“Mardi Gras and March to Madness”

““It makes me feel purish.” - Frenchmen Street woman on the rainy night of Krewe du Vieux

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One warm afternoon early in Carnival season, Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose sat outside signing his contribution to FRENCH QUARTER FICTION. He was on the balcony belonging to travel writer and fellow contributor, Marda Burton, overlooking rue Royal. It was the book party for FRENCH QUARTER FICTION, “The Newest Stories of America’s Oldest Bohemia.”

Brave be the soul who opens rooms and balcony during Carnival Season to celebrating writers partaking of medicinal red, signing each other’s book, and eyeing one another suspiciously, curiously, enviously - even admiringly. This great idea for a party was the brainchild of publisher Joshua Clark and was sponsored by Faulkner House Books, which provided the books and the medicinal red. The thirty-something authors (twenty-something came) were invited for the first two hours, their fans for the next.

“It was bound to get a crowd,” L. A. Norma said, crushing her cigarette on the banquette in front of the Cornstalk Hotel’s namesake cornstalk fence. “Each of you must have at least one friend or fan.” One last grind of the cigarette. “Most of you, that is!” She said these words exhaling staccato puffs of cigarette smoke. Norma was angry because no one had met her train from Washington, D. C.

Across the street, a crowd fanned out around Burton’s front door. It wound up the curving staircase and into the receiving arms of authors, publishers, book dealers, and bartenders. One ebullient scribe leaned over the rail offering verse for Carnival beads. She got no takers, but an elderly German couple in a mule wagon leafed frantically through their guidebook for an explanation.

Jeri Cain Rossi signed the front piece of my book, and then kissed it leaving big red lips round her signature. Josh Russell hugged, Lee Grue laughed, James Nolan smiled, and Andrei Codrescu glided gracefully along that finely honed ledge between fame and everyman-ness. Poppy Z. Brite didn’t come at all, but one of her fans signed for her.

Ellen Gilchrist, uncomfortable at first, seemed sweet as sugar reading her contribution, the anthology’s only poem: “I have come reeling out on Royal Street / at seven in the morning / strangely sober after hours / of wine and starlings . . . ”

“To wax,” Norma whispered, “perchance to dream, and to know thine own self.” Valerie Martin, proper novelist and biographer of Saint Francis of Assissi, pushed past, knowing her own self by bubbling through the crowd trailing a pink boa and wishing for another lunch at Bacco, “with ten-cent martinis!” (Wouldn’t you?)

Tom Piazza read, as did I. Julie Smith lay across Burton’s bed. Faulkner House’s Joe DeSalvo, Jr. and Elizabethan Elisabeth counted bottles and tallied sales. Elisabeth said, “It is our best selling book.”

All was joy, except for Tom Morgan, host of WWOZ’s great Wednesday morning show, “Jazz Roots - 1925 to 1940” (1933 is playing out of my radio as I write this). Morgan posted in the forum that he could not get through the throng to join the crazed celebration. Sorry, Tom, it was a good party that could have only been made better by your presence. Love your show, man! (Are you really airing one on Ash Wednesday?)

L. A. Norma leaned over her wine glass and said to an inebriated ear, “I wrote this joke on the train down, Dear One says to Dumb One, ‘How come you and me got the same last name?’ "

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Valentine’s Day I lunched with Hotel Monteleone’s publicist, Bonnie Warron. First time I’ve ever had a Valentine’s date, albeit with a publicist. It was wonderful, a lunch to munch in me dreams: Savory gumbo, with fried okra croutons. Greens and things in balsamic bath. Beef filet with wine and mushrooms, and small carved, blanched veggies - turnip, carrot, onion. I recalled Mardi Gras lunches at the Monteleone, waiting for Pete Fountains’ Half Fast Marching Band. “It still happens,” Warron said, “for the lucky.”

Walking out we stopped to inspect a brass plaque and book display inside the doorman’s vestibule. It was placed there in part by efforts of Faubourgundian Kenneth Holditch and the American Library Association, in commemoration of the literary efforts set at this grand old New Orleans’ Hotel, works by the likes of Eudora Welty, and Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams, and Richard Ford. . .

Hotel Monteleone’s Carousal Bar slowly turned behind us - remember any nights on that ride? Sigh! “If ever I cease to love . . .”

Outside, the streets bustled with pick-up trucks from Mississippi and stretch limos from Harrah’s. Older women walked about with bundles of roses. Younger ones passed with handsome young men, a single rose and a wide smile.

Later in the week, Krewe du Vieux marched in the rain, and partied till the wee dripping hours of morning. And Barkus barked the next week, under skies bluer than George Rodrigue’s dog.

Bacchus blesses New Orleans during Carnival time, even in the shadow of Landslide’s War. It was clear, blue and seventy-five the day of the book party. Now and then a fighter jet screeched overhead, with nothing to do but rehearse, we hope. Happy Mardi Gras!

And don’t miss Frederick J. Brown: Portraits in Jazz, Blues and Other Icons, at the New Orleans Museum of Art. (Closes March 16) Brown interprets musicians, among other canvases, and he is the master who painted Xavier University’s “Assumption of Mary,” another must see. “O. K.,” Norma said, “after Carnival!”