Easter Parades 2016

Rain threatened the parades all day but the  33rd annual Chris Owens French Quarter Easter Parade and the Gay Easter Parade benefiting Food for Friends rolled as scheduled. Renowned burlesque dancer and club owner Chris Owens still performs nightly (despite rumors of her being in her 80’s) and hosts a fun, fabulous parade. Both parades offer bands, colorful floats, beads, stuffed animals, candy, seersucker suits, floral dresses and elaborately decorated Easter hats. The Gay Easter Parade has also raised nearly a quarter million  for charity over the past 14 years.

Easter Parades and Hats!

Easter in New Orleans means many things to many people. It’s just as “normal” to see seersucker suits and Sunday-best as to see egg-colored wigs and hats piled high with decorations. But Easter in NOLA definitely means parades. Though I missed the earlier Historic French Quarter Easter Parade, we caught the 32nd annual Chris Owens French Quarter Easter Parade and the Gay Easter Parade benefitting the NO/AIDS Task Force’s Food for Friends program. A renowned burlesque dancer and club owner since the early 1960′s, Chris Owens still performs nightly (despite rumors of her being in her early 80’s) and she throws a heck of a parade. 

Beatles Fest 2013

House of Blues hosted the 11th annual New Orleans Beatles Festival, the third one I’ve attended. It seems hard to believe that the Beatles debuted their first album, Please Please Me, in the UK 50 years ago. Next year will commemorate the 50 year anniversary of the Beatles coming to America. Oddly enough, the band made a stop on that tour to play the stadium in City Park for $5 a ticket. Their only request was to meet the legendary Fats Domino, which they did. 

LA Film & Video Magazine and Raintree Services Galas

This weekend, I attended 2 galas, one for “Hollywood South” networking and the other a fundraiser for foster children. The first event was hosted by Louisiana Film & Video Magazine in the old Mardi Gras World across the river. We met up with Jeff “The Dude” Dowd (the inspiration for the Jeff Bridges character in The Big Lebowski) and took the ferry over to Algiers. It’s always beautiful to see the city from a distance, lights reflecting on the Mississippi’s surface. The Dude is in town to gear up for the first Louisiana International Film Festival in less than two weeks where I will be hosting 2 workshops so we were ready to do some serious networking.

Okeanos, Mid-City, Thoth and Bacchus Parades

Saturday was a big parade day. I envy the children and imagine the marathon party of Mardi Gras is so much more fun for kids than the one single day of Christmas. If we adults look forward all year to wearing costumes, playing in the street and catching beads and toys, the kids must go bananas!

Endymion Parade from the Bleachers

Endymion, a super krewe, delivered a new topper to an already dazzling parade – a 9 car float honoring Pontchartrain Beach, a long-gone beach and amusement park where many locals spent their childhoods and even Elvis played a concert. I’ve attended the parade on Canal St. (only for tourists and the truly daring), on St. Charles when rain rescheduled it (which was more mellow), inside the Morial Convention Center when I attended the Endymion Ball (which rocked – catching beads in ball-gowns and tuxedoes!) and this year, for the first time, we watched from the bleachers near City Hall.

Irish Channel Parade

After attending over 20 parades during the Carnival season, I was ready for a break, but with Mardi Gras ending so late this year, we only had 3 days before the St. Patrick’s festivities began. The Irish Channel Parade is characterized mostly by drunken black-suited men carrying what look like umbrellas but are, in fact, silk flowers to be exchanged for kisses. The other distinguishing characteristic is, in addition to the beads, toys and cups thrown at Mardi Gras parades, the Irish throw cabbage, potatoes, carrots, oodles of noodles, peppers, cucumbers, Lucky Charms and Irish Spring soap. The idea is that after the parade, you would go home and turn most of those ingredients into a cabbage stew.

Krewe of Endymion

Usually, the Krewe of Endymion, a super-krewe with celebrity guests and tandem floats nearly as long as a city block, rolls Saturday night before Fat Tuesday. This year, due to rain, the Ball went on as scheduled but the parade was moved to Sunday. We’d been out on the sidewalk since after 11 am, seen 4 parades already, but when the route was changed to St. Charles rather than mid-City rolling down Canal, we found the energy to end the evening with the super-krewe double whammy of Bacchus and Endymion.

Krewe of Ancient Druids Parade

The spookiest Krewe, the Ancient Druids, rolled through Uptown Wednesday night. Since it was a school night and only one krewe paraded, the crowds were smaller, but they put on a fairly big show with a funky medieval tone. Between the masked, Merlin-capped riders and the giant horses, I half expected someone to bring me a pint of ale.