After Mardi Gras

On Saturday, Kechi and I headed back to New Orleans to catch LSD Clownsystem at the Joy Theater. This was our first true Carnival event this season even though it’s not a parade or a ball. We checked out the dog parade in Baton Rouge last weekend along with our friend Cynthia, and while we had a decent time, it’s just not the same in Baton Rouge. So Kechi crafted us costumes—this is the same woman, who confessed to me, soon after we got together that she was “no good at costuming.”

I haven’t worn clown makeup since I was about nine or ten years old at this abbreviated church camp event somewhere in Maryland. I’ve never really been into white-face clowning at all, though I do feel that K&K Mimes is just about the most entertaining things I have ever experienced—definitely for the wrong reasons. One thing I truly miss about the Church was seeing performances by K&K Mime, Mike Warnke, and the Power Team, then growing up and viewing them through an adult sensibility.

At any rate, Clown System puts on a fantastic show, and the crowd was into it. Most everyone there was in clown regalia, and no two clowns were alike—which honestly surprised me a little. I thought at least a few couples would do the twin thing. Kechi improvised our looks from materials we already had—like one does, here in New Orleans—but I’ve already bought more makeup to give the clown thing another shot once before Mardi Gras itself.

For the first time, I’m genuinely beginning to feel the pull of nostalgia. In the past, the closest I came to it was thinking about my days in Tunis, back in high school. That was an era of enormous privilege and joy, in a lot of ways, but it was also a difficult time for me, emotionally and personally. In reviewing my memories of that era, I was always aware that life was not all good back then, and that the Tunis of my mind and memory never truly existed. Now, as darkness masses so thickly, I look back on previous phases of my life over the past, oh, let’s say twenty, years, and my first thought is, well, there was a lot wrong with that time, but it was, at least, better than this.

But I remind myself: I have always been and am still one of the lucky ones. I have less insulation and resources than many, but more of those things than most. I also have something of a plan for the next few years, though I am very aware that having a plan does not equal certainty or stability.

One thing I dearly miss is the freedom to let things ride until Carnival is over. To know that nothing truly burdensome has to get done before Ash Wednesday. I thought Kechi and I would be moving back to New Orleans sooner than later, but now I know we’re not—more on that later. Still can’t get into it—and that understanding fills me with a sense of loss that mingles uncomfortably with the sense of optimism and of the fight ahead.

Part of the Black experience in this country is the understanding that Americans are willing to endure a great deal of pain as long as they feel secure in the knowledge that other groups are hurting worse than they are. It still appears to me that the state of the government is accelerating matters so quickly and so fully that this knowledge that, “at least those people have it worse” is no longer sustainable—but, hey, I’ve been wrong about these things before, and I’m sure I will be again. Hope remains intact, at least.

I was originally going to end this entry here, but I remembered the other significant thing about this weekend! So, Kechi and I showed up and showed out with our friends at LSD Clownsystem even though I seem to have injured my foot lifting weights. We stayed up til 3 in the morning afterwards like a couple of wayward youths, and then in the morning, we snagged some pastries and coffee from La Boulangerie and rushed back home to Spanish Town. All we wanted was to crawl into bed and stay there, but one of Kechi’s friends had gotten us free tickets to Lightwire Theater’s production of Moon Mouse at the Manship Theater. We dragged ourselves downtown, and I have to admit—I was fully prepared to be underwhelmed. I haven’t seen any childrens theater in God knows how long, and I knew nothing about this production company even though they’ve been based in New Orleans since, I believe, 2008. Tired and surly as I was, I am truly glad I went. Moon Mouse is genuinely astonishing. It’s a story mostly told using a combination of dance and a sort of light puppetry that makes the characters glow against a backdrop of darkness as Moon Mouse endures bullying at school, cobbles together a rocket using his trusty alarm clock as a power source, and blasts off to a moon that is supposedly made of cheese only to find a lot of surprises there.

All of Lightwire’s productions use light in an innovative way to tell their stories. I won’t say more than that because seeing all this as a surprise was part of what made the joy so exquisite and infectious. Thinking about how I would have felt seeing this play at the age of six or seven, and just purely experiencing it live in a darkened setting bowled me over with emotion. I’m not ashamed to admit that I wept. The material and the execution were so fresh, so effective, that just knowing work like this is being done is an inspiration.

People who know New Orleans, and Carniv al, especially, know that there are always people applying serious professional costuming skill to their Mardi Gras rigs. That’s one of the reasons it’s my favorite season. There are people in regular street clothes, there are others in cobbled-together, mix-and-match costumes, and there are others who have spent hundreds of hours designing and assembling these elaborate get-ups so they can dress as their favorite Klimt painting, or a family of bobble-head skeletons, or a transforming LED-lit robot. I could easily see the Moon Mouse costumes used for a night parade or some bit of guerrilla theater in one of the parks.

Kechi and I also got a chance to talk to the Lightwire founders, Ian Carney and Corbin Popp briefly after the show, and while Kechi quizzed them with production questions, it was not lost on me that we had seen an amazing work put on by a married couple who had met doing the work they loved. This is a major example of the things I’m holding on to right now. These are the experiences, the revelations that thrill and sustain me. Maybe they won’t always be enough, but they are right now. I’ll figure out the rest after Mardi Gras.