Virus-muffled Mardi Gras hits New Orleans
NEW ORLEANS — Parades canceled. Bars closed. Crowds suppressed. Mardi Gras joy is muted this year in New Orleans as authorities seek to stifle the coronavirus’s spread. And it’s a blow to the tradition-bound city’s party-loving soul.
“This year, it’ll be heartbreak,” said Virginia Saussy, a member of the Muses parade “krewe” whose home, like many along a major parade route, usually overflows with people this time of year. “I think that people have to realize how unusual it is to have this pause in our culture.”
Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, is the annual pre-Lenten bash celebrated along much of the Gulf Coast — with the biggest celebration in heavily Catholic New Orleans. Last year’s revelry is now believed to have contributed to an early surge that made Louisiana a Southern COVID-19 hot spot.
This year, bars are being forced to close during the final weekend of the season, which began Friday. Parades that generally start 12 days before the big day have been stilled. Mayor LaToya Cantrell is promising a crackdown on large crowds.
For Saussy, it means no kid-before-Christmas anticipation of her annual ride in the Muses parade, where she and other members of the all-female krewe toss repurposed high heels — decorated with paint and glitter to become prized parade souvenirs — to the throngs lining the parade route.
For Elvin King III, a trumpet player with the Warren Easton Charter High School Band, it means missing his favorite part of the parades: marching under a freeway overpass and hearing the music thunder off the concrete walls.
“I think everybody looks forward to the last year of marching because I wanted to go with a bang.” Then he adds in a quiet voice: “But, things happen.”
That mix of disappointment and resignation is everywhere.
“It won’t be the same. We’re in a different world,” says Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes, a local musician who, most years, dons skeleton garb and leads similarly clad marchers on an early Mardi Gras morning march through the Treme neighborhood.
“I grew up as a kid, chasing all the parades,” says James Reiss, a bank executive and official of the Rex Organization, the 150-year-old club known for elaborate Carnival season balls and its annual selection of a prominent New Orleans man to serve as Rex, King of Carnival. Nobody is being tapped for the role this year and the Rex parade is canceled.
“We’re not mad about it. It just is what it is. The mayor’s doing what she has to do to keep the citizens safe,” Reiss said. “Mardi Gras in its entirety is satirical. We’re not really kings and queens. We’re doing this in the spirit of satire and celebration. None of it is worth putting people’s lives in danger.”