Tropical Isle's Hand Grenade cocktail (Photo by Doug MacCash, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)
Big Freedia performs during Essence Festival at the Super Dome in New Orleans, La., July 7, 2019.
A traditional Louisiana crawfish boil with a sack of fresh mudbugs, corn, potatoes, garlic and spices.
Steve,The Black Mohawks Gang Flag, yells as he leaves the stage at A.L. Davis Park on Super Sunday in New Orleans, La. Sunday, March 20, 2022. (Photo by Max Becherer, NOLA.com, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
A Banksy graffiti painting, vandalized on Christmas, was restored by fast-acting artists
John Kennedy Toole's book "Confederacy of Dunces" was published by the Louisiana State University Press in 1980, 11 years after Toole died by suicide. It won The 1981 Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
Residents tow a canoe -- and a passenger -- across St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans during the May 3, 1978 flood. The May 3rd flood has been etched in the minds of many locals, although it's one of several memorable May floods the city endured. (Burt Steel/The Times-Picayune archive)
Terius “Juvenile” Gray put the New Orleans-born Cash Money Records on the map with his multiplatinum “400 Degreez,” one of the best-selling rap albums of 1998. The smash single “Back That Azz Up” introduced much of the nation to the rump-shaking notion of New Orleans bounce.
Chip Dobson, bottom right, a living history crewman from Alabama, walks toward the front of a Higgins boat that opens once a year for the D-Day anniversary. Normally the boat is off limits to tourists. The National WWII Museum held a day of commemoration for the 72nd anniversary of the D-Day invasion in Europe. The Higgins boat was a landing craft made famous for bringing troops to shore during World War II. (Photo by Chris Granger, Nola.com | The Times-Picayune)
Rachel Unger poses during the 10th annual Chewbacchus parade in New Orleans, Saturday, Feb. 1, 2020. Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus, the sci-fi themed Mardi Gras parade, changed their route this year and marched through the French Quarter for the first time.
Chavon Williams puts a napkin on her son Cayden K. Williams, 12, while enjoying beignets at Cafe Du Monde in City Park in New Orleans on Sunday, August 1, 2021. (Photo by Brett Duke, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
Staff photo by Ian McNulty - At Morning Call Coffee Stand, customers add their own powdered sugar at the table, and many pair them with a cafe au lait. The cafe, with a history going back to 1870, reopened in a new Canal Boulevard location.
Heart-shaped biscuits are a one-day special offer from Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen in New Orleans and a handful of other markets.
Isidore Newman School students take out their frustrations by tackling a dummy covered with an Atlanta Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan jersey at the New Orleans Saints Play Football Experience on Wednesday, April 6, 2022 at Newman. (Photo by Chris Granger | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
Tropical Isle's Hand Grenade cocktail (Photo by Doug MacCash, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)
Chavon Williams puts a napkin on her son Cayden K. Williams, 12, while enjoying beignets at Cafe Du Monde in City Park in New Orleans on Sunday, August 1, 2021. (Photo by Brett Duke, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
The essence of New Orleans is a yin and yang thing. It’s not all killer hurricanes, but it’s not all rainbow snowballs either. It’s a balance of promise and pessimism, pavement and potholes, gentility and anarchy. To search for the essence of New Orleans, you’ll need an umbrella, a sense of humor, and a flashlight in case a squirrel sneaks into a transformer and blows out the electrical grid.
To search for the essence of New Orleans, you should probably consult with meteorologist Margaret Orr's forecast beforehand, channel Lafcadio Hearn and consider the wisdom of actor Matthew McConaughey, who said, “New Orleans is like a giant flashing yellow light. Proceed with caution ... but proceed.”
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Here's a list of 50 essential New Orleans experiences, meant to put a smile on the faces of those who live here and occasionally wonder why, and those who don’t live here and always wish they did.
1. Sipping a Hand Grenade cocktail
The contents of the plutonium-green concoction is a military secret. The flavor is something like a watermelon Jolly Rancher. If we told you any more, we’d have to kill you. Speaking of lethal, pulling the pin on more than one can be deadly.
2. Being blown away by the St. Aug Marching 100
High school marching band music is more important in New Orleans than elsewhere, because it’s the soundtrack for most Mardi Gras parades. And nobody blows the roof off better than the St. Augustine High School Purple Knights marching band. The whole city’s listening, these young men know it, and they never let us down.
3. Reading “Interview with The Vampire”
Expect to meet one of New Orleans’ great mythic antiheroes. Expect to decide that sucking blood and experiencing (almost) eternal life is an idyllic lifestyle choice. Begin wearing a black cape and/or black stockings continually and applying plentiful purplish eye makeup. Visit Metairie Cemetery, find Anne Rice’s tomb and thank her for helping you find yourself.
4. Screaming at a Saints game
It’s not just a sporting event, it’s a family reunion that knows no race, no religion and no age restriction. Everyone’s related in the Dome. Raise a ridiculously overpriced beer with all your rowdy Who Dat cousins.
Big Freedia performs during Essence Festival at the Super Dome in New Orleans, La., July 7, 2019.
The queen of the 21st-century Crescent City music scene is always the bomb. When Freedia invites the audience onstage to twerk, everyone in the joint is suffused with shared excitement, shared embarrassment, and shared sweaty joie de vivre. But ... you already know!
Our infrastructure is devolving daily. Which would not seem to be a good thing. Unless you consider the value of a common enemy. In this fractious world, what else bonds us in unanimity but our Saints and our potholes? We are the quarreling ancient Greeks, and the potholes are the invading Persians. We stand united against them. Not that it does us much good.
7. Visiting the glorious/grim Chalmette battlefield
Take a little trip down St. Claude Avenue to the town of Chalmette, where, in 1815, a rag-tag army of American patriots and pirates slaughtered boatloads of British marines who were bent on invasion. Just think, if they hadn’t won the Battle of New Orleans we all might be speaking English today.
Essential New Orleans: Great Reads From The City You Love
This is your go-to for Creole food and to set foot in a bona fide Civil Rights landmark. This is where you eat gumbo – just don’t over-season it with hot sauce like President Obama did, or somebody from the kitchen might have to set you straight, like the late Chef Leah Chase did. This is where you eat fried chicken. This is where you eat lima beans and shrimp, and this is where you hope they have those baby catfish on the buffet like they sometimes do.
9. Joining the Royal Street rabble on Mardi Gras morning
Every New Orleans household requires a hot glue gun, glitter and closet full of wardrobe remnants from which to produce an annual Mardi Gras costume. Thousands of us band together on Fat Tuesday at 10 a.m.-ish at the corner of Royal Street and Franklin Avenue to march toward the French Quarter en masse, like a migration of psychedelic, surrealistic, politicized peacocks. Nothing compares.
A traditional Louisiana crawfish boil with a sack of fresh mudbugs, corn, potatoes, garlic and spices.
10. Pinching tails at a crawfish boil
Taken for granted in south Louisiana, whole boiled crawfish are a forbiddingly funky delicacy that you won’t easily find elsewhere. To witness a steaming kettle of the scarlet crustaceans avalanche onto the daily newspaper unfolded on a friend’s backyard picnic table is transporting. Extra points for sucking the nasty yellow stuff out of the head too.
11. Catching a sunset on Lake Pontchartrain
Find a park bench facing west, sniff the salt air, and let your mind wander to love lost, mortality, and other areas of the sublime, as you watch the horizon turn to pink, and blue, and orange, and purple watercolor.
12. Listening to “Fiyo on the Bayou”
Turn down the lights, sip some cool, cool wine, and cue up the Neville Brothers’ 1981 album. If you don’t get goosebumps when Aaron tosses of off those high-register harmonies, have somebody check your pulse.
13. Main staging at Jazz Fest
Sure, the sun is attempting to melt you into the ankle-deep mud, the stage is so far away that it could be in the next parish, your girlfriend is missing in action with no cell service. But you are here, you are here, by God, and as Shakespeare might have put it: "Gentlemen in the beer line shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap.”
14. Waiting in line for gas or ice, before or after a hurricane
Heaven knows there’s nothing more tedious or disheartening than waiting in the steam bath-like, late-summer heat to fill up your tank or purchase enough ice to keep the kids’ milk from going sour. Yet here we are, survivors, among the cockroaches and possums yet again. Living to fight another day.
Steve,The Black Mohawks Gang Flag, yells as he leaves the stage at A.L. Davis Park on Super Sunday in New Orleans, La. Sunday, March 20, 2022. (Photo by Max Becherer, NOLA.com, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
INDIANS! Here they come! Black Indian masking may be the most unique of American art forms. Each spring, the tribes gather Uptown at A.L. Davis Park, in Mid-City at the southernmost end of Bayou St. John, and on the West Bank near Landry-Walker High School for spectacular foot parades. Finding a place on the curb, listening to the tambourines sizzle, hearing the warriors wail, and watching the feathers fly is pretty close to rapture.
16. Stepping on a palmetto bug, barefoot
Not all essential NOLA experiences are pleasant ones. Nothing quite contributes to the Crescent City sense of place like encountering a cockroach as big as a bottle cap in the kitchen. Extra points if the skittering across a linoleum floor is audible, or if it’s flying, or (maximum experience) it is fatally wounded by being crushed beneath the ball of the foot.
17. Googling E.J. Bellocq's naughty photos
Ernest Bellocq’s photos of prostitutes from the 19-teens are a struggle between eroticism and pathos, with pathos coming out on top. The mysterious photographer, who died in 1949, gave us a chilly view of the Storyville era of legalized prostitution that was a hotbed — pardon the pun — for the birth of jazz, and lent the town some of its laissez fair mystique. Search for Bellocq’s grave in St. Louis Cemetery No. 3.
18. Riding on a Mardi Gras float
Oh, to rumble down St. Charles Avenue on the second deck, spotting a friend in the crowd, expertly tossing a shoe, a coconut, a holy grail, or a special strand of beads into their outstretched hands. Exulting as if you were Jameis Winston completing a touchdown pass. Parades without throws must be duller than dirt.
19. Praying at St. Augustine Catholic Church
Despite the libertine reputation, New Orleans has a bone-deep religious side. Both the faithful and secular among you should pay a visit to St. Augustine at 1210 Gov. Nicholls St. in the Treme neighborhood. Dedicated in 1842, the church was the place of worship for much of the city’s relatively large population of free Blacks, with side pews reserved for the enslaved.
A Banksy graffiti painting, vandalized on Christmas, was restored by fast-acting artists
20. Beholding Banksy’s “Umbrella Girl”
In 2008, British graffiti master Banksy, the world’s most famous artist, bombed New Orleans. Few of his works remain, but the “when it rains it pours” girl perseveres. And she is as eloquent as ever. Our levees failed us once, just like the girl’s umbrella that seems to exude water instead of shedding it. Look for the masterpiece among the wannabe tags at the corner of Kerlerec Street and McShane Place (St. Claude Avenue).
21. Packing in for the Pinettes
Finding yourself up front on Friday night at Bullet’s Sports Bar on A.P. Tureaud Ave. when the fiery, all-female brass band, The Original Pinettes, strikes up “Ain’t No City Like the One I’m From,” or, better yet, their strangely triumphant version of Valerie. This is as good as New Orleans music ever, ever gets.
Glimpsing one of these modern-day dinos in some distant swamp is certainly a thrill. But it doesn’t compare to the jaw-dropping incongruence of ogling a big gator cruising in Bayou St. John or some other ostensibly tame urban waterway.
Bourbon Street is the middle American id. Channel your Mr. Hyde and plunge vicariously into the lust, the drunkenness, the pathos, overindulgence, inequity, and iniquity. Did I say vicariously, I meant to say vicariously. Vicariously!
24. Staring down a deep-fried soft-shell crab
This is one of the tastiest delicacies in a town that knows its tasty delicacies. The trouble is, it looks like something that once tried to kill Sigourney Weaver in outer space.
John Kennedy Toole's book "Confederacy of Dunces" was published by the Louisiana State University Press in 1980, 11 years after Toole died by suicide. It won The 1981 Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
25. Reading “A Confederacy of Dunces”
The acute absurdities of John Kennedy Toole’s 1980 novel are as delicious as ever. No book is more deeply funny and simultaneously deeply sad. Toole got New Orleans, and eventually New Orleans got him too.
26. Watching termites swarm a streetlamp
Termites are the real residents of New Orleans, the rest of us are just refilling the buffet. Despite their destructiveness, the springtime swarms are the closest thing we usually get to a picturesque snow flurry. All together now: “Oh, the weather outside is frightful …”
New Orleans sno-balls are a little softer and snowier than those found elsewhere. Check out the summertime treat at one of the old-time stands like Hansen's Sno-Bliz, Pandora’s, Plum Street or … really … any sno-ball stand. Try some condensed milk on top.
28. Wandering the Bywater and Marigny
Long despoiled — some might say — by huddled masses of realtors, teeming hipsters, and the wretched refuse of Airbnb, these tempest-tossed neighborhoods are still well worth a promenade amid the eclectic architecture. It’s OK to drink and walk. We recommend a bracing IPA acquired along the way.
Since the time of Tennessee Williams, New Orleans has been a queer capital. Each Labor Day weekend, about the time it seems too hot for the lizards, and the tourist industry has gone on life support, the town erupts with the city’s sultry LGBTQ festival, featuring parades, parties, and general carrying on in the Vieux Carre.
Residents tow a canoe -- and a passenger -- across St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans during the May 3, 1978 flood. The May 3rd flood has been etched in the minds of many locals, although it's one of several memorable May floods the city endured. (Burt Steel/The Times-Picayune archive)
30. Canoeing … on a city street
In many regions of the country, folks wrestle their canoes and kayaks onto the tops of their SUVS in order to portage them to a picturesque stream or lake. In New Orleans all we have to do is wait for a drainage pump to quit during a downpour, and the recreational opportunity arrives at our doorsteps. So convenient.
31. Dining on a po-boy dressed
Go to Joey K’s, or the Parkway, or Johnny’s Po-Boys, or anyplace that keeps it simple. A shrimp, roast beef, oyster, or – especially -- French fry po-boy is the perfect meal. Nobody needs to “kick it up a notch.” Good bread, good stuff inside, mayo, lettuce, tomato, pickle, and that’s it. If you don’t eat your po-boy dressed, then don’t do it in public.
A craving for painted coconuts and black beads rises in the heart of every New Orleanian on Mardi Gras morning as Technicolor warriors appear on the street, marking the arrival of the of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club’s annual procession. As Professor Longhair put it, “You know, you'll see the Zulu King down on St. Claude and Dumaine, and if you stay right there, I'm sure you'll see the Zulu Queen.”
33. Riding the St. Charles streetcar
The picturesque squealing contraption rattles amid a strand of mansions that demonstrate the Queen City of the South’s splendor in the late 19th and early 20th century. The elegant conveyance is the ghost of public transportation past, and, who knows, maybe the future too.
34. Becoming disoriented by the geography
The St. Charles Avenue streetcar comes to a halt near the corner of South Carrollton Avenue and South Claiborne Avenue, which presumably means it has reached the South Pole. But it has not. Instead, it has reached someplace called the Marlyville-Fountainebleau neighborhood, which is more or less a part of Uptown. To get farther Uptown, head west young man. To get downtown, head east. A crow flying far enough in either direction might pass over the West Bank. The streetcar, by the way, has two front ends, so it’s always heading in the same direction – forward — no matter what.
35. Listening to “Back that Azz Up”
The feverish chant has been the Crescent City’s collective earworm since 1999 when Juvenile, Mannie Fresh, and a newcomer named Lil Wayne first belted lines like: “Want to bring it to my house, yeah, on the couch, yeah.” As Freud might have put it, the bounce classic "Back That Azz Up" iterates the concept that "one is very crazy when in love." Or in lust anyway.
Terius “Juvenile” Gray put the New Orleans-born Cash Money Records on the map with his multiplatinum “400 Degreez,” one of the best-selling rap albums of 1998. The smash single “Back That Azz Up” introduced much of the nation to the rump-shaking notion of New Orleans bounce.
Nobody really knows what chicory is, but it was sent from heaven to make New Orleans coffee the best in all the land. Brew it strong and dilute with artery-clogging evaporated milk. Everything else is kid stuff.
Everyone’s heard of primordial musician Buddy “King” Bolden but nobody’s actually heard him, because no recordings exist. Known for his raucous trumpet style and equally raucous lifestyle, Bolden helped formulate the artform we now call jazz, then died in a mental hospital in 1931, adding to his immeasurable mystique. Jazz fiends will want to pass by Bolden’s modest house at 2309-11 First St. in Central City or the Eagle Saloon where he once played, at 401 South Rampart St.
For beginners, nothing in the world is more forbidding than a platter of glistening raw oysters. Yet they are seductive little mollusks, languid, beckoning, becoming, in time, a seasonal obsession.
39. That first taste of king cake on Jan. 6
Irredeemably bland and sugary, king cake is a Carnival season passion that's eaten from Epiphany to Fat Tuesday. The pregnant pastry — it contains a plastic baby — is the harbinger of parades, parties and expanding paunches. Yes, I’ll have another slice.
Chip Dobson, bottom right, a living history crewman from Alabama, walks toward the front of a Higgins boat that opens once a year for the D-Day anniversary. Normally the boat is off limits to tourists. The National WWII Museum held a day of commemoration for the 72nd anniversary of the D-Day invasion in Europe. The Higgins boat was a landing craft made famous for bringing troops to shore during World War II. (Photo by Chris Granger, Nola.com | The Times-Picayune)
40. Visiting the National WWII Museum
Those clunky flat-bottomed boats with the doors in the front that let American soldiers hit the beach on D-Day and start stomping Nazis were invented right here in New Orleans by a dude named Andrew Jackson Higgins. That’s a source of eternal pride. That’s why the National World War II Museum is here, not someplace else.
This ancient dining establishment is a culinary Bermuda Triangle, where one minute it’s lunch time, and the next thing you know, the whole day has disappeared. It’s the spot for old-school shrimp remoulade, oysters Rockefeller, turtle soup, crawfish etouffee. Just one more Sazerac and then I really MUST get back to the office.
Unlike elsewhere, New Orleans graveyards are above ground. They’re like pretty little subdivisions of stone houses, where everyone always gets along. Make a pilgrimage to voodoo queen Marie Laveau’s crypt in St. Louis Cemetery #1. But listen, keep your hands in your pockets; it’s uncool to put marks on her tomb like everybody used to do.
A few decades after Darwin published the “Origin of the Species,” Italian food began evolving into the particular Creole-Italian cuisine found across New Orleans today. Expect more green pepper in the marinara, more garlic in the sweet sausage, and sometimes something called cucuzza. Bravissimo y'all.
Like cars in Detroit and steel in Pittsburg, ghosts are a major industry in New Orleans. So take one of those French Quarter ghost tours, learn about the sadistic Delphine LaLaurie, Arnaud Cazenave’s Carnival-loving daughter, Pierre Antoine Lepardi Jourdan and all the other wandering spirits. Is it all true? You couldn’t handle the truth!
Rachel Unger poses during the 10th annual Chewbacchus parade in New Orleans, Saturday, Feb. 1, 2020. Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus, the sci-fi themed Mardi Gras parade, changed their route this year and marched through the French Quarter for the first time.
The Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus is one of those upstart, downtown, DIY parades formed in the era after Hurricane Katrina. It is a nerd-forward affair, devoted to Star Wars and all other sci-fi obsessions. The parade is too long, not terribly well organized, and in every way perfect for the New Orleans zeitgeist. All hail the Sacred Drunken Wookiee!
If New Orleans had to settle on one, single, signature dish, this might be it. The humble red bean, simmered with sausage and served with white rice, is the manna that seems to fall from heaven here, mostly on Mondays. Louis Armstrong actually signed his letters (typed in green ink with improvisational punctuation) with "Red Beans and Ricely Yours, Louis."
Frenchmen Street is Bourbon Street’s younger, prettier, slightly less crazy sister. It’s New Orleans’ nightclub strip where jazz is still king. Check out a street band blowing hard on the corner of Chartres or slide into a seat in the back room at Snug Harbor.
48. Walking the levee in Holy Cross
Get a gorgeously gritty view of the juncture of the Mississippi River and the Industrial Canal, inspect the architectural eccentricity of the pilot houses, and take in New Orleans’ largest, and most poetically subversive graffiti tag – "OPEN YOUR EYES" – applied to the abandoned Navy station.
49. Perspiring elegantly at White Linen Night
From the time of John James Audubon, New Orleans has been a haven for artists. On the first Saturday in August, the city’s great tribe of painters, sculptors, patrons and aficionados don their best white duds, gather on Julia Street as the sun sets, and raise a glass (actually a plastic cup) to the creative spirit. Why on earth this block party takes place during THE hottest part of the year is anyone’s guess.
Staff photo by Ian McNulty - At Morning Call Coffee Stand, customers add their own powdered sugar at the table, and many pair them with a cafe au lait. The cafe, with a history going back to 1870, reopened in a new Canal Boulevard location.
It’s a beautiful circle of life. Hurricanes remove roofs, insurance adjusters assess the damage, roofers replace the roofs, hurricanes blow them off again, and everyone’s happy. Unless the insurance adjuster or the roofer doesn’t show up, then it’s a whole anxious, bewildering, seemingly endless, waiting for Godot situation.
Lagniappe, pronounced LAN-yap, is fun to say. It’s one of those New Orleans words and phrases that you don’t hear anywhere else. Lagniappe is always pronounced wistfully, preciously, with affection, with the knowledge that such cultural peculiarities are steadily slipping away. Lagniappe means getting an unexpected bonus, like when you pay for an oil change and they vacuum your car’s carpets for nothing. Or when you get to the end of a list of 50 essential New Orleans experiences and you find one more.
What did I forget? Send your suggestions to dmaccash@theadvocate.com. If they're sufficiently civilized, I'll add 'em to the list.
It’s only fair: you read my 50 essentials list and now I’ve read yours. Here’s what we’ve received so far.
“How about swimming in or renting a ‘camp’ on Lake Pontchartrain -- Al Boudreaux
“Great list but you forgot: Riding the carousel in City Park, climbing to the top of Monkey Hill (at the Audubon Zoo), and getting kissed at Mardi Gras Fountain” -- Honee Hess
“I would add an evening riverboat cruise on the Steamboat Natchez (or her sister ship) with the Dukes of Dixieland” -- Bruce Sofge
Heart-shaped biscuits are a one-day special offer from Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen in New Orleans and a handful of other markets.
“Doug, I thought of a few NOLA experiences that could be included in your list: Walking up Canal Street, eating Popeye's chicken, riding the (Algiers) ferry, walking around Jackson Square, taking a river/dinner cruise, walking around with a daiquiri, being in a second-line parade or second-line funeral, going to Mother-in-Law’s (Kermit’s Treme Mother-In-Law’s Lounge) establishment” -- Stacie Thomas
Someone calling themselves Banned Heretic reminds us of the darker side of the Crescent City experience. Not the tone we were originally going for, but the shadow of crime awareness is certainly part of the picture. So here it is: “Good list. But you didn't mention ‘getting carjacked.’ Also: waiting for the electricity to come back on” – Banned Heretic
Hating on the Atlanta Falcons
Isidore Newman School students take out their frustrations by tackling a dummy covered with an Atlanta Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan jersey at the New Orleans Saints Play Football Experience on Wednesday, April 6, 2022 at Newman. (Photo by Chris Granger | The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
“Catching a breeze on the sea wall, waiting for Popeyes on Mardi Gras, answering for umpteenth time about ‘where I got my shoes at,’ waiting in line at Mothers restaurant, standing on the banquet waiting to cross the neutral ground to catch the street car, hearing a tourist ask where Burgundy or Calliope Streets are, listing all the ‘ain’t dere no more’ locations, picnicing at City Park, craving just one last Hubig’s Pie, visiting the Roosevelt (Fairmont) Hotel lobby at Christmas, hating anything Falcons-related, ordering po-boys ‘dressed,’ meeting someone at the flag pole for Jazz Fest, knowing what ‘boiled willies and tomatoes paste’ means (as heard in the Meters’ classic ‘They All Asked For You’), missing the Neville’s closing out Jazz Fest, actually enjoying eating ‘debris,’ driving by Fats Domino’s house in the Lower 9th ward, seeing a spy boy on Mardi Gras morning, not wincing on the first taste of a Sazerac cocktail, not ordering a Hurricane at Pat O’s, singing the Pontchartrain Beach jingle or the Mr. Bingle jingle, touch down dancing to ‘Choppa Style,’ and living in a shot gun house -- Pete Thrash
Running the Crescent City Classic
“Thoroughly enjoyed your super list! Two additions: ‘Strolling thru the Fairmont at Christmas time’ and ‘Running, walking, eating or drinking your way thru the Crescent City Classic’ -- Newton Spitzfaden
Joining the Bayou Boogaloo Navy
“Rafting/kayaking on the bayou especially during ‘Bayou Bugaloo’" -- Ben Brown
Email Doug MacCash at dmaccash@theadvocate.com. Follow him on Instagram at dougmaccash, on Twitter at Doug MacCash and on Facebook at Douglas James MacCash.
The festival has been canceled the past two years due to COVID and hurricanes.
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