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by Pam YoungLesbian Mardi Gras Dreams...
My first memory of Mardi Gras in New Orleans comes from a photograph of me and my grandmother. We are standing on St. Charles Avenue waiting for Rex to roll on Fat Tuesday. She's wearing a flowered print dress, a hat, heels, and something she called a shawl. And I'm there too. I'm the bunny rabbit: big ears flopped over, broomstick whiskers, cotton tail. I look happy. It is probably 1950 in that still photo.
My next Mardi Gras photo memory comes several years later. I am standing next to a wrought iron fence. I am crying. That year's costume was a dyke's nightmare: an Old Fashioned Girl, they called it-hooped skirt, powdered wig, a mole painted on my cheek. Someone is holding out a doll for me to carry. Oh, please.
Other carnivals are chronicled in the family album and my attitude during that particular year's festivities is frozen on my face, in my stance, by my body language. There is the year we were cowgirls. Skirts with fringe, hats with chin straps, red gingham. I look a little stiff, but I have this six shooter strapped to my side, so I'm OK. (My brother has on a double pair and he has his pulled out and aimed at the camera.) I'm probably about 8 years old.
The next photo shows a trio of clowns. I'm the evil one in the middle. The face is painted on with grease makeup. All that itchy stuff is bunched up around my neck, pointed hat, big buttons. I am lunging at the camera...a clown just stepped out of a Stephen King novel. Age 12.
All Mardi Gras mornings have a similar memory "smell" too. Early, early, before dawn...the smell of chicken frying in the kitchen, potatoes boiling for salad, sandwiches being spread with butter (because Mayo might spoil) and ham. I would lie in bed trying to gauge the weather. Cold meant layers and layers of clothes...and misery when one had to go to the bathroom. Rain meant double misery-a rain coat worn over the costume. Sunshine meant comfort-no raincoat, no galoshes, no wool sweater that itched. Sunshine meant I could catch stuff thrown from the floats.
Mardi Gras was a time when I could change my identity. I could be a football player, a cowboy, a horse...if I was lucky. My dad would try to intercede with my mom on the costume front. "Let her be what she wants to be," he would lobby for equality for me. My dad knew that by age 10 he had to try to let me "be what I wanted to be."
Ah, but my dear mom...old fashioned girls, dancers, Dale Evans instead of Roy Rogers. My mom was determined to do her part to have her daughter fit in. Sorry mom, it was not to be...at least, not as she imagined.
Then came the brief interlude at Mardi Gras when my family decided to join one of the truck crews who parade behind Rex. And there also came the worse horror: being a "maid" in a ball. A lesbian nightmare.
The truck ride was OK. I could look out for cute little kids dressed in funny costumes...kids who looked happy. And I could also pick out the kids dressed in the imprisoning costumes of gender demands...that little girl with the lipstick and rouge and the long black fall, sitting in the ladder box with her little brother dressed like Superman. Or the two little girls standing side by side next to a big oak tree: one dressed like a princess with a frilly tutu, the other dressed like a tennis player (before Navratilova) with a tennis racket and a can of balls-big smile, but no shorts. Tennis skirt.
The next year, I got the measles and couldn't ride on the truck. Stayed home with the babysitter playing solitaire. Not too bad considering the ladies' costumes for the occasion: Queens of Hearts...big dresses, red heart hats, scepters. The men wore leggings, king's crowns, and neat tunics. Solitaire: a better choice.
But the most stressful memories are about that junior maid experience. We lived in Metairie back then and the suburbs were just beginning their own Mardi Gras celebrations...even their own parades for the first time. Zeus, Atlas, Jason. Now what was my mother thinking? A carnival ball for this daughter? Presenting me to my page? Oh no! And we even had to practice "walking" like a maid-in-waiting...slowly moving across the floor, head held high, eyes cast down in a shy way. After all, I was to be a maid-in-waiting. Waiting for what exactly? I knew. My knight in shining armor. Trouble was, I wanted to rescue, not be rescued.
I was the kid who used to ride the little girls to dance class on my bike. I didn't take dance lessons. I threw a fit. I was the kid who was captain of the neighborhood football team. I was not a cheerleader. I was the kid whose mother had to go to school to meet with the teacher. Not because I was a sweet little girl, but because I walked around the playground holding hands with the other little girls. My mom thought I was strange. My dad made me his son, teaching me how to work on cars, run the lawn mower, paint the house. Taught me how to hammer ("don't hammer like a girl!"). Bought me a boy's bike. Always put the football under my side of the Christmas tree...right next to the doll that my mom would include.
But back to the junior maid experience: there were 6 junior maids and 6 senior maids, plus a queen. We were made-up to the teeth. Thick pancake foundation, rouge, red lipstick. We carried a bouquet of flowers. Our dresses were knee length (we were only juniors, after all) but the necklines were scooped and the shoulders very low cut. The senior maids were in long dresses with short trains, deep cut v-necklines, spiked heels, bouffant hairstyles. Junior maids wore ringlets.
So the curtains opened and the junior maids were pushed out onto the floor of the Municipal Auditorium. Imagine a huge, cavernous floor without slot machines or Mardi Gras heads hanging from the ceiling: the Auditorium before gambling or hockey. (I wonder what spirits haunt that building now, ghosts of carnival kings and queens playing slot machines with doubloons left over from the Harrah's era, or their ghostly courts pitted against one another in a regal hockey game with doubloon pucks.)
The junior maids walked out to center floor, curtsied, and walked to the edge of the floor. Here's where we were supposed to move demurely, eyes cast down, face aglow. I was more interested in finding my dad. He was an usher. His job was to find the ladies for the "call outs"-the dances set aside by the dukes for their special partners. I saw him across the floor, kneeling down in front of the first row of chairs, smiling at me, pointing out an imaginary line that I was supposed to walk. (Probably praying that I would not embarrass my mom.) I was 12 or 13 and unpredictable.
I walked toward my father, eyes straight ahead, trying to move slowly, smiling back at him instead of acting shy. All the people in the background disappeared, my dress disappeared, the bouquet became a sword. In my mind, I was transformed into Joan of Arc, my hero. And I was there to restore the Dauphin to the throne of France. Thank God for Joan of Arc and one role model who was not "in-waiting."
I made it to my appointed position, but the curtsy became a bow with some sort of a sweep of the arm. My dad was applauding. I didn't dare seek out my mother's face. I knew better.
The rest of the presentation was easy. I watched the senior maids meet their dukes. I watched the captain come out onto the floor in his feathers and sequins, walking with a royal swagger. Next came the queen in a costume any of the drag performers on Rampart Street would have died for. Elegant, sparkling, colorful.
Then some much older man, the king, would enter the floor...and with a flourish he would claim his queen (20 years his junior, at least) and take her to his throne. All I could think was that I would soon be out in the field with my troops-Joan of Arc till the end, minus the burning at the stake part...although I really understood what it felt like to be burning with humiliation, desire, hopes and dreams for another role for me as a girl.
That particular evening ended with me dancing with my dad, having refused to dance with the page assigned to me. The photo session was not fun. I had to sit at the feet of the senior maids and the queen looking up into their faces in what I supposed was to be an expectant, hopeful expression...waiting for my turn to fill their shoes. When the photos came back, my eyes were closed and there was a triumphant look on my face. No doubt I was already off on some other adventure as Joan of Arc.
So these are some of my early Mardi Gras memories. Oh, there are more, too. Mardi Gras on Rampart Street, the drag contests, the French Quarter madness once I was old enough to be set free on Fat Tuesday. But it was a long road from St. Charles Avenue to Gay Mardi Gras.
This is but one lesbian's memory of carnival. I'm sure you all have your own. And I hope that this year's Mardi Gras will be filled with fun, frivolity, and laughter. And safety. It will be exciting to see what lesbians will be wearing this season. Sexy, humorous, bold, clever. There are so many more choices...choices, not gender-restrictive costumes.
I'm going to be a tiger...or Joan of Arc.
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