Mardi Gras Party

Energized Friday morning by motivating music, I ran longer than ever before -- a banner day for running!  The day progressed with thoughtful interactions and good conversations, finishing the night with a New Orleans band and singers at a Chicago Mardi Gras party.

Following is an excerpt from 1Dead in Attic, by Chris Rose, a collection of stories by Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose, recounting the first four harrowing months of life in New Orleans after Katrina.  Click here to purchase at Barnes and Noble.

Rose lets us in on the accurate, soulful description of Mardi Gras:

“To encapsulate the notion of Mardi Gras as nothing more than a big drunk is to take the simple and stupid way out, and I, for one, am getting tired of staying stuck on simple and stupid.

Mardi Gras is not a parade. Mardi Gras is not girls flashing on French Quarter balconies. Mardi Gras is not an alcoholic binge.

Mardi Gras is bars and restaurants changing out all the CD's in their jukeboxes to Professor Longhair and the Neville Brothers, and it is annual front-porch crawfish boils hours before the parades so your stomach and attitude reach a state of grace, and it is returning to the same street corner, year after year, and standing next to the same people, year after year--people whose names you may or may not even know but you've watched their kids grow up in this public tableau and when they're not there, you wonder: Where are those guys this year?

It is dressing your dog in a stupid costume and cheering when the marching bands go crazy and clapping and saluting the military bands when they crisply snap to.

Now that part, more than ever.

It's mad piano professors converging on our city from all over the world and banging the 88's until dawn and laughing at the hairy-shouldered men in dresses too tight and stalking the Indians under Claiborne overpass and thrilling the years you find them and lamenting the years you don't and promising yourself you will next year.

It's wearing frightful color combinations in public and rolling your eyes at the guy in your office who--like clockwork, year after year--denies that he got the baby in the king cake and now someone else has to pony up the ten bucks for the next one.

Mardi Gras is the love of life. It is the harmonic convergence of our food, our music, our creativity, our eccentricity, our neighborhoods, and our joy of living. All at once.”    
                                                                                                              ~~  Chris Rose, 1 Dead in Attic

Meals

My breakfast hash in the morning.

Breakfast hash on a tortilla = Lunch!

Muscle milk and nuts.

Mardi Gras dinner:  Red beans & rice, 1 small crab cake, Jambalaya.  Passed on the Beignets and Bananas Foster.

Workout

1 hr. 15 min. personal training session