New Orleans – This city – what remains of it – is throwing a party again.
The first post-Hurricane Katrina celebration of Mardi Gras, which begins in earnest today, will be four days shorter than past events but no less boisterous and luxuriant, organizers say. The floats are all poised inside hangarlike garages on the city’s east bank – the side that stayed dry. And the copious stockpiles of beads and doubloons await the roadside throngs to which they will be flung.
And yet even as the hotels begin to fill and the parades prepare to roll, residents of the storm-tossed city admit to some uncertainty as they begin this year’s installment of New Orleans’ defining cultural event.
Will Mardi Gras 2006 be the city’s coming-out party? Or perhaps its going-away party?
“I’ve been open for 20 years, and right now I don’t know if I’m going to reopen after Mardi Gras,” said Michele Babineaux, owner of Michaul’s Live Cajun Music Restaurant on St. Charles Avenue, the main parade route.
“Of course we’re going to celebrate Mardi Gras. But my staff is all gone, the people are all gone. What am I supposed to do?”
The debate about whether to host a Mardi Gras celebration at all in a city still scarred by the flooding and destruction of two hurricanes was brief and seemed hardly to have been taken seriously by many people in New Orleans.
Given the government’s limited role in the event – all parades and balls are organized and paid for by private clubs – it seems unlikely anyone could have stopped it anyway.
