Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Mardi Gras, I watched cheerfully drunk white longshoremen boogie down the street for hours in women's clothing behind a black jazz band, in what they called a practice parade of their Carnival marching society -- as if any of that took any practice. I talked to light-complected, Catholic, French-named blacks who said that the Zulu Parade was what you might expect of the darker, Protestant blacks they still occasionally referred to then as "American Negroes." I interviewed prominent business leaders whose Carnival "krewes" -- the organizations whose floats parade through the streets during the Carnival season...
...people who believe that the line at Galatoire's Restaurant, which does not take reservations from anyone, is the only aboveboard operation in all of southern Louisiana -- but the New Orleans assumption of a corrupt motive in any act can make Americans feel naive. In 1975 I asked a French Quarter character I knew what effect the Superdome would have on the city, and he said that once the land deal was done and the insurance written, "the rest is commentary...
...likely to be of the same Irish or German descent as the Brooklyn dockworker he sometimes sounds like. The person I have known who most naturally fit into the pace of New Orleans -- a person whose normal and astonishingly effective way of keeping appointments was to stroll around the French Quarter, assuming he'd run into the appropriate person by and by -- was born and raised in Pottsville...
...what I've been writing about is the gradual fading of its foreignness. I suppose yats still hold practice parade the week before Mardi Gras, but in a lot of ways Mardi Gras has become a more American event. The number of people roaming the streets of the French Quarter on Mardi Gras day seems to have increased steadily and the percentage of them in costume seems to have decreased, as that part of the Carnival celebration has changed from a family costume party to another stop on the relentless tour of all- purpose American event-attenders. Mardi Gras turned...
...basement. There is a theory that the person responsible for the greatest change in the city was the engineer who finally figured out how to build massive skyscrapers on river effluent. The result was a row of huge oil-company office buildings and, on the edge of the French Quarter, a gaggle of high-rise hotels -- hotels large enough to hold the sort of national conventions that could make every night in the French Quarter seem like the Saturday night of the Tulane-L.S.U. game. The French Quarter, particularly along its river edge, was slicked up for the increasing...