Word: mardi
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Shrove Tuesday in New Orleans. Early on this Mardi Gras morning, before the white folks' Rex comes in splendor to Canal Street, the Negroes are having their own carnival. Up squalid New Basin glides a barge, canopied in sacking, to the wharf at Rampart Street and Howard Avenue. Off the barge strides the King of the Zulus, right royal in black underwear, a hula skirt of sea grass, a tin crown. His sceptre is a broomstick, topped by a snow-white rooster. Preceding him is his Queen, behind are his capering dukes. The King mounts his throne-a decrepit...
...never will King John ride in tin-crowned glory up the Street of the old Rampart Last week, at 47, John Metoyer died. At the Brown Bomber the mourning Zulus gathered, planned a proper funeral with five bands, pallbearers in Mardi Gras skirts of grass, and all the Zulu mourners carrying coconuts. The coconuts would be laid on John Metoyer's bier, that he might fight his way to joy with the heavenly Queen of the Amazon Islands. Mourners hoped that John Metoyer's boyhood friend and Zulu clubmember, famed Zulu Louis ("Satchelmouth") Armstrong, would come down from...
...indigenous to the bayou country as Mardi Gras are pirogues (canoes dug out of cypress logs). Louisiana's first mode of transportation, pirogues are still used by Cajun and Baratarian trappers to navigate the swamps and bayous south of New Orleans. Pirogues weigh from 50 to 100 pounds, are 18 inches wide, six to 20 feet long. Among Cajuns and Baratarians (descendants of Pirate Jean Lafitte's band of buccaneers) a pirogue is a family heirloom, the result of two or three years of painstaking labor. First the tree trunk is scooped out with a mattock and fire...
That Pres Dillard is in trade (banking) is bad enough, but that he neglects his lady for business is worse. To chastise Pres, Julie wears red to the Mardi Gras' Olympus Ball, where unmarried girls traditionally wear white. To chastise Julie, Pres dances her feet off while proper and white-frocked New Orleans belles primly withdraw to the sidelines. That night Julie's good night to Pres is a slap fully as resounding as that which Scarlett O'Hara deals to Ashley Wilkes to give Gone With the Wind its real start. When Pres goes, Julie...
...Composer Cadman's title. Julia Mood Peterkin's 1928 Pulitzer Prize Scarlet Sister Mary, a somewhat less scandalous book than the title led the Portland Junior Symphony Orchestra to believe, inspired Composer Cadman to write Dance of Scarlet Sister Mary. After he had watched a New Orleans Mardi Gras he rewrote it, keeping the theme but less than half of the actual music of the original...