Chris Bickford

The goings-on of Carnival season can often present one with difficult choices.  There is simply too much happening, all at the same time, to do it all.  And, as my friend Richard Hofler (whom I will profile in an upcoming post) said to me on numerous occasions, “Carnival is a marathon, not a sprint.”   You need to conserve your energy, guard your down-time, and make sure that you are not so worn out by the end of it that you can’t even make it out of bed on Mardi Gras.

And then, of course, there are the dueling factions of preparation and spontaneity that vie for the heart of the Reveler.   At its heart, Carnival is all about being in the moment, about losing oneself to the spirit of the street dance, about following the second-line wherever it may lead, and hoping that something magical happens to you along the way.  And yet, all those balls, all those parades, all those costumes–they require months, sometimes years, of preparation, and are built up through decades of tradition passed on through the ebb and flow of Carnival history, which in New Orleans is as old as the day of the first French settlement in Louisiana.  You can’t go through all that preparation and then just change your plans last minute, right?

Well, it depends…

I have spent much of the last few months reading, researching, emailing, poring over schedules, talking to contacts on the phone, following this lead and that lead, many of which have led to dead-ends–this ball will not allow photography; this ball, which we were supposed to get tickets for, is now sold out; this parade is canceled due to weather…Federica and I put together calendars and schedules, trying to make sure we had plans in place to maximize our time and get as broad a visual of New Orleans’ Carnival season as possible.   Because as a professional, that’s what you do.  You make a plan.  But your plan, your meticulously thought-out schedule, is not really plan A.  It’s plan B.  It’s what you do if nothing really special happens, because you have to make sure you come home with SOME kind of pictures.  Plan A is hoping to God that something better than Plan B happens that you hadn’t really expected or accounted for, that will cause you to throw all your plans out the window.  Plan A is hoping you just happen to be on the right street corner, on your way to somewhere else, when out of nowhere you hear music and a dancing troupe of second-liners in crazy costumes rounds the corner and sweeps you up in its creative frenzy.

And so it came to pass on Lundi Gras, as Federica and I convened in front of Jackson Square to check out the arrivals of Rex and King Zulu and the fireworks over the water (our plan B, as it were), that the unmistakeable rhythm of the Tremé Brass Band struck my ears, and suddenly there appeared, like an apparition,  a dancing, ghostly krewe of young revelers, all of them decked out in costumes made out of beans.  Not beads, that’s right; beans.  Red beans, white beans, black beans…

There was no time to think about it.  I left the bikes with Fede and fell in to the second-line, following it as it rounded Jackson Square and made its way back towards the Marigny.  Along the way I made photo-friends with the more outrageous krewe members as they hammed it up and hopped up on mailboxes and swung from telephone poles.   The Tremé boys kept the jazz flowing as we headed down Chartres Street, stopping briefly at the crazy house depicted in these photos with the giant ten-foot papier-maché mask in front of it.  Here, Devin Meyers, the king of the krewe–The Red Beans and Rice Krewe–made a welcome speech to his compatriots, wishing them all a happy and joyous Lundi Gras, and without further ado, led the krewe further down the street, into the Marigny, and up Frenchmen Street, where the whole krewe stopped traffic for two hours and danced in the street.   It was Plan A, all the way, and I was loving every second of it.

The backstory of Red Beans and Rice, as Devin told me over a beer he’d poured me from the port-a-keg, was that a couple of years ago, he had shown up at a Halloween party with a costume decorated entirely with beans.  People went crazy for his costume, so he decided to form a little krewe based on the theme; and, since Monday is the traditional day for red beans and rice, it was only natural to hold their parade on Lundi Gras.

And so began a new Carnival tradition, one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, that have come and gone throughout the history of Carnival in New Orleans.  The beauty of the Mardi Gras tradition is that anyone and everyone can be part of a krewe, or start their own.  There’s no barriers to entry, at least to these smaller krewes.  You don’t have to be Comus, or Rex, or a member of one of the First Families of New Orleans, to belong to Carnival.  We all belong to Carnival.  It’s in our DNA.  As one of the Red Beans Krewe responded when someone asked how they could join, “Just follow the music…”

And stitching some beans to your jacket might help as well.

I’ve fallen behind in my posts, as you may have noticed.  Family matters have taken precedence over the last few days, and I have many posts to catch up on.  Over the next week or so I hope to get caught up.  I’ll be posting in no specific chronological order, which I think is only appropriate, since after being in New Orleans for a while the whole concept of linear time starts to erode a little.  I think it was Andrei Codrescu who said something to the effect that New Orleans has preserved a piece of every decade since the 18th century, and you are constantly walking through time warps as you make your way around the city.  Here it’s still the seventies, or the sixties, or the twenties, or the 1850’s, depending on where you are, what’s being celebrated, and what frame of mind you’re in…

Enjoy the Beans…and those of you in the krewe, send me an email, I’d love to hear from you.