Answer #42 - Laissez les bon temps roulez

I lived in Monroe, Louisiana for a time...a while ago.

For a time I drank sweet tea, ate etouffee on a regular basis, traveled back and forth to New Orleans, learned to make a roux and gained an appreciation for Flannery O'Connor that remains unparalleled. I smoked cigarettes on porches in Adirondack chairs and sipped bourbon & crushed mint on ice. It was steamier than anyplace I've ever lived, outside of Seoul.

 And every other house was haunted.  Including mine.

   I also ate more than one of these - King Cakes, that is. It's a  sweet bread/cake with sugar icing and always purple, yellow  and green coloring.  Mardi Gras tradition.  A pink plastic baby is buried in the dough.  It's good luck to get the piece of cake with the little nubbin in it.  The whole concoction is visually surreal and the baby is really just the hard little plastic metaphor for the whole heart of the thing - somewhere, deep in the Mardi Gras memory is the taste of blood, sacrifice - and  

what better way to express our humanity than chomping on a plastic baby?

I know, I know - this is morbid.  And I don't condone chomping on plastic babies, except this time of year, or any other time of year you may be in the vicinity of beautiful NOLA, but the point is, we lost our Pagan sensitibilities some years ago - most likely because, as is our human tendency, the Pagans probably carried the whole 'sacrifice' thing a bit too far, and, after a while, every holiday is a reason for a little blood-letting, and well, the inherent complications are obvious.  Not to mention shortage of virgins.

But oh, something calls from the way back, way back, doesn't it, as my friend Arbutus says?  Something deep in the dark dark memory that whispers to us to dance around those fires, pound on drums, skirt the edges of civilization and roam the woods with abandon, sweaty and wild, eyes fixed on the moon.

In the company of ghosts.  I spent much of my Louisiana time in the company of ghosts, all manner of ghosts.  The song 'The Ghosts of Peach Street' came from that time.  Characters lived and breathed and died in Louisiana that I could never call out of the air.  I spent time in abandoned houses, on the bayous, on the water and surrounded by music nearly every night.  Most of it dark... some of it joyous - but all of it with the knowing of things unseen, and generally unspoken.  I said, at the time, that the Mississippi Delta hung on me like a wet wool overcoat.  Because I wasn't cut out for those blues, and you should know where you are.

But, oh, Mardi Gras!  Now there was a time! Stories were told of Mardi Gras in Sunset, LA - where the men of the town got drunk early in the morning and stole chickens on horseback.  The townsfolk left the chickens out eventually, because otherwise the drunken men would trash the barns and the yards in search of chickens to steal.  In the end, all chickens were brought to the center of town and put in a gigantic chicken gumbo.

I have no doubt that shortly thereafter, plastic babies are chomped.

And tonight I'm snowed in. In Indiana... and though there's no place like home - tonight, just for a time, I'd be in Lousiana, covered in beads and chicken feathers.