Top 10 Things to Know About Mardi Gras

The Top 10 Things You Need to Know About Mardi Gras(From Someone Who Isn't From Around Here)*

*Who, by the way, consulted absolutely no one before she made this list and who, incidentally, is completely uninterested in any arguments or corrections. So, there's that.

Disclaimer: I've been here for two Carnival seasons and I'm not really an expert but that isn't stopping me from telling you all about it. Most of y'all aren't from NOLA either, so you don't know any better and I'll gladly impart my knowledge upon you!!

First of all, YES that is Daryl from the Walking Dead on a Mardi Gras float. Zombies, I hope you enjoyed your hey day, because Daryl was too busy tossing beads to kill you. Which brings me to item #10 on my list of things to know:

#10. Celebrities Freaking Love Mardi Gras

It's true. Mardi Gras is as star-studded an event as any awards show. Celebs are always parading as grand marshals or krewe royalty or what have you. This year they include:

• Norman Reedus ("The Walking Dead")
• Ian Somerhalder ("Vampire Diaries")
• Carrie Underwood
• Hugh Laurie ("House")
• Will Smith
• Quentin Tarantino

Whatever. You get it. It's a big deal.

#9. King Cake: It's What's for Dinner

There's no escaping King Cake during Mardi Gras. It's the only time the treat is (*or SHOULD BE) available, so it's literally everywhere. Every office at work, in every store, handed out by strangers in the street. You can try to fight it, but why? IT'S SO GOOD!

If you are what you eat, then for two months of the year I'm purple, green, and gold sugar with a little pastry and cinnamon on the side.

#8. Context Is Everything

For those of you outside of New Orleans this time of year, you probably hand over plastic beads to little kids playing dress up and think of cheap stuffed animals as bad carnival prizes. Don't fret-- we feel that way, too. UNLESS, of course, that cheap trinket is thrown from a float. Suddenly it becomes precious as gold. Context, I tell you, is EVERYTHING.

And the bigger the trinket? Cheap though it may be, there will be BLOOD. Seriously, I almost fought an old man for a medallion. A plastic necklace with a plastic disc attached. And if it lights up? Oh, buddy. I NEED IT. 

#7. It's Good to Be Adorable

Seriously, you want to know who gets all the good stuff? Kids. And, less common but just and popular, nuns and adorable old ladies. As an average parade goer, your only option is to seek out these adorable folks and try to poach their throws. 

What? Don't judge me. I have no shame. The old folks have had their day and kids gotta learn sometime that life is hard.

There is, however, one less seedy option for getting the goods...

#6. Witty People Will Out

The only hope for the average Joe to get some goodies is to sport a witty or outrageous costume or make a witty sign. I want to be clear, I didn't make it to Muses this year (*work) so illustrating cartoon LeeAnne in this bit is just a pipe dream because I am so epically jealous of the woman who made this sign and got not one, not two, but SIX shoes. 

It gets boring up there (or so I'm told-- I've only ridden in a dinky Mardi Gras parade around campus, so I have no idea) so anything that catches a rider's eye, challenges them, or makes them laugh is win-win for all.

#5. Nothing Is Weird Here

I also considered naming #5 "Read carefully" because yes, you read right. If you read this warning in the Midwest, you'd probably be quite alarmed. Not here. It's everyday language.

I've said before that anything goes in NOLA. That goes double for Mardi Gras. 

#4. Plan Ahead

You best plan ahead, y'all, because you ain't getting anything done on Mardi Gras day. Grocery shopping? Nope. Run some errands? No way. Grab a bite to eat? Forget it! The entire city of New Orleans shuts down for Mardi Gras. It's a holiday at work-- the university is closed. But not anywhere else. Because everywhere else, it's Tuesday.

I take that back. Last year, we drove around for an hour or so until we found a little Thai joint that was open. That might not seem like much time, but considering how many restaurants there are per capita around here, that's plenty. Let's just say we passed a lot of "CLOSED" signs and our tummies rumbled for a long time.

#3. Mardi Gras Knows How to Jam

When you turn on the radio each winter, you know it's officially the holiday season by the time the sax solo chimes in to "Last Christmas." Christmas has a soundtrack hundreds of songs deep-- but I'm telling you: the holiday soundtrack doesn't end after that! Mardi Gras has a prolific list of songs itself. 

It's not Carnival without "Mardi Gras Mambo" or Professor Longhair's "Go to the Mardi Gras"-- these songs instill more holiday cheer than any Christmas carol.

Want to listen along? Here's a great Mardi Gras playlist on Spotify: New Orleans / Louisiana (Mardi Gras) music

#2. Master the Vocabulary

Sometimes I'm pretty sure that people here in New Orleans make up words just to see who will go along with it. That educated guess aside, there are a lot of words associated with Mardi Gras that I never used before moving here. Here's an extremely abbreviated list for you foreigners:

• carnival (or carnivale) - the official term for Mardi Gras season, from Twelfth Night (the twelfth day of Christmas matters here) through Mardi Gras day
• doubloons - coins some krewes give away; there's much debate as to their worth, but I like them until I inevitably lose them
• krewe - a group of folks who put on Carnival parades or balls (See also: Micro-krewe and Super Krewe)
• ladders - not just for home improvement jobs, special ladders with seats and wheels are set up for the little ones to sit on for a good viewing/catching spot
• Mardi Gras - officially, "Fat Tuesday" (the day before Ash Wednesday and Lent), but unofficially the name for the entire season
• micro-krewe - a "krewe" that puts on a smaller parade whose floats are often shopping carts, bikes, or small trailers. Chewbacchus is my favorite--it's sci-fi themed and goes right past my old place!
• riders - those nice masked folks who throw goodies at you
• super-krewe - a big ol' krewe with thousands of riders and double decker floats. Endymion is my favorite because their Pontchartrain Beach float is a gigantic, sparkly, fiber-optic paradise.
• throw - the goodies you get from Mardi Gras parades
• "Throw me something, mister!" - the Mardi Gras creed; may the throws be ever in your favor

#1. Do Whatcha Wanna!

Rebirth says it best: DO WHATCHA WANNA! Mardi Gras is all about having a great time! People are nicer during Mardi Gras than any other time of year. You look parched? Have a beer. You haven't caught anything? Have these glorious beads. You lost your phone? Why, here you are!

I digress to tell you my very own Mardi Gras miracle: On the way back from a parade route, a friend and I came across a track. OBVIOUSLY we had to race back to the car... and apparently fling my phone out of purse along the way. We discovered it was missing when we got back to the car and headed back to search. We called once and a gentleman had it and was waiting for someone to come looking for it.

That's right folks. He didn't steal it, break it, or ignore it. He figured someone would come back for it. 

Mardi Gras blessings upon that man-- may his car never be towed, may his beers always be cold, and may his kids catch the best throws from every parade.

Enough talk: It's Lundi Gras, y'all! HAPPY MARDI GRAS!!

Why Life in New Orleans is Like a Sitcom

I've always wanted my life to be like a sitcom. I can already hear some of you decrying sitcoms as the lowest form of televised entertainment, and I say to you: Shut up, hipster. Sitcoms are delightful little 22 minute packages of laughter, wrapped up nicely each week to make you feel better for watching it. Sometimes there are even moral lessons sprinkled in, but not always. Not everything has to be life changing, you know.

I've been saying for a while now that I think that the writers for "Happy Endings" actually just follow me around and then write up Penny's plot line for the week. (If you don't watch the show, I suggest you do. But maybe give it a few goes round-- just like life, not every episode is a-mah-zing, but in general: I love it.) Penny's hijinks have my friends (and myself) saying "Gee, this sounds an awful lot like LeeAnne," which has always brought me some joy that my life is at least a LITTLE bit like a sitcom, and I'm the comic relief.

But then I moved to New Orleans. 

In the few months I've been here, my life has become more and more like a sitcom with each passing day. Of course, I'm about to tell you why:

We're all familiar with the scenario: the main character has a conversation that the writers don't know how to wrap up, then thankfully the neighbor barges in and the laugh track starts rolling. Just watch an episode of "Seinfeld." Jerry is inevitably ranting about something and just when you're wondering how much longer he can go on, cue Kramer sliding in the door with some ridiculous comment or plan for them to carry out. Or in "Will & Grace." The banter gets less and less witty and then BOOM! Jack is running through the door!

In my life, I have my roommate/landlord: Bill. He is wonderful, but positively cuckoo bananas. In the otherwise stressful storyline of LeeAnne's first hurricane, Bill pops in and has me help him "purify and protect" the house. I can walk around burning sage and repeating mumbo jumbo with the best of them, so I did it. And it made me feel better, just realizing that ridiculousness was happening. Or I'm cooking dinner (not a particularly thrilling chore), when he pops in to explain to me that the feral cats in our backyard are more human than we are and that we can learn so much from them. Maybe he's got the onset of dementia, but it brings me a lot of joy.

In the sitcom formula, the show always centers on a group of friends, usually a trio, because then there's always the awkward sexual tension of two of the friends liking one another and the other being left out. Oooh, drama!

Well, I don't really have that. I serve as third wheel to my friend Nicole and her fiance, Michael, so it's not really a mystery to me as to which two in this trio has feelings for each other, but the similarity still stands. We are a group of friends who have adventures together. (Adventures you'll read about if you keep reading.)

What about sitcoms with larger casts, like "Friends" or "Happy Endings" or "How I Met Your Mother?" I can fill out those casts, too. Between our co-workers and the awkwardness that ensues, we're an entertaining bunch at any number.

Speaking of co-workers... They are often a source of hilarity in sitcoms. Obviously "The Office" (original British or spin-off American version) is the best example of this: work places are rife with situations you don't encounter in other parts of your life and also full of awkward people forced into interacting with one another.

I work in a campus activities office, so the number of bizarre work experiences I have are especially abundant. You've heard me talk about that before, so I won't go on (rather, you should read my other posts). But I will say this: Any job that involves working with magicians and inflatable fly guys as much as mine does = sitcom comedy gold.

Any sitcom worth its salt is chock full of shenanigans. Fortunately, so is my life. Going hipster isn't so much a storyline as an ongoing joke (I live around a bunch of hippies and I use Instagram), but that's still common to sitcoms.

I won't tell the whole story to the following shenanigans as that's the job for future posts, but here is a list of for-true adventures I've had since I moved here in August:

• I got free front row tickets to a Brad Paisley concert just because I was sitting and eating and looking generally friendly. (We didn't go because we decided to buy tulle instead, but that's another story.)
• We dressed up as giant loofahs and went out on the town. People loved us, and we're floating around in Facebook albums by people we don't know and probably won't see again. Also, a woman's necklace got stuck in my loofah and she took it off and decided just to leave it there. FREEBIES! (We gave it back.)
• We crashed a party at Muriel's celebrating the best restaurants in New Orleans-- which, if you know anything about New Orleans, means these were hoity toity people we were hob nobbing with. We gorged ourselves on pate and lox and top shelf liquor, all the while fawning over John Besh and some lady who was in Treme and acting like we belonged. 
• I pretended to be engaged to a friend of ours (who happens to be gay-- Penny and Max from "Happy Endings," anyone?) so that we could crash a rehearsal dinner tasting. It was delish.

All of this happened as the aforementioned comedic trio, of course.

You'll notice if you've ever watched a sitcom that they usually wrap up with all of the characters getting together in their usual spot to discuss the happenings of the episode and end the episode laughing so that we on the outside know that they're ALWAYS having fun, not just for 30 minutes a week. There are a million examples of this: "Friends" had the Central Perk, "Seinfeld" had the diner, "Cheers" had, well, Cheers, and "Saved by the Bell" had The Max.

I have happy hour. The location changes each week, but it serves the same purpose: my friends and I get together at the end of the week to discuss our happenings and leave laughing so we know we're fun people.

Sitcoms always have cameos, too! Watch "Glee" on any given week and you'll think to yourself, "Oh, [some actor/actress far too talented for network television] is on this week! Who knew s/he could sing?!"

Well, living in New Orleans, I also have cameos of famous actors. Personally, I've run into Justin Long and Noah Wyle. My friend Nicole saw Morgan Freeman at a restaurant once, and it's a well known fact that Leo DiCaprio jogs in Audubon Park at 5am on the daily.

I also have people who serve the cameos' role in my life; my friend Nicole says no one else does this, but I often have people I call "friend-for-a-day." I hang out with them for a day or so and then I never talk to them again. I met a girl on the bus who got me into a Trombone Shorty concert for free and we had a grand ol' time. I have no idea what her name is. After Isaac, when I was hot as all get out and escaped to the Quarter during the day, I hung out with the same people at an artists' co-op everyday, shooting the shit and painting and complaining about the heat. I haven't seen them since. It happens. They're my cameos!

But mostly when I think of cameos, I think of the sitcom king who I want dearly to cameo in the sitcom of my life: 

I love this man. And it's a cameo that could potentially happen as he lives here in New Orleans. Then my sitcom would be PERFECT. 

I might as well just plan on that happening and pitch my story to some network execs ASAP. I even have my promo worked out. Show's logo is a unique font so it's immediately recognizable. Main character highlighted front and center. Cheesy smile and awkward pose so people know it's a comedy. Generic photo of the show's locale to attract mainstream viewers. Primetime time slot so people know there's some adult content.

I'll update this with a network logo as soon as someone picks it up. I feel pretty good about this.