What Happens To My Pee When I Eat Asparagus and other stories you'll never hear

Luther Kent--"Who Dat At The Mardi Gras" (mp3)
Bayou Renegades--"Mardi Gras Time, Pt. II" (mp3)

The well-worn adage, "What happens in the French Quarter stays in the French Quarter," may have a superficial usefulness for someone trying to cover one's tracks for indiscretions great and small committed during a trip to New Orleans, but few people take the concept seriously. It is far more likely that you will hear about everything that anyone did in the French Quarter (or Key West or Spring Break or any other "decadent" experience) before it's all said and done.

We'd rather kiss and tell or tell on someone else. That's much more fun.

But, what happens in New Orleans probably should stay there. The problem is that whatever happens in the French Quarter has little relevance to anyone who wasn't there or hasn't been there.

Vacation exploits are actually kind of inside jokes. Case in point: we're in a bar that has cheap drinks and a good jukebox, is stuffed to the gills, and has a happening party vibe going on. A non-stop regimen of "Who Dats" and songs like "When The Saints Go Marching In" fill the air. When they run out, my friend decides to put some songs on the jukebox, but he makes a crucial mistake--he puts on songs that he likes, not songs that fit the mood, culminating in Neil Young's "After The Goldrush," a slow, high-pitched classic that dumps on the bar like a bucket of cold water. When it's over, the bartender shouts, "Hey, man, I love Neil Young and all, but how about playing something a little faster? I mean, it's Mardi Gras." Well, my friend is quite competitive. He plays a Stevie Ray Vaughn first, but then some other kind of British, mid-tempo stuff I didn't recognize, and now the bartender is really on him and they exchange words about if the bartender wants to hear certain stuff why doesn't he put money in the juke and him saying that's exactly what he was planning to do until my friend jumped in. We're not innocent. We're egging this on. There's a woman named Brenda Mac whose husband owns the bar and who once fashioned herself something of a torch singer, and so her album has a requisite spot (the last spot) in the jukebox lineup. "Put on three straight Brenda Mac songs," my friend says. And my other friend takes the bait. And we leave, quite amused with ourselves.

See what I mean?

Now, when you're in it, it gets your adrenaline pumping, is the topic of conversation off and on for several hours, etc. Especially since we went back to that bar later in the evening and had additional confrontations of various sorts. But when you're not in it, it's just a stupid bar story. People with alcohol getting more worked up about something than they should.

And that's the point: New Orleans during Mardi Gras is its own unique world with values that don't apply anywhere else. The string of beads that you stood out in the freezing-ass cold for, that you jostled for, that you leapt for, that you spilled your beer for, that hit so hard they made your fingertips numb, that you shared with a stranger, or, God forbid (not me!), you paid good money for in a store, are nothing but cheap trinkets made in China when you take them out of your suitcase while unpacking at home.

The thrill you felt when the next parade float turned the corner from St. Charles onto Canal may still be salvageable in your mind, but try explaining that feeling to someone who hasn't been. You did what? they are thinking. You spent your evenings waiting for and watching parades?

Whenever I report back to my father even after a family trip to New Orleans, I always feel the air go out of the balloon. The things we did seem so mundane--we ate, we drank, we walked around, we shopped, we took pictures, we went to favorite places we've gone to many times before, we barely stepped into our hotel room. He seems unimpressed. It's like he's waiting for the revelation of some great mystery.

You know, one of the greatest gifts from God involves children, and it is this: children, seen from the outside, seem like whiny, messy, time-consuming little brats who won't do what they're told and who ruin what they demand to be a part of. A blessing, you say? Well, of course, because the blessing is that those who don't have and/or can't have children are usually shielded from the multitude of joys that children bring. It saves the childless from becoming disconsolate. It allows them to develop in other ways.

In some small way, a trip to New Orleans reminds me of that dichotomy. You can't really explain the pleasures of the experience to someone who hasn't been there. You can't effectively claim it is a city that is more alive than wherever that person happens to be living. That causes immediate defensiveness. You can't prove that in New Orleans, food is more than food, parades are more than parades, walking the street is different than taking your dog around the block. What happens in the French Quarter mostly stays in the French Quarter because it doesn't translate easily back in the gray world.