Maison and more

Friday evening and Saturday we found even more things to do! First of all, we went to Maison, a really great venue with live music and no 21+ requirements. We saw an amazing jazz band and Miles had his first (that he will admit to anyway!) experience with a bouncer. At the door he was asked “hey, how old are you?” and Miles answered “13.” To which a lot of confusion ensued because while the place serves food and therefore is allowed to have all ages inside until 10pm, it was clear they didn’t have any real mechanisms in place for this answer. But all was good in the end and we enjoyed the musicians very much! And we left at 10, good for both us old folks who don’t really want to stay up late anyway AND the rules for the young folk!

Before Maison we had visited an open air art market also on Frenchman’s Street and I saw a metal work piece that I really liked and after thinking about for a couple of hours, decided to go back and buy. The artist makes sculptures using scrap metal he finds. For this one the background is a circle saw and on top is a welded on fleur de lis. It’s going to look great in our garden once it gets warm enough for me to go out there and hang it up! The fleur de lis is a very popular symbol in New Orleans and you see it everywhere, in the form of flags and on tattoos. It baffled Miles who had just learned about how the fleur de lis was the symbol of the Bourbon Court in pre-revolutionary France. His feeling was that it makes no sense that the people in New Orleans would continue to use it as a symbol even after the French Revolution. Also he asked how the government of post-revolutionary France would have stood for it. The only thing we can figure is that nobody on either side of the Atlantic was very bothered by this. The people in Louisiana identified as culturally French, and that’s about as much explanation as there is. Miles got particularly perplexed when seeing a current creation, a French tricolor flag with fleur de lis icons running across the white stripe. It makes no sense! Oh well, I think the local solution is to just let the old bontemps roulez! But thanks Miles for posing with the sculpture below, and thanks to John for getting this thing through airport security! (The guard was sympathetic to his comment “ummm it’s something my wife bought for the garden?”)

On Saturday we returned to the Tremé neighborhood, where we had visited on the bike tour earlier in the week, to go see the Backstreet Cultural Museum. So cool! It is a community-run museum all about the culture of Mardi Gras (tripping you up again, Colette!) and social clubs in New Orelans. There are two main rooms, one all about the Mardi Gras traditions of the Indian Chiefs. Now, earlier I said this wasn’t related to Native Americans, but that wasn’t put very well. In the pre-Civil War era, if an enslaved person ran away, Native Americans were often very hospitable and they would help the person hide. As an homage to the Native Americans for these kind acts, a tradition of dressing up as Indian Chiefs developed among African Americans. There is a whole tradition related to making the costume and wearing it during the Mardi Gras celebrations on Fat Tuesday / Pancake Tuesday / Carnival / the day before Lent starts. In the photo below, the skull character on the left, shows the costume of the skull and bones gangs, who wake everybody up on Mardi Gras day.

The chief costumes are so elaborate! The people who make them spend all year working on them. They use a new one every year.

This video shows the face-offs that happen between chiefs:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhXH20FU174&w=560&h=315]

This music video is also really cool, it shows the lyrics to the song “Iko Iko,” a familiar song that now means a whole lot more since we know the context!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wNSHPQj0W8&w=560&h=315]

The other half of the museum explores the history and culture of the Social Clubs in the neighborhoods of New Orleans. They are local support and social communities, started because other types of commercial insurance wasn’t available to “free people of color” (another historical fact we learned about, in short the Spanish version of slave holding included a stipulation that a slave had a right to purchase his/her freedom. Louisiana was owned by the Spanish at one point and so this law was in effect, creating a group of people called “free people of color” who had purchased their freedom). These clubs are thriving still and perform a parade twice a year, once on their own parade day and again on Mardi Gras. The parade consists of a line of the club members, a band, and everyone who wants to join in. The people who join in form a “second line” (OK one could count it as 3rd but just stay with me!) behind the band, and the parades are commonly known as second line parades. While it was parade season (parade season is pretty much all year except summer when it’s too hot) they happen on Sundays, and we had to leave on Sunday, so we didn’t get to go see one. Next time!

Oh and just an aside, here I am with the Ignatius Reilly statue again, this time with the clock that is important in the book but we didn’t get in the photo the first time.

Also on Saturday we met my friends Grant and Laura, who moved back to NOLA from Chicago last year. Sorry, no pics! But we had a great lunch with them. Then we took a ride on the St. Charles streetcar, did a bit of coffee drinking and shopping, and then went to the Cochon Butcher for traditional muffuletta sandwiches.

We got a selfie but no food shots. A muffuletta sandwich has an olive spread, mortadella, salami, mozzarella, ham and provolone, on a round loaf of bread. Delicious! Later that evening we went to hear a jazz band at the famous Preservation Hall. Great 45 minute set showcasing the work of legendary trombonist Big Jim Robinson. Not a great photo! I was having more fun than photo success on this trip! And that seems like a good way to wrap up the stories about our trip to NOLA, it was a huge amount of fun and we can’t wait to go back!