Everywhere Else It's Just Tuesday

I'm sitting at the computer with Kermit Ruffins pounding out of my tiny little speakers while WWOZ in New Orleans gives me my first Mardi Gras fix of the day.

In much of the rest of the country, people are voting in the big Super Tuesday primary, hoping to figure out which two people will contend this November for the priviledge and responsibility of leading our country (and the burden of extracting us from the mess that King George has gotten us mixed up with in Iraq) for the next four years.

In New Orleans it's a different kind of day.

Mando Kayo has already taken their "get in front of the parade and parade" philosophy down St. Charles and Pete Fountain's Half Fast Walking Club is heading down Bourbon Street. Zulu is starting out the day of parades that will go on until dark, and the Society of St. Anne is parading along Royal, just a block from the idiocy taking place on Bourbon.

Yesterday, on Lundi Gras , the Social Aid and Pleasure Club Task Force mounted the first parade of Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs to EVER parade during the Carnival season, and today, on Claiborne Avenue the Mardi Gras Indians are showing their colors.

My friend Mary just called and let me in on some of the music playin' on the street, and my friend Tom Morgan just came on WWOZ (with a pre-recorded version of his show because he's off at Mardi Gras). All of this both made me feel better... and it made me feel worse. Dr. John, singing Mama Rough, just used the line "second line fever today" and that would be a pretty good description of how I'm feeling right here at this very moment.

This year, firmly ensconced in my renewed connection to Petaluma, I really thought I was going to find myself disconnected from Mardi Gras in New Orleans. I tried, like last year, to catch some of the parades on NOLA.COM but software issues kept me at arm's length. From the beginning of Carnival, just after New Year and going until the day before Lent begins (and not just today, like so many people think), Mardi Gras is the time for celebration of the craziness in life; a yin/yang juxtaposition with Lent that plays out, like a great drama, the realities of the way life unfolds. For some ridiculous reason I thought I would be able to extract myself from the deeper (and lighter) meanings of the season, and for most of the last month I've done exactly that.

Well... not any more!

Right now... with my friend Al Johnson on the radio singing Carnival Time... I really DO know what it means to miss New Orleans.

HAPPY MARDI GRAS Y'ALL!