Fat Tuesday

It's here! Yay! Yes, Mardi Gras day would certainly be more fun if I didn't sleep through the last and best parades. Alas, I will end my time in New Orleans without one Zulu coconut. But tonight is my favorite part of Mardi Gras: the after party.

Happily, my exile into Daquiriland is over. I was supposed to work today again but it turns out I was double-booked and instead I'm working a private party on a Bourbon St. balcony tonight. This party gets over at midnight, which is perfect. The best party of the year starts Tuesday at midnight, the official end of Mardi Gras. The wall of horses, followed by the wall of water, washes any tourists off Bourbon St. and all the bars have to close their doors (or get really, really wet). Any decent place closes at midnight and lets its overworked employees off the hook (although more and more places are re-opening around one, a trend which I find greatly disturbing). This is cause for jubilation for the myriad bartenders, waiters, bouncers and others who are subjected to great quantities of massively drunken tourists, greedy managers, long and grueling days, and transportation difficulties that occur when streetcars shut down, cabs are unavailable and parking costs $50.00 a day (and is nearly impossible to reach by car). Plus, it's really fun to watch tourists get run or washed off the street. Quite magical, really.

And then the party is on. All the locals bars on sides streets in the Quarter fill up with elated and bedgraggled workers. Many of the bars don't even allow tourists inside, which is a big draw for servers who would rather bathe in a putrid Bourbon Street "mud" puddle than have to look at another obnoxious bead-wielding tourist again. This is the night when everyone lets down his or her hair and gets crazy. The combination of relief, sleep deprivation and a shared sense of having lived through a major crisis (all of Mardi Gras is a crisis) cause strange behavior in normally sane (well, sane-ish) people. I hazily remember one Mardi Gras morning dancing on a bar with my boss who I normally hated. The memory is burned in my mind because of the huge shiner I got on my eye from the blades of the ceiling fan which hung over the bar. (You should have seen the nasty looks my husband got for a week afterwards. And the shiner looked really cute with my strapless gown I wore to our fancy celebration dinner the next night. But I digress). To sum up, I am very glad to have worked this Mardi Gras. And I am very glad it's nearly over. And I am most glad because I am going to my favorite party of the year tonight: the celebration of the end of the tourist invasion. Happy Mardi Gras.