Mardi Gras After Katrina: Laughing In the Face of Fate

How many of the 30-odd officially city-chartered Mardi Gras organizations will participate in this year's scaled back festivities no one can really say. The Mystik Krewe of Comus, founded in 1857 and so exclusive even the sons of some members can't get in, will hold its traditional ball tomorrow night. But what about the all-inclusive Krewe of Elvis Marching Club ("Everyone's the King") founded in 1999? Officially it's not on the schedule, but since it's open to anyone who wants to parade in sideburns and a white polyester jumpsuit, how could it ever die?

Likewise, hundreds more informal associations, each answering some festive imperative for its members -- however wacky -- remain prepared to parade whenever the spirit moves, if only with three kids in a red wagon. TV cameras are always drawn to the drag queens, vomiting drunks and bare breasts on display in the French Quarter, usually by tourists. But Mardi Gras in New Orleans has almost always been more about neighborhoods and families.

It's about the excitement of a kid catching a doubloon or a "pair of beads" tossed from a passing float, and about the pride of a teenage flambeau carrier bearing his parade torchlight for the first time, or "second-lining" with a strut and a parasol ahead of the procession. It's about the camaraderie of families with children who run into each other just once a year, at a favorite parade-watching route, and may not even know each other's names.

That easy interchange among strangers is the bricks and mortar of New Orleans, and even though it has been under siege by crime and economic uncertainty in recent years, it was that sense of a shared city that Katrina, with her floating bodies and crumbled homes and abandoned invalids, did the most to betray.

Nothing tells you that like the sense of loss felt uptown and down, by whites and blacks alike, for the thousands of black New Orleanians who have been scattered across the nation in the Katrina diaspora. Many of those people may end up better off elsewhere, but New Orleans is still their city, too, and no one recognizes that any deeper or feels a sense of cultural loss more than those New Orleanians, white and black, they left behind. It's not just the labor or votes of those absent that the city needs: How can New Orleans be again the vital, multicultural tapestry we love unless it is possible for those who want to come back to return?

That's the real imperative for holding Mardi Gras this year. Far more important than the tourist dollars it attracts will be the signal it sends to those there and those absent alike that New Orleans is still alive, partying defiantly amid the pain -- struggling to reconnect the human and cultural sinews that have always made the Big Easy so much more than just a city.

Chris Rose, the Times-Picayune columnist who has become one of the most eloquent voices of post-Katrina New Orleans, has compared the city to Whoville, the mythical little town from which Dr. Seuss's Grinch removed all the trees and lights and presents in an effort to steal Christmas. And just as Christmas came to Whoville without the trappings, Mardi Gras will come this year to the Crescent City, even without enough police or garbagemen or hotel rooms or parades.

Because Mardi Gras is about more than just a day or even a season. It's about a way of life known as New Orleans.