Friday Parades

• The rain let up just long enough for everything to pass. Perfect Carnival atmosphere. Warm but not too warm. Not too crowded but not empty. Sound of drum cadence, smell of exhaust fumes, taste of light beer. Nothing better.



• Oshun has a lot of rinky dink little floats and they hardly throw anything but they also have lots and lots of marching bands. Not a bad way to start. But someone needs to explain to me why the King and Queen floats come 9th and 10th in the procession.



• Pygmalion is a bit bigger floatwise... but not by much. The maids had elaborate headdresses depicting classic New Orleans schlock. I especially liked the K&B and Pontchartrain Beach maids. The floats were also themed with New Orleansy things. It's pretty typical of the early parades to have light and easy themes. This goes just fine with the bare-bones floats and bands format. We need to build up to the crazy stuff, ya know.



• One of the first things I caught was a "pair" of what Daisy likes to call "gay beads" (rainbow colored strand). This is keeping with tradition. I was pleased to get them.



• NOPD looks a lot better in the powder blue. No more SS on the parade route.



• Another great thing about the early parades is that the crowd is mostly just people from the neighborhood. The man standing next to us was there to see his son march in the Cohen High band. The kid's 4 year old daughter was also there to watch her daddy in the band. An old lady in the crowd was probably the best dancer on our block. It helped that she was double-fisting a beer and a bottle of... something harder.



• r was a bit late arriving and, since she had the Pink Thing, we weren't able to load it in time to get it into action. Instead we just kept the cold beers in a plastic bag and tried to down them as soon as fast as we could.



• No photos tonight. I was too chickenshit to bring the camera out where I thought it might get wet.

Great first night. Mardi Gras is a marathon, not a sprint.. but with the opening leg underway, I feel 100% better than I did this morning.