So I took my iPhone for a stroll in the Quarter the other day.  I was carelessly texting, surfing, and answering email, all while getting a little exercise, when I nearly got creamed by a cab.  The Arab gentleman behind the wheel told me what I should do with my fancy phone and strongly suggested I keep my eyes on the road.  Now this little incident got me thinking about how technology changes everything, even a harmless walk in the Quarter.

It seems like nothing escapes the influence of our networked world, including our most ancient and hallowed traditions…take our Mardi Gras for example.  Before the advent of cell phones and all the texting, google-mapping, and connectivity they provide, the Mardi Gras experience was an entirely different beast, a beast that teetered on the lip of chaos and adventure.  Now revelers can use their phones to coordinate whole platoons of friends with military precision, whereas in the past there were no digital lifelines.  For those who can’t recall a Mardi Gras before the mobile era, let’s take a walk down memory lane.

TWILIGHT ZONE VOICE:
Picture, if you will, a band of young revelers from a regional state college, fresh-faced kids arriving in New Orleans for their first Mardi Gras.  They know almost nothing about the city nor the celebration, other than notions of beads, boobs, and booze.  After the hotel they gather their flasks and half-pints, and head out into the Quarter with visions of nipples and hand grenades dancing in their heads.  As they approach the first throngs on Bourbon Street there is a tightening in their guts, of excitement and apprehension.  They press forward in a loose chain, hands grasping each other’s coat tails.

And then the struggle begins…the struggle to stay in a pack as they squeeze through the intestinal flow of the crowd, constantly distracted by the spectacle on the balconies above them.  One young reveler sees something above, which he simply must immortalize with his disposable camera. He breaks the chain for a moment, snaps his pic, and then...just like that, he’s all alone in a sea of strangers.  He looks around for a friendly face but sees only cruel masks, the crowd around him a churning mass of Dante-meets-Fellini madness.   Suddenly stranded in a strange cityscape, he begins to panic as the realization sets in: he’ll never find his friends.  The meet-up spot is in five hours, and will be long forgotten by then….  This was the Mardi Gras crossroads—one road led back to the hotel lobby where our young reveler could cower and wait for his friends, and the other led to a risky adventure in America’s strangest city.

Full disclosure: I was that young lost reveler, and that night was one of the wildest of my life, a baptism of feathery fire that changed me forever.  I made friends with strangers from all walks of life, street performers, drag queens, dope-dealing clowns, and other lost college kids. I wandered the Quarter all night long, eventually finding Frenchmen Street and the scene that convinced me that New Orleans was where I wanted to live.

When the sun came up, I staggered back to the hotel where all my college buddies were passed out across the room.  After a brief but deep sleep we hit the streets again and I discovered that they had spent the previous night at a karaoke bar on Bourbon, slurping hurricanes and singing “Brown Eyed Girl.”  Two of my buddies were ready to go back home, convinced they had seen the best Carnival had to offer.  I felt like I had seen a completely different city and had to preach the Word to these frat-boy rubes.  I truly pitied them then and I pity the kids today who may never know what it’s like to really get lost during Mardi Gras.