Local News Tuesday: Fat Only Feels This Good Once a Year
Attention, attention! We at Scooter Nation have a very important PSA: Mardi Gras started in Mobile, Alabama. That's right. The Zulu Krewe might be strutting their stuff over in NOLA, but over in Bienville Square (could we sound more Frenchy?), the Mystics of Time are sending throws and moon pies out to the crowds, too. Not only that, but in case you're not from around here, Mardi Gras doesn't just stop with the big cities. Mardi Gras is part of the Gulf Coast identity. Every small town from Texas to the panhandle of Florida and beyond gets into the action. Public schools give everyone a four day weekend. The local Mardi Gras societies throw balls. The whole region buzzes with a collective on-your-second-beer-and-don't-you-feel-good vibe.
And before you turn your mainstream Mardi Gras nose up at those small town parades, consider this next point very carefully: Mardi Gras is not about getting drunk or even about flashing your boobs at every Tom, Dick, and Bubba--Mardie Gras is about catching free stuff. Never mind that you don't really need two pounds of silver Mardi Gras dubloons; purple, green, and gold thong underwear; inflatable bananas the size of a German shepherd; or piles of moon pies of varying quality (good = Lookout; so-so = small foil-wrapped no-name ones; stellar = Lookout double-decker moon pies zapped for 20 seconds in the microwave. Amazing). Mardi Gras isn't about need. It's about glut and decadence and catching obscene amounts of cheap plastic shiny beads that smell like motor oil because let's face it, whatever they're coating those things with can't be good for the environment and yet we allow small children to chew on them anyway.
Catching obscene amounts of beads that smell like motor oil requires focus and strategy. You can get drunk on cheap beer and show your boobs to random men any day of the week, but that's not going to help you map out a smart way to catch the Knights of Ecor Rouge parade four times in one night or make the crucial dive at just the right moment to scoop up that one perfect strand of elusive aqua blue beads. And in small towns, you can find a place to park and you can walk to the parade without the fear of being shot or mugged and no, I'm not exaggerating. And at the end of the parade, when you've caught more than you can hold and you don't really need or want any of it because where will you put it when you get it home and what could a grown person possibly do with beads that smell like motor oil, you can hand your entire plastic grocery bag stash to the nearest passing grade schooler and he will smile shyly and take it all and you can walk back to your car whistling to yourself, sated. The thrill of Mardi Gras is in the hunt, the chase, the perfectly timed dive.
But save a few moon pies. And try them in the microwave, just once (unwrapped on a plate, people). And if you get a banana one--one of those ones with the impossibly orange coating--mail it to me. God knows I love a banana moon pie.
posted by Sparky at 9:26 PM
4 Comments:
Oh, man, are you bringing back fond memories for me! I never noticed they smelled like motor oil, but those beads were fun to catch. Ah, gluttony. OMG, and Moon Pies! I didn't know what one was until I moved to Mobile--at least not the kind they chuck at you at Mardi Gras. Enjoy the festivities, badly spelled French to follow--"Laissez lez bon temps roulez!"
Right, Mardi Gras is not just Louisiana... but saying that it started in Alabama seems like wishful thinking by Alabamans desperate to claim that they have a culture too. There's a book (very academic, sorry) called _Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance_ by Joseph Roach, and some of it is about the Mardi Gras festival originating out of circum-Atlantic culture in the 18th century.
In other words, there is no "root" or "origin" of Mardi Gras. Rather Mardi Gras was invented out of criss-crossing "routes" or movements of people, culture, etc.
In other words, it isn't really honest to talk about Mardi Gras without talking about race and the history of slavery.
Case in point -- drunk white people exposing themselves as they appropriate the music and denigrate some of the symbols of black culture... ga. But also, likewise, more positively perhaps, Mardi Gras' carnivalesque and symbolic, if not real, overturning of the power structure...
... sorry for this comment. I couldn't help myself.
Ahh, BF--if you didn't make that comment for us, who would? No apologies needed.
I correct myself. Mardi Gras supposedly first appeared on the North American shores with the French when they turned up in Mobile. They landed in the Mississippi river around 1699 and named a few things "Mardi Gras Point," and so on, but the first Mardi Gras or Carnival celebration that we've got on record for the States was in Mobile in 1703.
The tradition, however, is certainly older than that.
But I stand by my other claims about the importance of moon pies. Philosophize THAT, Booga man. Let's ee what you come up with for processed marshmallow, squishy cookies, and a vaguely chocolate coating. Mmmm . . . trans fats you have to catch to consume . . . Mmmmm.
I can't resist a dare.
Moonpies, which according to Wikipedia are also called Scooter Pies... hmmm... no wonder you like them, Ms. Scooter Nation !!!
Also, according to Wikipedia, Moonpies were a popular snack for coal miners. I don't know how that relates to Mardi Gras.
But from my own perspective as a student of 18th century culture, I have one word for you: SUGAR. Without sugar, there is no Mardi Gras. Sugar was the basis for the wealth of the Caribbean (and Alabama and Louisiana have more in common with the Caribbean than with, for isntance, Virginia); sugar was the reason that swampy, humid, mosquito-infested hell hole of a region came to exist as a commercial center. This is what the silver dubloons in the Mardi Gras celebration symbolize -- the old sugar economy. Dubloons are a Spanish coin, and the sugar trade routes were organized around Spanish and Portuguese shipping networks. Back then, the biggest silver mine in the world was in modern day Peru. And the way you got silver was by selling your sugar. And what about gold? A lot of the gold came from... yes, you guessed it!... the gold coast of Africa, hence the name, a.k.a. Guinea, which is why the first gold coin ever minted by the English government was called a Guinea and was minted by the same company that first started trading slaves.
And back then just as today, sugar continues to be the basis for everything consumed in the Caribbean... not just fruity rum drinks and champagne, but also moonpies.
And without slaves, there would have been no sugar. (Read Jean Toomer's novel Cane, published around the same time Moonpies came into being.) And without the African culture brought by the slaves, Mardi Gras would be nothing worth mentioning.
But Moonpies, interestingly, are today made of cornsyrup, not cane sugar. Why? Maybe because Moonpies were invented in a corn region (Tennessee) not from a sugar region (Alabama). But maybe also because Moonpies came into being from 1920 to 1950 when the plantation economy of the south had been significantly reduced due to the end of slavery in both the U.S. (1865) and the Caribbean (1897). Unlike corn, cane sugar is a labor intensive product. By then, the global economy and technological innovations were already moving sugar production to other places and to other forms. Oil becomes essential to the new economy and is discovered in Alabama around the same time as Moonpies are becoming popular. And so we get more factory made products... Moonpies, Coca-cola. (Incidentlly, cola is called cola because of the cola nut, which is from Ghana.)
So, Moonpies were invented out of global economic forces -- they are a hybrid of 18th century sugar-plantation culture and 20th century development.
Moonpie Nation, indeed.
Am I too Marxist? Am I too invested in looking at production instead of consumption?
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