Everyone is talking about this today.
There’s been a great disturbance in The Force, you might say. Since the NOPD can’t muster enough officers to patrol Saturday’s Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus parade, the route of the sci-fi foot procession has been substantially pruned. A krewe official said they got word of the change on Thursday evening.
Instead of starting at St. Claude Avenue and Homer Plessy Way, the 1800-person procession, named after a "Star Wars" character and the Roman god of wine, will begin at Royal Street and Elysian Fields Avenue, then continue into the French Quarter, organizers said.
This comes after we had already learned KDV's route was forcibly shortened and that most of the Uptown parades would also be required to follow a truncated route. That includes, even, Thoth whose unique "Krewe of Shut-Ins" route is designed to pass by Childrens' Hospital and a number of institutijons for the old and infirm.
Obviously things are headed in an unsettling direction. Of course there's much more to say about this. But, since I haven't been terrific about finishing the long posts lately, here is a link back to something I wrote in early March 2020. This was during the brief period between the start of the pandemic shut downs and the end of what was itself an ominous Carnival season of tragedies and bad vibes. Before COVID interrupted everything, the city was getting started on a political dialog about the future of Carnival. A lot of things were at stake in that fight. But we never got to have it. And now it looks like the city's ruling class is imposing the worst possible version of what might have come out of that process.
Anyway, I tried to address a lot of my concerns at the time. So check that out. I'll try to build on it soon.
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