Bugging Out

Carnival costume conundrums

I live in the French Quarter and every single Mardi Gras I get up early and go out with my phone camera ready, looking for naked people. And every year, the same thing. They are all perfectly modest. They must cover up when they see me coming.

It’s a good thing I don’t work for no girlie magazine. I would get fired.

Then, after I get fed up with seeing people fully covered, I go meet up with the Gunch family at my sister-in-law Gloriosa’s house. The Gunches usually dress alike, including myself, (also modest), and take the streetcar all the way to St. Charles and Napoleon avenues, and then we walk up the parade route until we find a place where we can squeeze into the crowd to watch the parade.

A couple years back, my mother-in-law, Ms. Larda got COVID around December, and felt too bad to make us new costumes like she usually does, so she drug out our old cockroach costumes from a long time ago.

Gloriosa stomps her foot down and says she ain’t going to appear in public again dressed like a cockroach. A butterfly maybe, even a ladybug, but a roach – absolutely not.

So, she talks Ms. Larda into moving into her house to babysit her three kids while she and her husband, Proteus, take a ski trip to Aspen, just like all her snooty friends who ain’t actually Mardi Gras royalty this year.

Not that either Gloria or Proteus ever saw a ski before. But they figure, how hard can it be? So anyway, they leave on Sunday, already booked into a resort called Purgatory Plus. This should have given them a heads-up about what this vacation was going to be like.

Meanwhile back in New Orleans, Ms. Larda is sewing up little roach costumes for their kids.

They actually turn out cute, and it’s hard to make a roach cute.

Well, the rest of us don’t look cute, but we do look like roaches. We got bendable antennae attached to the hoods on our heads. We have brown, shiny backs made of Styrofoam covered in Carnival satin. She even added a line of slimy-looking fur down our arms and our extra four legs. And the best thing she did is, on the ends of our arms, she put claws that we can take on and off our wrists and free up our hands to catch stuff. We each wear the costume like a dress over our own long pants, which makes it possible to use any bathroom we are lucky enough to find.

And we take turns holding up a sign that says, “We are really very rare palmetto bugs.”

On this Mardi Gras day, the rest of us Gunches meet up at Gloriosa’s like usual and get on the streetcar like usual, and then we walk until we find a good spot, pulling the kids in a wagon. It’s easy this year, because people already waiting for the parade naturally back away when a bunch of roaches come along.

Meanwhile, things haven’t gone so good up in Purgatory. It turned out Proteus has a fear of falling. He never realized this, since he’s lived in New Orleans all his life and we got no hills except Monkey Hill in Audubon Park.

He was always terrified of Monkey Hill, and he never knew why. But now his hands get clammy at the top of a practice slope called Bunny Hill. They move to a real slope, which is named Satan’s Crotch. Gloriosa went flying down it, out of sight. Proteus looked down it and said “Nope.” He said it again because it made him feel better. “Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. NOPE!”

When Gloriosa come limping back to their room – she fell halfway down the slope – he was packing. And the two of them agree that the good times should roll, not ski.

They get on a plane home that night (it is almost empty because everybody is going the other way) and arrive home in New Orleans on Mardi Gras morning – in time to get home and then walk the parade route, looking for roaches.

 

Digital Sponsors

Become a MyNewOrleans.com sponsor ...

Sign up for our FREE

New Orleans Magazine email newsletter

Get the the best in New Orleans dining, shopping, events and more delivered to your inbox.