’s life-sized  paper mache 610 Stomper and Pussyfooters dancers.

Satchmo Summerfest 2019

Satchmo Summerfest celebrates New Orleans native, Louis Armstrong’s birthday with 3 days of music on multiple stages and food booths from local vendors. Always marked by summer heat, the festivals provides shady tents and symposiums on Armstrong and related topics in the air conditioned Old U.S. Mint, home of the New Orleans Jazz Museum where you can find Armstrong’s first coronet.

The Roots of Music kicked things off

Krewes of ‘tit Rex & Chewbacchus

While the giant Krewes of Sparta and Pygmalion floats rolled Uptown, we watched the miniature parade, ‘tit Rex, and the wonky and wonderful Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus parade Downtown. A reaction to the super Krewe parades, ‘tit Rex was inspired by the tradition of kids decorating shoeboxes and parading them through school. This was my first time making it across town in time for the parade and it was everything I’d heard. The crowds were huge and the floats were tiny, creative and often satirical.

Mardi Gras Day in the French Quarter

Everywhere else, it’s just Tuesday. Just one block from the debauchery of Bourbon Street, for many locals Mardi Gras Day in the French Quarter is a day of elaborate costumes, wandering bands and dancing in the streets. It was see-your-breath cold but after the crap-weather last year, icy wind seemed like a cakewalk. No time to write but they say a picture’s worth a thousand words so here are about 150,000 words.

HBO’s Treme and Treme Bicentennial

As I recently remarked to someone, New Orleans is definitely a “you had to be there” kinda thing. HBO’s Treme helps illuminate some of why that’s so. There are actually 2 Tremes, the show and the neighborhood in which it’s primarily set. The actual Treme is the oldest black suburb in the United States, the home of Armstrong Park and Congo Square where jazz (and most American music) was born. This weekend, New Orleans celebrated the neighborhood’s 200th year with a bicentennial festival complete with concerts, food and second line parades.

2 Weeks of Treme

It’s been too long since I last blogged, long enough to have missed posting on the Saints’ first win this season and the records broken by Brees and Colston. It’s also been long enough to have watched 2 more episodes of HBO’s  multi-award winning Treme. The more I get to know this city, the more familiar the musicians, locations and traditions are for me this season. At some point in the season’s second episode, I heard the familiar refrain of Mr. Okra rolling through the neighborhood in his colorful truck chanting, “I have eggplant. I have collard greens. I have oranges.” In L.A., you never knew who or what you might see. I remember seeing a car that was a chicken, a 3 story-tall Oscar on a flatbed truck and a gladiator walking through a neighborhood. In New Orleans, you also never know who or what you might see, but it’s not because someone is trying to make movie magic, it’s because life here can be truly magical.