Hey y'all, it's Andrew with
Free Tours by Foot New Orleans and today, we are getting into the subject of
Mardi Gras and specifically Mardi Gras of 2021. I'm in a really important spot for Mardi Gras
right now. This is St Charles Avenue, the street that the streetcar goes down ,that connects the
French Quarter to the Garden District. Lovely sedate street most of the year and this is
where normally during Mardi Gras season, our parades roll and you can tell any time of
the year because there are beads in the trees. Our float parades go down one side of the street,
beads get thrown to the crowds below and a lot of them get stuck in these branches and they last all
year. Though gradually with the elements a few of them are gonna tumble down and for somebody who
knows New Orleans really well you usually can look at a photo of St Charles Avenue and kind of guess
the time of year by how heavy the bead growth is. This is going to be the first year
in a long time that we don't get a bead harvest from these trees. We haven't
lacked parades on St Charles since 1979. We haven't had parades cancelled
throughout the region since 1945. So this is a big loss for us and of course it's
part of a year full of losses so when the news came that we weren't going to be able to have
Mardi Gras parades this year - sensibly that we're not going to be able to have Mardi Gras
parades this year you know we grieved that. As we have grieved a lot of other things this
year. We've lost other festivals like Jazz Fest, we've lost jobs we've lost friends, and then once we grieved it we said screw it
we're gonna figure out how to do it anyway. This isn't a thing that we skip. So what
we're gonna do today is take you through the ways that 2021 Mardi Gras is happening
and the ways that it's going to be different. We're going to give you just as essential
historical foundations to make all of this stuff make sense and we'll do that at a
Mardi Gras museum down in the French Quarter. After that we're going to hit up
the place where the floats are made, give you an inside view of the process
and some of the floats themselves. We're going to talk about Mardi Gras throws,
some of the places where they come from, how they're made as well. And we're going
to see places honoring and supplying the costuming traditions in New Orleans. And
finally we'll get to how houses are being used in place of floats this year to deliver the
vibe that we know and expect out of this season. So we're going to start in the French
Quarter and I'll see you down there. So y'all for a little taste of the history
- we're in Jackson Square. I think we come here in probably half of our videos
but there's a lot of good stuff here and in this case we have the Presbytere next
to us, which is the home of the Louisiana State Museum's Mardi Gras collection, as
well as their Katrina collection. So if you ever wanted to learn the history of New
Orleans Mardi Gras, Louisiana Mardi Gras, which are a few different things depending on
where in the state and where in the city you go. This place is kind of the primary
resource for that big picture. In the even bigger picture the holidays older
than we are, so there has been a Mardi Gras going back into medieval Europe and it even maybe
has some influence from Ancient Roman festivals. So it's part of the Catholic religious calendar at
its root and that's going to give us a religious flavor to it definitely, but it's celebrated
in really secular ways through a lot of parts of the world. People in Louisiana have been
cognizant of that date, even though it moves around going back as far as we know anything about. One
of the very first French place names in Louisiana was Puente du Mardi Gras -- Mardi Gras Point -- and it
was named that in 1699, a good couple of decades before New Orleans was founded. So French colonists
coming here far, far away from where that holiday was celebrated were still cognizant of where
on the calendar it fell, and still eager to pay tribute to it somehow. The way we do that in New
Orleans today has changed a lot. So Creoles, the folks who lived in the French Quarter, would have
celebrated Mardi Gras with balls and with street masking, and those are still critical pieces of
it today. The thing a lot of people from out of town think of -- the float parades, which we love, too --
those are going to come in in 1857, with a group called the Mystic Krewe of Comus, and they start
some patterns that we've definitely built on and have changed over time, but like you see some
fundamentals that have lasted since that day. Mardi Gras parades being produced by these
social clubs called krewes? that's still a part of the puzzle, we definitely still have some of
the accoutrements of those early parades -- it was one of the first few that established the idea
that the Mardi Gras colors are purple, green, and gold, which you will still see if you visit in or
around Mardi Gras season on all kinds of buildings, and a lot of that's in the French Quarter, a lot
of it's on homes. This is kind of a normal year, we're going to see the 2021 version of
this as we go into some other parts of town, which is going to get way above and beyond the
norm. So that's coming up later, for the moment we want to get a little bit into where the parades
come from and what they look like now. That's going to bring us to a place called Kern Studios, which
you might know as Mardi Gras World, that's up next. Y'all, we stepped a little bit outside the French
Quarter to a place called Blaine Kern Studios, better known to a lot of visitors as Mardi Gras
World. So this is one of the places that makes and displays floats. From the outside, it's
pretty innocuous, apart from the branding. From the street, though, as you passed by,
you'd see a giant sea god and an alligator letting you know a little bit of the magic that's
made inside. These guys are one of a few companies that do this, they're the largest one; you'll find
some other smaller ones like Royal Artists that produce just a few parades, and some of the parade
crews are also going to design and build their own floats, but because they're the largest one, pretty
much if you ever visit during your carnival season, you will see some Blaine Kern floats. Even if
you come outside that season, there's a very good chance that a parade is going to be happening, and
even if not you can visit this spot. It's the only one of these companies that has a space open to
the public all throughout the year where you can see the floats up close and personal, sometimes in a
lot more detail than you'd be able to see them if you were watching the parade -- and you can
also watch the process of making them. These guys have actually been a big part of changing
that process over time. When these guys first got into the business in 1947, when Blaine Kerns
Sr. founded this company, typical floats were drawn by mules, they were built mostly out of wood,
and they were decorated with painted papier mache. Though they display a few of those older pieces
from as early as the 1970s built in that style, you're gonna see mostly foam fabrication going on
now, so they will sculpt the basic figures out of giant blocks and sheets of styrofoam. Some of that
work is done by hand, and some of it is done by a huge robot named Pixie, and then once they've made
the basic shape, they're going to cover it with a papier mache layer that allows for painting,
and they're going to finish it with another material that'll make it more long-lasting.
So in that process, these guys are building hundreds of floats per year, they do it at bulk,
and they do it for a lot of different krewes which have different design needs all around. The parades
are all pretty different from one another, but krewes have a few things in common -- they, for one
thing, have that word in common -- which goes back to the Mystic Krewe of Comus, the very first
float parade that we had -- and krewe, since those days, is spelled K-R-E-W-E -- which is a fake old
English spelling of just the word crew c-r-e-w. And krewes are social organizations that are
gonna do various things throughout the year, but primarily usually revolve around making a
parade happen. They also are gonna share in common usually being named after some kind of idea from
world religions or civilizations, and so you have the Krewe of Rex, the Krewe of Comus,
sometimes drawing from roman mythology; you're gonna have the Krewe of Cleopatra and the
Krewe of Isis coming from Egypt; you're gonna have the Krewe of Zulu making African references; we
have a lot of different Greek gods, and these guys were actually part of founding one particular
krewe. So a little more than 50 years ago in 1968, Blaine Kern Sr. was brought on board to
design the very first run of the Krewe of Bacchus, the Roman God of wine and theater and partying,
and Bacchus was designed around the whole idea that Mardi Gras needed to be bigger. We had
a number of tourism magnates basically in town who thought that they weren't getting
enough visitors to town for Mardi Gras, and so they wanted to make something flashier and more
impressive that they thought y'all would like more, so they decided scale was the thing to increase,
and current studios provided that from day one. They started building bigger floats, and they
started building them with moving parts and their own lights, and nowadays Bacchus is one of
several of what we call "Super Krewes," which are the ones with the highest production values,
and they also throw by far the most stuff. So every year they're debuting new floats, but if
you visit here, you can see some of their classic floats. There's a few that they use every year
with occasional replacements and renovations; for example, if you came here now, you would see King
Kong and Queen Kong, which are actually floats without riders. Typically, you're gonna have a few
dozen riders on a float who are the ones throwing things, but parades like Bacchus throw so much
stuff that sometimes they will have a special float just for throwing things back, so you may
have noticed on Queen Kong there are beads stuck all over her, and after you've had so many things
thrown at you in the course of watching a parade, it's nice to do some of the throwing at the end.
This year, these floats are going to be staying put in this and the other warehouses around the city,
because parades are the thing that we cannot do, so there's various ways that we're coming at that. One
thing we're doing is we're having an event called Floats in the Oaks; our City Park, which normally
hosts the Christmas lights viewing in December, is gonna have floats spaced throughout it from
lots of different krewes, where you can drive through and you can see them one by one rather
than in a huge crowd, and they're actually gonna have bands and dancers spaced in between, making
it very much like a typical parade experience. We also had -- way back at the beginning of the
season -- a parade that did something pretty similar. For the past few years, we've had a parade that
happened on the first day of the season -- January 6th -- called the Krewe of Joan of Arc, which didn't
actually have floats, they would be mostly on foot and on horseback doing medieval European
cosplay, and these folks decided as the season came in to do a drive-through experience of what
they called Tableau -- and Tableau is an idea that goes way back to the beginnings of Mardi Gras, the
Krewe of Comus way back when and the other really early Mardi Gras krewes, when they did their parade
they were going to finish the route at a theater, and then a select invited group of the attendees
was going to go inside and watch the members of the krewe arrange these Tableau -- so you'd be on
a stage, and it would create these pictures that evoked a famous moment in history or a famous
painting -- so Tableau really are one of these ancient styles of celebrating Mardi Gras which
we don't see a whole lot anymore, so in that way by doing Tableau, the Krewe of Joan of Arc was
bringing it way back to the beginning and reviving an old Mardi Gras tradition. What this version,
the driving through version, doesn't allow for is throws, which are a really big part of what we
tend to do and what we think makes our Mardi Gras different, so I'm going to show you a little bit
of how those work and get into how some of the parades are dealing with the absence of throws
this year in some pretty creative ways. Next up, we're going to go to a spot that sells those
throws, it's going to be a little ways from here. Y'all, we're at one of the places that sells
Mardi Gras throws. You can find them for sale in the French Quarter, absolutely, and there
is a "convenience markup" let's call it, and if you're walking beneath the balconies on Bourbon
Street, you can also find them for free there in exchange for what let's call "barter," so it's
possible to get them there, but most of us who live here know that there is the option to get them at
places like this at a significantly cheaper price by coming out to the suburbs. We are not in the
parts of New Orleans that most visitors are ever going to come to, and as you can see it is
a place to visit pretty much exclusively by car, and you would be surrounded by strip malls, and
chain restaurants, and uh, other things you would not find in the French Quarter let's call it, but
here and there, there's these little locally owned businesses, but these things are a lot cheaper here,
so if you want to shop like a New Orleanian for Mardi Gras or for Christmas or for Halloween or
for a Saints game, here's one place you could come. Y'all, any given year, the number of beads
flying around is enough that by the time students at Tulane University -- where we are right
now -- walk back to campus the short distance from the parade route, they are so weighed down with
what they've received that they will throw their stuff up into -- formerly a tree -- now a specially
built structure just for the purpose. So each year, there are so many beads flying around that
they almost become more of a burden than a prize within a few minutes to a few hours after the
parade. So with that in mind, the volume of beads that we have, it adds up to a lot of expense, and
that expense is borne by members of the krewe. While visitors to town will pay for beads sometimes,
normally the people buying them are the ones who are riding on the float, so not only is a krewe member required to pay yearly membership dues, which for a parade like Bacchus is going to be in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars a year, you might spend just as much on the things you're going to be throwing
and it won't just be beads -- there's going to be beads, stuffed animals, plastic cups, little plastic coins called doubloons with an image of the parade's logo and its theme for the
year, all of which become these collectors items over time; beads are the bulk element, the other
things become special. It wasn't always this way, it used to be that beads, as they were thrown in
Mardi Gras parades at least, were made of glass, and you'd have a relatively small number of them
to hand out in the course of a parade, so that if you got a string of them, it was a pretty big
deal; they were cheap, but not nearly as cheap as they are now, and as we got into the Super
Krewe era, we end up seeing mass production in China in plastic, and that allows the huge numbers
that are thrown around today to be out there, and that's one of the things we don't have this
year is beads flying through the air in those huge quantities, which might not be the worst
thing that's changed about Mardi Gras this year. Normally at the end of a parade, we have an
amazing cleanup enterprise that happens -- it's actually one of the most remarkable parts of
the parade to watch is all the people who come and empty the garbage out of the streets
afterwards -- but there's a lot of garbage produced, and you end up having about two million pounds of
waste produced by every single Mardi Gras season. You can't do a whole lot with beads; basically you
can use them to decorate your fence or your house, you can put them in a bag in your attic and save
them for friends who visit town, or you can use them again, you can give them a second life
flying through the air at a future parade, at least as long as they physically last. So there's
a form of recycling that's possible, and once in a while we throw them into potholes to fill them
in, but they're not even all too good for that, so as we get into modern Mardi Gras and
especially with hiccups like this year, we kind of ask ourselves what we should be doing
with this tradition, and for one thing, we have a scientist from LSU who in the last couple years has
announced the ability to make biodegradable beads out of algae; that's a process that is gradually
becoming more affordable and may at some point take over for the mass-produced plastic stuff we
see, locally produced ones made out of paper is a thing too, and also just less throws sometimes
is a strategy people take. Also for that feeling of specialness that beads used to deliver, more and
more krewes have shifted over to having a specialty throw, where even if the parade itself is produced
by Blaine Kern or otherwise has a big factory made kind of aesthetic, they make something specially
that's distributed to a few select members of the crowd who have an amazing costume, or who knows,
somebody who put on the right display of energy during the parade. These are going to vary
a lot, the Krewe of Muses is one of the most famous for having its bedazzled high heels covered in
glitter and rhinestones, and the Krewe of Zulu has the honor of having a special place in Louisiana
law. Most places in throughout the world that have Mardi Gras parades don't throw a lot of things --
that's our special thing -- and because enough people have been injured by throws, there is Louisiana
law saying that parade organizations are not responsible for injuries incurred during a Mardi
Gras parade by flying objects, and specifically in that law is the word coconuts. The Zulu parade
has been throwing coconuts, gradually more and more painted and decorated over the years, and
those are maybe among the more dangerous flying objects. Technically, they're supposed to hand
them to you or gently toss them to you, and now with this year and throws being completely
out of the question, we're starting to see people adapting in some really interesting ways. Muses
is only producing a few of its signature shoes this year, which they're going to be distributing
through a few different endeavors -- some of that is going to be straight to health care workers, some
of that's going to be through a Shoe Fairy who is going around town finding people who look like
they deserve it and passing off one of the year's shoes to them, and they're also doing a Stiletto
lottery -- Stilotto -- through which they've partnered with a bunch of different businesses around town
where you can visit once per day and use a QR code to enter yourself in this lottery, and the idea
is each of those things at the end of the season is going to draw for one winner for the shoe that
their business gets, and it's meant to get people out to these businesses that maybe they've fallen
out of the habit of visiting; so it's a whole lot of different retail and food establishments
along Magazine Street, St. Charles Avenue, and in our business district, so if you're here in
town as a visitor or as a local, that's one way to both give some support to local businesses and
to possibly get one of the rarest kinds of Muses shoes there's going to be. Bacchus, the krewe that
we've discussed for having some of the most throws, has opted to have a digital parade this year,
so they've created an app and they're having numerous small parades throughout the season,
and then a big one on their final day, where they will be throwing lots of digital things -- a few of which can be redeemed for real prizes -- but the rest of which, you get the satisfaction of
catching, and then they take up very little space in your attic or in a landfill or really even
on your hard drive by the time you have them. Oh my god, this is this is actually very
much like being at a Mardi Gras parade. I think I just caught a tape measure! Making
signature throws is crafting, and people who are a part of the parades that do these have special
places they go to get the supplies they need and to do the work sometimes. So next thing we're
going to show you is some of the places where the supplies for costuming and for throw-making come
from. Y'all, if you like what you're seeing so far, hitting the like button doesn't just tell the
world how you feel, it also helps other people find this video, and if you hit subscribe you'll
be the first to know when we drop something new. We cover lots of cities in the US and Europe, so
there's plenty more to see besides New Orleans. And now, back to the tour. Yeah we just -- way across
town to NOLA Craft Culture -- this is in mid-city, this is a real New Orleans building, and this
is one of the places where not only things like Muses shoes would be crafted and where the
supplies to make them come from, but also where you would get stuff to make costumes, and a lot of
that is the same materials. This place stocks a lot of different things, but specifically glitter
galore and every type of glitter under the sun, every color in edible, wearable, and biodegradable
versions, so lots and lots of stuff to find here that you would not get at your typical craft
store, and they also have a crafting space. Anyone who's worked with glitter before knows: once you
have glitter in a room it never goes away. So you can do the glitter crafting here and not have to
leave a trail with you where you're going home to. So they also run classes and stuff,
bachelorette parties here anything like -- bachelor parties, for that matter -- great place to
work on something together during a group trip, and there's a lot of people who make their
costumes here -- actually, DIY costuming is a deeper part of New Orleans history than float parades
are -- we've been doing that, as far as we know, back pretty close to the city's origins, if not all the
way, and it's one of the traditions that pervades really almost any of the places where Mardi
Gras is observed that I know of. You got a lot of different masking traditions, and really all they
have in common is that all of them are on foot. We've talked about the big krewes like Bacchus,
which are expensive to be a part of in the first place, and also just aren't everybody's vibe, and so
you get various groups that get created around the idea of doing something on foot; one of those with
a name very similar to the Krewe of Bacchus is the Krewe of Barkus, where people dress up their dogs
around some kind of common theme and take them on a long walk through the French Quarter each year.
So that one is having a digital parade this year, worth looking that up, and really just in general
any year, any time of year, Krewe of Barkus is one of the best image search terms that's out there. Then
we also have a krewe that is very close to my heart, I did my first Mardi Gras parade last year with
the Krewe of Chewbacchus; this is a merger between Chewbacca, the Star Wars character, and Bacchus, the
God of wine. So the mascot of this parade is the sacred drunken wookie, and what you get basically
is a bunch of sci-fi/fantasy nerds who are fans of a huge number of different franchises
marching with some kind of homemade costume. I'm part of a group called Queer Eye for the
Sci-fi, and my partner and I ended up being Sparkle Alien vs Sparkle Predator last
year, and we spent a lot of time working here to make those costumes, so that crafting space?
very close to my heart. We also have dance groups in the float parades, so there are groups like the
organ grinders who are going to do rehearsals all throughout the year for dance routines, and then
during Mardi Gras season -- over the course of a few weeks -- they'll go out in the street and you'll have
five or six parades that each of them is in, doing flash mob style dance routines in full costume.
Among all of these masking traditions, y'all, maybe the one that everybody looks up to the most
is what are called Mardi Gras Indians, or Black Masking Indians. This is one of quite a few black
masking traditions in New Orleans that grew up separately during Mardi Gras in the 18th and 19th
centuries. We're gonna visit Armstrong Park to get a view of that one. Yeah, we've moved to Armstrong
Park, right outside of the French Quarter. We're in the Treme neighborhood, and we're gonna see inside
the park one of the many monuments here which is dedicated to what are called Mardi Gras Indians, or
Black Masking Indians. This is one of the older and longer lasting masking traditions, and in general
black folks in New Orleans have a lot of separate Mardi Gras traditions with their own long lineage
going back to the fact that early Mardi Gras parades were segregated in a lot of ways, so the
Mystic Krewe of Comus only allowed a pretty small select number of wealthy white Christian men,
and meanwhile Mardi Gras was being observed and celebrated by everybody. It ends up getting
infused with a lot of elements of black culture here, which have some of their deepest roots inside
this park via Congo Square, so this was a place where in the 18th and 19th centuries, enslaved
people would gather and have some room to play their own music and otherwise express their own
culture that turns into a lot of modern traditions like second lining; so we have this street parading
tradition revolving around early jazz bands which is still a huge part of all different
kinds of occasions, Mardi Gras and otherwise in New Orleans. In terms of those early parades,
the place that there was for a black participant was what's called a Flambeau; so if this was a
float parade, Flambeau would be people who walked along the side of them. The float was meant to
be a work of visual art, and often times these parades rolled at night, so visibility was an issue.
Flambeau would carry these huge, heavy torches that would illuminate the float -- they were
lending light to the work of somebody else. Eventually, because of learning tricks with the
thing and just the athleticism of it, they became a focal point in and of themselves, and nowadays
if you go to a Mardi Gras parade, Flambeau walk on their own; they're just a feature of the parade and
actually, if you're around New Orleanians watching the parade, you're likely to see people tipping
Flambeaus as they go by, but alongside that you get the development of a lot of other traditions.
There's baby dolls, which are women who dress up in these blonde curled wigs and kind of elaborate
costumes. You get the Krewe of Zulu, which nowadays is a float parade that's on the same route as a
lot of the others, similar route, but that started small and unofficial and which -- Lewis Armstrong,
the namesake of the park -- was the king of in 1949. And there's also skull and bone gangs, who on Mardi
Gras morning here in the Treme, dress as skeletons and go through the neighborhood super early before
the sun comes up, and they make a lot of noise, help everybody start their day on a energized note, and
one of the things that they sing as they go by is: "you better get your life together, next time you
see us is too late to try." So they are messengers of death alongside a lot of the fun and delight
of Mardi Gras Day, and then there's Mardi Gras Indians, which also are called Black Masking
Indians, and the name Mardi Gras Indian refers to the main occasion when they mask, but also to this
reference to Native Americans, so there's a lot of connection between black and Native American
history in Louisiana, and that happens because A. both groups are enslaved, B. enslaved people --
African descended -- who escaped from slavery in the city a lot of times found their way to Native
American communities outside the city, and C. Native Americans who urbanized often ended up --
because of segregation laws and just patterns -- ended up in black neighborhoods, and so you have
this commonality of ancestry, you have this merging of cultures that happens, and a lot of folks who
mainly identify black in New Orleans these days also know or suspect that there is some Native
American lineage in their family. This is the celebration of that lineage every year -- it doesn't
look like any Native American you'd ever see -- no traditional costumes from Louisiana, it is
its own whimsical interpretation of the idea and homage to the idea, but it is an incredible piece
of craftsmanship, and the guy you're seeing here is uh -- his name is Big Chief "Tootie" Montana -- is one
of the foremost artists of the medium, so you can see with his suit, it's extremely detailed, it's
extremely heavy. So all of the detail on this is made from hand-sewn beadwork and built into panels,
and then sewn together and decorated with feathers, which is what you're seeing all around the
outsides and also in super bright colors, and these suits can weigh a couple hundred pounds easily,
so there's an athleticism to performing in them, there's an extreme craftsmanship to creating them,
and there's a community element, because they form into tribes -- these groups that perform together on
Mardi Gras Day -- and they have a lot of traditions that mirror the practices in Congo Square;
they have a tambourine that they call a drum, they still practice on Sundays, the day that Congo
Square gatherings happened -- all these echoes of some of the earliest known African extracted
cultural practices here. So on Mardi Gras, you see in the various neighborhoods these folks celebrate
in, them coming out of their homes wearing the suit that they have made for the year, processing
through the neighborhood, they have their own music that they perform, and if they meet another tribe
there's a mock battle kind of a dance-off that happens, so they are one of the highlights of Mardi
Gras Day for people who live here and know the tradition really well. They also have to make a new
suit every single year; this is tradition for them that you wear the suit for Mardi Gras and then
a couple of other days throughout the spring, but after that you retire it, and it becomes a museum
piece -- particularly so in the case of this guy. So Big Chief Tootie's known for a few things: one,
he's known for the way he died. So he was a long participant in this tradition, and he really
raised the design standard from suits that were much more modest -- some bright rags and feathers --
to being this incredible work of craftsmanship over the 50 years that he made suits, and the
49 different suits that he made, and he actually passed away during a city council meeting. He was
at the city council meeting speaking in defense of his tradition after there had been an episode
of police violence -- police holding Mardi Gras Indians at gunpoint in the neighborhood where they
were parading to make them stop doing so, because at a very technical level, you know the parades are
are unlicensed -- so after this threat of violence, he shows up to speak at the city council -- he's in
his 80s, he's retired from the tradition -- and while he's speaking, he has a heart attack, dies in front
of them, and this makes enormous news here. There's a whole lot more to that story, but basically
because of the life he lived and his death as well and the craftsmanship that happened along the
way, he really is revered among Mardi Gras Indians as the foremost of that tradition. So his suits are
on display, and if you want to see these things and the works of other people like him, you can visit
various museums: there's the Backstreet Cultural Museum here in the Treme, there's the House of
Dance and Feathers down in the lower Ninth Ward -- they've had a hard year, we're actually not going
to see a whole lot of this in the street this year, the heads and creators of both of those museums --
Ronald Lewis down at the House of Dance and Feathers and Sylvester Francis at the Backstreet
Museum -- have both passed away in 2020, and so with this awareness of lost friends and
of in many cases lost jobs that make it unaffordable to create a suit like
this -- even if someone wanted -- and just a intense awareness of the risk involved
in going out and parading in public, a lot of Black Masking Indians have decided to
forgo this year -- or the ones that are doing it, a lot of them are going to do it on a much smaller
scale, just step out of their suit around their own house and keep it to their nearest and dearest, and
the people right there in their own neighborhood. So knowing that stark year was coming, a
lot of Mardi Gras Indians gathered out here on January 6th when the season was beginning --
and also a day that's dedicated to the memory of Big Chief Tootie here -- so they gathered around
to pay homage, played a lot of their own music, and one of the people present there, unlike
a lot of others who were skipping this year, decided to step back into the tradition this year;
one of the people that Big Chief Tootie trained was his son Daryl. Daryl Montana became the chief
of the same tribe that this guy was a part of, and he created suits like his dad for a number
of decades, and then he retired from it in 2017. He had made at that point 47 suits, and he'd
agreed with his dad never to pass up his dad's record, but this year -- 2021 -- he is stepping out
of retirement to build one last suit, number 48, to get right up under his dad's record and maybe
out do his own last piece of work. Another group that's been particularly hard to hit during this
year has been restaurants. We've lost a lot of the city's favorite restaurants; some of those are
high-end tourist destinations like K-Paul's, Paul Prudhomme's restaurant in the French Quarter, and
then neighborhood joints like Li'l Dizzy's here in the Treme -- many of those have shut down, and the
ones that haven't are still really struggling to hang on, so fortunately there's a culinary element
to Mardi Gras, and that's going to be our next stop. We're going to get to one of the places where
you can find the signature seasonal pastry; it's called King Cake, and we're going to get into
what restaurants are doing with that this year. Y'all, we are at King Cake Hub in mid-city right
now, this is one of the places to pick up King Cakes from lots and lots of different bakers. So
King Cake is the traditional Carnival pastry, it usually starts selling right at the beginning of
the season all the way through Mardi Gras Day, and this is something that also predates New Orleans's Mardi Gras practices. The French version, called a Galette des Rois, is a puff pastry dish with almond
paste inside of it. Our version, the traditional one in New Orleans, is more like a cinnamon roll,
often with some purple, green, and gold elements. And then you get bakeries making it now that take
it in all different directions -- I got an apple goat cheese one from a place called Cake Cafe, and
this was a bakery and restaurant that actually closed this year, but the chef stepped back out
to partner with NOCCA, our arts high school in town which has a culinary program, to produce this
for the season. So some of the restaurants that are still open right now have actually stepped into
King Cake baking this year for the first time. Brennan's,one of the really famous restaurants in
the French Quarter, is making three different King Cakes this year; GW Fins, classy seafood outfit in
the quarter doing the same thing; and Galatoire's, one of the oldest restaurants in the quarter, has
also gone in that direction. These are high-end places, so it's helping them stay afloat -- it's not
so much a thing that smaller restaurants are doing, but it's keeping their employees working,
and in that way it means that a culinary career is a little bit more viable in New Orleans
during Mardi Gras than it was the season before. The classic bakeries that make these, y'all, really
span the spectrum: there's Gambinos, there's Haydels, there's Dong Phuong, and those have Italian,
German, and Vietnamese names respectively, so all different cultural backgrounds in New Orleans
have ended up adopting the King Cake as their own. It is a Carnival tradition that relates to the
King's Day element of the beginning of the season. So King's Day, in the Catholic calendar, is the day
when the three kings were supposed to have found the baby Jesus, and if you buy one of these,
typically you're gonna get in the package the pastry and also a plastic baby. In the French
version, it's small figurines of different kinds, but the baby is standard here, and it represents
the baby Jesus -- used to be, when I was growing up, that the baby, by the time you bought
this, would already be embedded inside -- but just like with throws, that led to lawsuits, and
in this case, the bakeries decided this was not a hill that they wanted to die on. So nowadays you
typically find the baby a little off to the side, you get to embed it yourself, and if somebody
chokes on a baby at your house, then you can be the one that they sue. It also is a thing that
you can get, almost no matter where you are, so for us who are in town, or if you're visiting
town, you can pay this place a visit in person -- there is a bit of a line on the weekends,
but it's quicker on the weekdays -- lots and lots of other bakeries are carrying them, some
restaurants are actually becoming carriers of King Cakes who normally wouldn't do that so they
can make a little bit of money off of resale -- and these guys are also doing Doordash this
year, so you can get things delivered from here. They don't ship outside of town, but some places
do, and we're gonna have a list of some of those options in the description, so feel free to go down
there and find the choice if you want to get a King Cake and have a small Mardi Gras gathering
yourself where you come from -- or a big Mardi Gras gathering -- get as many as you want! Speaking of
things that happen at home, we've saved my favorite part of this for last. I want to show you some of
what people are doing with their homes this year as a replacement for what we would normally
see in parades, that's going to be our last stop. Y'all, we're back on St. Charles Avenue, and while
this street is not gonna have the parades and the bead throwing that it's used to, it is
still gonna get its Mardi Gras ambiance -- and in ways that it never has before. There's some real
different stuff going on this year, and it starts from a real quiet moment. One New Orleanian a few
months ago decided to found a new krewe called the Krewe of House Floats, and she did that in the
most innocuous possible way by just starting a Facebook group under the name. This idea
caught fire really fast, and at this point a couple weeks out from Mardi Gras, there are
already a huge number of houses decorated in the way that floats normally would be, and it
looks like by the time we actually get to Mardi Gras, there might be more of them than there are
of actual floats in a typical Mardi Gras year. Y'all, I think this idea is amazing and there's
a few different reasons why: one of them is that it's just the right thing for us to do, not just
this year, but in general. When people know Mardi Gras and New Orleans tradition around it, they know
this is something that we should be doing, and Kern Studios made this one, and when current studios
is following in your footsteps? You know you have innovated Mardi Gras right. So this is a moment
in Mardi Gras history, no question -- and any future year you come, I think you'll see some of these.
It's also just that it gives individual people a chance to be a part of this tradition in a way --
one more way than we've had before. There's been a move for some years now towards the DIY, and the
homemade Super Krewes are great, but everybody wants to be a part of this holiday in their own way,
and so in addition to the huge projects like this made by professional float designers, we also have
a lot of people who are just doing it themselves. Decorating a house for Mardi Gras has been a thing
for a long time -- putting up some purple, green, and gold swag and flying the flag of your favorite
krewe and decking your fence with some beads -- but this year we are seeing, even just
walking around in my neighborhood, some people are doing them in the style of their
favorite krewe or the krewe that they're themselves a part of, some people are taking a stab at the
kind of satire and commentary on current events and sometimes just wackiness. That is a big part
of the Mardi Gras flavor, and some people are sourcing it to the professionals. We have the
Kern Studios example here, but this is kind of I think the most brilliant part of it, because
this endeavor solves a whole different problem. If you've learned something from this video, I hope
it's that Mardi Gras is not just a holiday, it's also an industry. There are people who make their
livelihood for part or sometimes all of the year on selling the throws, producing the floats, and
just like everybody in the tourist and service economy which we can't responsibly have right
now, those folks are out of a job right now -- so after the Krewe of House Floats idea came to
be, a group called the Krewe of Red Beans, one of our walking crews which every year decorates
their own costumes and sometimes entire vehicles with bean mosaics, decided to add in this
additional program which they called "Hire a Mardi Gras Artist," and through this, people
in an area can pool resources, hire a team of Mardi Gras professionals, and get a house in their
neighborhood done in a way that really shows off the professionalism. And they've all got different
commentaries on New Orleans and Louisiana culture -- we have one that's called the Night Tripper that's
dedicated to the imagery of local musician Dr. John, we've got one called Acadiana Hayride which shows
several Cajun musicians doing their version of a wandering musical parade, we've got one called
Birds of Bulbancha, which shows some of the local wildlife and is named after the name for this
region in the Choctaw language -- the language of the dominant Native American tribe here -- one of them
is a fully realized Mardi Gras float, but built around some existing trees -- which you can't do with
a rolling float -- on the theme of Midsummer Night's Dream, and one of them is called the Queen's
Jubilee and celebrates healthcare professionals. So more of these are going to be coming, and whether
you're here or not, you can check them out yourself from a distance -- you can look up terms like
"Yardigra," one of the hashtags that people are using to file these, as well as Krewe of House Floats,
and whether you're here or not, the website for our local newspaper has both a map and photos of
them. Besides making these video tours, Free Tours By Foot is also an in-person tour company, and
we operate out of New Orleans and lots of other cities. Our tours are all pay what you will, it's
a trust-based system, and if you like the sound of that and you like what you see today, you can find
links in the description to tip your guide. Thank you for watching and please let us know down in
the comments what you thought and what else you'd like to see from us in the future. Like as well
as subscribing and you'll make sure to be first to know when those next videos come out, and I hope
you have the best Tuesday of your year coming up!
