Take Me to the Mardi Gras
Fat Tuesday in Galveston
First is New Orleans, population 377,000, then Mobile, Alabama, pop. 185,000, then Galveston, pop. 53,000.
Among the several dozen things we didn’t know about Galveston when we moved here was that it hosted the third-largest Mardi Gras celebration in the United States.
More about why and wherefore in a second.
My first encounter with Mardi Gras came in 1974, one year after Paul Simon released “Take Me to the Mardi Gras,” which I knew even when I was 14.1 For some reason, my unexceptional high school band in Springfield, Missouri was invited to march in a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans. We took a Greyhound bus there, just under 700 miles.
I don’t remember having any preconceptions about the Mardi Gras or New Orleans, but my best friend Steve did. As we were nearing downtown, he turned to me and asked, “Do you worry that God could decide to strike this city down while we’re here?”
The other enduring memory of that trip is from the parade itself. A spectator came into our ranks, lifted the bell of a fellow trombonist, and poured a cup of beer into his instrument.
When I was young, my family attended a mild-mannered Episcopal Church, so I never got the full weight of either Mardi Gras or Lent. My father’s regular Lenten sacrifice was to give up watermelon.
I became (briefly) observant around 20, and that’s when Lent began to register. I didn’t participate, but I appreciated the principle, which was to remember Jesus’s sacrifice, to weigh our own shortcomings, and to live like those things mattered, which is to say, soberly.
Appreciating Lent allowed me for the first time to really grok Mardi Gras. That intellectual and emotional shift was useful for the next time I visited New Orleans during Mardi Gras, when I was 22. In 1982, my friend Rob and I drove there from Austin in my VW Beetle. Almost the entire trip is lost to me because we did the traditional thing. We drank ourselves silly.
The point of Mardi Gras in New Orleans is to celebrate life, and celebrate hard. Mardi Gras, like life, will end soon, before you’re ready, and then you’ll have Lent to remind you of all the things you should have done in the life you should have lived. In the meantime, drink up.
Mardi Gras in New Orleans starts on January 6 and usually lasts more than a month. Mardi Gras in Galveston lasts two weeks – the two weeks before Lent. Mardi Gras in New Orleans is a full-on debauch. Mardi Gras in Galveston is more my speed.
A founder of Galveston, Michel Menard, is said to have thrown the first Mardi Gras ball here as a housewarming in 1840 at what is now known as the Menard House, the oldest surviving house on the island. Most sources place the first public celebration of Mardi Gras in Galveston to 1867, just ten years after the first celebration in New Orleans.
Architecturally and culturally, Galveston has always reminded me of a miniature New Orleans. When I looked at censuses from the late nineteenth century, I began to understand why. Every third person seemed to be from Louisiana, and many of them were from New Orleans.
After the Civil War, when Galveston became, in Gary Cartwright’s words, the “largest, bawdiest, and most important city between New Orleans and San Francisco,”2 Mardi Gras celebrations here picked up steam. By the 1920s, Mardi Gras festivities had become prime drivers of Galveston’s burgeoning tourist industry.
World War II put an end to that. But in 1985, developer and Galveston native George Mitchell spearheaded a revival of Mardi Gras celebrations on the island. Today, Mardi Gras brings over a quarter million people each year – five times the city’s population – to this skinny sand barrier.
But our celebrations are nowhere close to the scale of New Orleans’. We live 12 blocks from the celebrations’ epicenter. This is Saturday as I write. My wife and I, with our dog Astro, took a walk before dinner to our favorite fish market on the bay and passed through blocks of revelers. It was a party atmosphere, and it would get rowdier later, but it had the vibe of a family party.
Mardi Gras here seems less a debauch than a temporary respite from life’s worries. The worries can wait. Tomorrow, there’s the Barkus and Meoux Parade. Galveston’s Mardi Gras is more like Paul Simon’s, where you can take your burdens and let the music wash your soul.
My favorite version of “Take Me to the Mardi Gras” is by pianist Matt Rollings, from his 2020 album, Mosaic. BTW this entire album is sensational, and not just because he includes a cover of one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite songwriters, Walter Hyatt.
Galveston: A History of the Island. Gary Cartwright. TCU Press, 1991.
I wonder what that Steve fellow is up to today… possibly preaching to folks who give up watermelon for lent.