Day 7

Jan 6
10:30 pm

When we walk up, the two-story bikes are stacked up against each other on a lamppost, and Gal Holiday’s raspy voice is hurtling old-school country music out of the upstairs windows and all the way down Franklin Avenue. It’s Twelfth Night, the official beginning of Carnival season, and we’ve been wandering through the Marigny eating King cake, drinking whisky, and battening ourselves down against the ridiculous cold.

Our original intention for the evening was to put on shiny sparkly outfits and run around the neighborhood with bells and harmonicas and whistles and noisemakers, making our own parade. But it’s cold and we’re tired, so instead here we are in hats and scarves, in scrubbly sweaters and woolly mittens. (Except Aneeta, who dazzles us all in a Joan Jetson dress and swirling purple headband.) This Mardi Gras does not begin with a bang; it seeps into our lives and we huddle around it like warm wrinkly relatives. Which is all right. Sometimes you need to start off slow.

Mardi Gras is the closest most New Orleanians ever get to running a marathon, and we all have heaps of advice on how to do it right. The common refrain is, usually, “Pace yourself, baby,” and this applies to everything: costumes, dancing, eating, drinking, staying awake all night, handling multiple lovers. Ultimately Mardi Gras is about doing whatever you want, in excessive amounts, for weeks on end, while not getting completely destroyed in the process. And so if tonight our Carnival starts off cozy, we are most likely all the better for it. The future is wide. There will be time, oh, yes, for sparkles.

When we walk upstairs the only sign of life, except the band and a few solo boys on barstools, is a table of women in impossible makeup and sultry dresses. They are looking around the room with radar eyes, as though at any moment a celebrity, or an evil ex-lover, will pop in. For a moment we stop in the doorway and they all perk up, at attention, but then it’s just us, and once we settle in behind them they sigh, disappointed, and return to their distracted conversation, necks long and searching, like egrets.

“I could dance to this music,” Elizabeth says, and she is right because she can dance to any music: there have been multiple nights where Elizabeth and I have walked into subdued rooms just like this one and she begins dancing, and then I begin dancing, and when it’s finally time to leave we can barely make it out of the crowd, wending our way through all the twisting writhing limbs of all those people who were just waiting, waiting for someone to start something.

And so she takes our little friend Noah out onto the dancefloor, and it’s kind of adorable to watch because Noah, who gets carded everywhere he goes, and who has been consuming Jordan Almonds and Coke all night but also telling us graceful and intelligent stories about art, can actually dance, and well. And soon others are dancing, and soon a troupe of pirates and robots and Renaissance courtesans rolls in, and then the pirates are dancing with the courtesans and everyone starts telling everyone they are beautiful, in they way you do when anyone can be anyone, and the music starts sounding just a little more raucous, and then the people move their bodies just a little closer to the other people’s bodies, and it’s starting, Mardi Gras is starting, you can feel it, seeping in around us like a mist, like a web, like gravity, like it’s only a matter of time and eventuality before we all get entangled in something that’s bigger, and more magic, than we are.