Mardi Gras with the Pink Fringe People

For a town that is so close to New Orleans, Baton Rouge doesn’t get its freak on often enough.  This city is like the dorky cousin of a rock star.  I would say “nerdy,” but nerds got an upgrade during the past two generations.  They’ve moved up to “could be cool” status, having created high tech gadgets that make people like me feel omniscient. 

That’s how I felt last night after my many beers, a daiquiri, and a peach, a cherry, and a lime jello shot. I wasn’t the me of last year.  This year, I was fully awake at The Spanish Town Ball, and I was stalking a few select ones, snooping around their space for good vibrations. The first one turned out to be a man.  And then, while I was watching the feathers on one girl’s cowboy hat, I was about to approach the table when the woman I thought I was stalking passed me. The remainder of this story would be entirely different if she had stopped and said, “I’ve been looking for you.  Where have you been?” I would have said, “I’ve been standing here stalking you, over there at your table.” And then, I can’t imagine how I might have recovered.  So, it’s probably best that I didn’t slur non-sequitors at her but retreated to the ice chest for water.

The mascot for Spanish Town is a flamingo.  Throughout the city, during this time of year, there are plywood-bodied pink cranes in front of formerly respectable homes, at the front door of national chain stores, and in the big lake—standing erect and with one leg up—near LSU.  But, each year the Spanish Town Krewe shakes it up with a special theme.  This year it was “Some Twinkie ate my Ding Dong.”  A number of the [straight] men were dressed up like Twinkies and Ding Dongs but most everyone bobbed in a sea of pink jackets with black bolo hats and/or homemade flamingo costumes that were up and down and all around the 300 tables that held liquor bottles, King Cakes and food from many parishes. 

Most of the other Mardi Gras gatherings are formal. Their members are a bit more serious and have a significant history that matters only to them and theirs.  But, this Krewe invites the fringe people.  And, that’s why it found me.  You don’t need a rich Cajun or Creole heritage.  With this group, you probably don’t want to talk much about that if you want to get loose and get your cray cray on.

The festivities unfold at noon. Some poor appointed person from your group wheels a limousine ice chest into the convention center and finds your table.  At 7, the doors open and everyone carries in a Styrofoam container of an almost empty drive-thru daiquiri that kept each line-dweller from being parched before she could find that icy cold beer.  For the next five hours, everyone at the table does their part to make the chest as light as possible before your drunk butt has to drag it a mile away which is hopefully near wherever you parked.  By then, you should be able to reach into your cooler and grab the last icy bottle of water and wait until you can locate your keys and then think about sleeping in the trunk.  

Hours before that decision, I was standing outside with the smokers and watching MacTiger who was talking to an older gentleman. He was wearing a white tuxedo and had pink accoutrements, including the hairs in his bushy mustache. He was explaining that his friends lost their ($40) tickets to the ball, and how he had to give up his for one of the other guys.  Next, he pulled out a lanyard with a VIP card in it, saying it was his ticket in.  I thought it was a fake badge that he printed at home, but MacTiger later informed me that the man was one of the founding members of this insane tradition.  While the older eccentric didn’t appear to be gay—I haven’t met anyone associated with this Krewe who is actually gay—it’s clear that the fringe people, going it alone, wouldn’t make this ball what it is without the queers. There’s something freeing about being allowed to [get ridiculously intoxicated and] embrace the “other” side.

Whether you’ve ever participated in a Mardi Gras along this southern coastline or not, you probably know that it’s all about over-indulging.  Many vices are exercised to support hedonism and carpe diem! before that Wednesday when everyone must give up a single vice of their choosing for lent.  And, many were there to participate in this religious tradition. Thinking about the mob of Twinkies, Ding Dongs, and space alien prostitutes, I brushed into and bumped against every walk of life.  Most had selected a costume that in some way represented their ulterior personality. Remembering this bit from last year, I chose to represent the Trickster.

We all have a shadow side.  It’s who we don’t wish to be but are.  Before we are born, we sit on God’s lap and talk about what we need to get done while we’re on earth.  And before we depart from the pre-life warehouse, each body is embodied with great assets.  But while in the assembly line, we get saddled with oddities that won’t fit back on the shelf and can’t be returned.  These are thrown in—freebies that lighten heaven’s inventory and make a life more interesting.  This method is based on a hope that the sane [conservative] collective will teach the trickster tendencies how to cope.  

The shadow harbors fragmented parts that don’t fit with the socially acceptable ones.  However it isn’t really a “who” because it isn’t complete.  And, the trickster lives there, in the dark recesses, with all of the other rogue pieces of your psyche.  In my thesis—on Jungian archetypes—I wrote, “Tricksters are lost between primal ignorance and human ethics.”  [I was much smarter before I lived in a cubicle. Today, I can only guess at what I meant by this numinous statement].  I think that tricksters have diminishing power and jab out from the darkness, stealing opportunities to manifest.  They get to do this by cohabitating with the socially acceptable traits who actually have ethics, and they get to do it with primal reflexes for the purpose of [positive] change through chaos. 

The most interesting part about a trickster—according to Jung—is that a person is manipulated by a trickster who is the same sex.  That’s right.  If you’re a husband, your wife can’t be your trickster.  You might have other names for her, but it can’t be trickster.  Your impish qualities are seduced from your shadow by someone who has the same gender energy.  That makes things tricky (no pun intended) for same-sex couples.  Can my lover draw out the worst in me?

I think I just heard a unanimous roar from each of the Lesbians Linking Lands lands.

Last night was the night to let my trickster step into the spotlight. After a few pounds of mudbugs, I took it out on the town. And there we gathered—all of us familiar strangers—for an insane evening of viewing exaggerated foam penises on the outside of clothes and real cleavage that is usually suffocated by business attire. We were wearing our various and colorful trickster personalities on the outside so that 2,000+ others could size it up and dance with it.  I loved the insanity.  I needed to release too much pent energy that was feeding my trickster with much impetus that wanted to destroy the last few things that were working well in my current situation.  It was planning change through chaos. All of this negative energy was feeding the trickster who might get me out of here.  But then, where?

Today, I’m clearer about what I need to do to sell this house, stay focused and work toward a new life.  I can’t tell you why being decadent for four hours will make me more responsible for one, two, or four more months. (But, that’s a pretty good payoff.) Maybe I spent much of the time being grateful to be with my people—the fringe people.  Whatever the answer, I’m not one to question a religious tradition that throws such a great party that all of the dorky cousins fit in at the rock star religious bash.

If you’re in the neighborhood, The Spanish Town Parade is only two weeks away.  I hear that you have to show your I.D. to attend, “)!