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Madame John Dodt's Legacy #21
by Jon Newlin, NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana

I am afraid I have gotten to be a cynic and perhaps even like to wallow, water-buffalo or hippopotamus style, in the mud of fatalism about Mardi Gras. That's the main reason I haven't written much about it here. I haven't told all those stories like that about Old Lady Dodt, who I hope is honored by the title of this "colyum" now and forever amen, as part of a jubilee of returning queens at the Petronius ball in her hoop-skirt falling over backwards and breaking her hip and unable to get up, and with no drawers on, as acres of spectators in their spectator pumps gasped and moaned at this incredible dilemma.

There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of Carnival stories waiting to be told but as much as I love or loved Carnival, it won't be me. Some years ago I wrote what I thought was a brilliant article in a now-defunct music magazine Wavelength called "The Case Against Carnival." This article, which appeared just as Bacchus and Endymion were really beginning to suffer from spiritual elephantiasis and artistic paralysis (not that they had too far to go) and which predated Dorothy Mae Taylor's ill-advised and ill-tempered bit of bullying called an "ordinance" and the driving of the old-line krewes from the streets and predated the unwelcome new "tradition" of sordid and tawdry tit-and-prick-exhibition in return for oversized beads (I'm hardly prudish about the sight of male pudenda as anyone who knows me well, if not Biblically, could attest in front of any notary public in the parish), and the transformation of Mardi Gras into an oversized version of Fort Lauderdale or Daytona during Spring Break, with far too many college students who ought to be hitting their books against their foreheads, hard puking and pissing and fighting and behaving badly anyway, this article suggested that Carnival had gotten out of hand and needed to be downsized, as they say in the cruel and chilly corporate world. My suggestion was that a committee made up of people like Harry McCall and the Usual Suspects should look into the holiday while Mardi Gras just suspended operation for five years or so, and everyone could rethink the whole season. It got rethought all right, if that's the verb, and it hasn't been much fun for me since.

I enjoy parties and costumes and dancing and feeling of young men to whom I've not been properly introduced, and I think the hope of Mardi Gras is smaller scale events like the Krewe de Vieux and the little marching outfits like Kosmic Debris and Nutria and the parade of Barkus though not the St. Ann parade which gets more unwieldy every year, and which has not been pleasurable for some Carnivals. I remember about thirty years ago when Henri Schindler and Paul Poche and their friends, of whom I am privileged to be one, all dressed up and went out on Carnival Day. Paul had seen a tomb in St. Louis #1 for a burial organization called the Societe de Ste. Anne, hence the name; also, when this began, more or less, he and Henri lived on St. Ann Street, La Rue de la Mere de la Mere de Dieu, as we used to call it. Gradually, the thing got too big, too many strangers, too many creeps, too much choreography and planning, until finally it got ossified and rigid and ceremonious in all the wrong ways.

Everything has gotten too big and too organized for my apparently anarchic tastes. Barkus this year was a catastrophe-all those miserable, forlorn wet poochies dragging themselves through that storm seemed anything but festive to me, and I could only bear to watch the first half of the parade. Dr. Brobson Lutz, wise man that he is, had the right idea: he was squiring two immense turtles in a Lafitte skiff on wheels, and the whole pageant might have worked better, considering the elements, had all the participants been amphibians. I realize that a thousand or so canines turned up at Good Friends, pressed on by their respective Mama Roses into the parade, and how many Bloody Marys with Milk-Bone garnitures could they be expected to crank out at GF before some Pomeranian or Papillon gets liquored up and decides he can lick, literally, any Rottweiler in the house. They're good at catching serial killers at Good Friends and certainly my Sally Victor bonnet comes off to them for that but a barroom brawl between a thousand hounds might have been more than even those crime-stoppers could handle. Maybe I would have turned 'em out into the rain, too.

I also remember those dear, dead days when Lundi Gras was so quiet and peaceful that you could fire a cannon through Lafitte's or the Caverns and not hit a soul at 11pm the night before Mardi Gras. Everyone was home at the Singer making a last adjustment or unleashing a case or two of Get Set on some confectionery hairpiece.

Which reminds me of my favorite Lundi Gras bon mot. Some decades ago, I was in Le Bistro of happy memory and it was fairly late and one of New Orleans' premiere rock-n-roll singers was in there, having knocked off for the night, and in came this young drag with falls pinned to cascades pinned to falls, a tower of ice-cream-blonde Elura that displaced a good fifteen cubic feet. He, the singer, turned to me, popped his eyes and said, "Mary! I didn't know we were in the Wig Castle!" (The Wig Castle, for those born within the last fortnight or else strenuously uninterested in cross-dressing tradition and history, was a low budget wig store with many branches throughout the city and ads on every Public Service bus in wonderful faux-Gothic lettering.)

So Carnival really isn't what it once was. I know my readers get aggravated and even fatigued with the endless mood of crepuscular threnody that fills these columns (crepuscular threnody, how's thatfor fancy dress?) but it is, I suppose, better than the alternative which is not having one. I couldn't even make it out this Mardi Gras, having had a terrible accident the night before with a Crown Royal bottle at the Corner Pocket. Other than a private party or two, at one of which my footwear refused to cooperate with the gypsy in my soul and the shine on my shoes and the melody in my heart, etc., and thus I missed dancing with and pawing any number of eligible young men who I assume to be at least well-bred enough to know that they should never strike their elders, particularly when said elder is wearing a hat loaded with half a dozen eight-inch-long lethal hatpins.

The most gratifying events to me this Mardi Gras were both occurrences in the mainstream press. The first was that wonderful story front page, m'dears! by Lynne Jensen, about large-size high heels, with Mlle. Wes Hughes and old lady Hoyle whooping it up in the side aisles of my friendly neighborhood Pay-Less Outlet.

Depressed at the demise of the much-lamented Lane's Shoe King on Dryades, aka Gunboat City, which is where I always found something fetching for the tootsies, I thought I'd take a tip from the Picayune, something I almost never do, and check out St. Claude and Elysian Fields on my way to Schwegmann's. I had to buy groceries anyway. Imagine my shock and dismay to find that Ladies' sizes ended at unlucky 13, and me a Fo'teen EEEEEEEEE. I skulked around for a bit, decided like the fox with the grapes that these shoes wouldn't have looked good anyway, and sailed off to check out the pork neckbones and seven steaks.

The other magnificent gesture from the T-P was its Sunday society page just before Mardi Gras which covered the Queenateenas King Cake Party. Now Rip and Marsha have been in the T-P almost as often as Angus Lind or Mark Lorando, and usually to better effect, so it was no surprise to see them rubbing figurative elbows on the page with Hizzoner the Mayor, telebrity chef Emeril Lagasse, Barkus baron Tom Wood, Secretary of the Navy John Dalton, perennially tanned George Hamilton, and T-P publisher Ashton Phelps his own self. But how about Sophie Tucker clone or lost twin sister Mother Bob! Girl! And with Old Lady Shannon lurking in the background (we all know she lurks so well, too) at least they didn't say O.L. Shannon was "heavily encrusted with Austrian stones" if you had led the life she's led, your face would look that way too. And, right up there with the Queen of Mystic and the writeup for the Original Illinois Club and the picture of the former Queens of Rex knocking back the sauce at Antoine's was my girl Smurfette looking just pretty as a picture y'know, one of those ones that's worth a thousand words, none of them printable. If they'd only sliced yours truly, looking like the ghost of Charles Laughton, out of it. Ah! Smurf in Society...I've always dreamed of it, something like those old movies where Joan Crawford or Jean Harlow is a floozy from the wrong side of the tracks, a waitress or dimestore-clerk or something like that, and she hooks the rich guy, and his hoity-toity parents and the snooty-bitchy debutante sister and the oh-so-proper butler and the snooty-bitchy former fiance and the country-club bridge-playing friends all just think she's dirt and then she does something just awful and scandalous, like farting in church or wearing a dress with no back or front and doing a cooch-dance at some society shindig, and so they disinherit the boy and he and Smurf have to go wandering around living in furnished rooms and he gets sick and Smurf has to become some gangster's plaything-good scene of Smurf in a slinky dressing gown lined with maribou feathers making some awful face when the big gorilla tries to kiss her to get money for the boy's operation, right, so he can play the violin and ride a horse again. Well, in the end, it all comes clean just like Smurf does, and the G-men blow the big gorilla gangster and his torpedoes away, and Smurf does something heroic, and the boy gets well, and the parents decide maybe this chippy isn't so bad after all, and they all end up happily ever after, Smurf and the old lady now the best of friends knitting on the front porch together surrounded by Irish setters and Sloe Gin Fizzes, the old daddy trading stock tips with Smurf, who's become an absolute Wolverine of Wall Street playing her hunches, and even the snooty-bitchy sister and fiance just idolize her and are always pestering her to borrow that midnight-blue strap-on for the evening. Why, Smurf even has 'em all doing the Shag and the Lindy Hop-even the butler!

So, see, it wasn't such a bad Mardi Gras after all. Always about poor-but-honest a little tart-tongued but without a mean bone in her platinum-blondine-headed body, after they meet cute sharing an umbrella or he spills his Tom Collins on her something.

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