Do Mardi Gras Parades Need to be So Long?

The Leviathan float in Orpheus, by Alex Rawls

One way to address the bead waste is to shorten the parades and Carnival nights.

Beads aren’t the bad guy, but they’ve become an inseparable part of the Mardi Gras story. During Carnival this year, my mom called to tell me about a story in a Canadian newspaper about the problem with bead trash and efforts to find alternatives. I talked to riders and people along the parade route this year who preferred more practical throws, things that had a life after Carnival season. Since my daughter takes her lunch to school in her Hermes insulated bag and wears Bacchus socks while I use a Muses coozie to keep my beer cold, I definitely appreciate that approach.

At the same time, I like beads. They come with a lot of tradition, and I like the visual sign of a shared experience. There’s magic in the moment when you notice everybody in beads—particularly flashing ones at night—that’s lost when people catch something and promptly stuff it into a grocery bag to take home. The item doesn’t get 10 seconds of attention after the catch and probably even less at home when people sort through their loot.

The way beads become trash. is hard to deny, but the process by which that happens merits a think-through. There comes a point in any good parade where you’re kicking aside broken beads or those too common to pick up, and when the parade’s over a crew is raking up pounds of unwanted beads that went almost directly from the float to the trash. But I don’t think the problem is beads. People don’t let the first beads thrown their way hit the ground; they catch them. They see good beads and they want them.

The problem is that beads become too common to care about, and at some point in a parade there’s little incentive to pick up beads at your feet because more will fly your way in moments and will continue to do so for the next hour or more. In economic terms, there’s no scarcity of beads.

My solution isn’t to steer away from beads; it’s to have shorter parades with a cap of 25 floats, to pick an arbitrary number. Fifteen of 30 parades on the St. Charles Avenue and Mid-City routes had more than 25 floats this year, while five—King Arthur, Tucks, Thoth, Orpheus, and Zulu—had 40 or more. There came points in all of those parades where beads went from being a great catch to a nuisance because they come endlessly.

To be fair, Carnival is a profligate time, so a certain amount of wastefulness comes with the territory. Until people find ways to mass produce and sell ecologically friendly cheap beads, we’re going to be dealing with trash beads. There are other ways to address the surfeit of beads. Each rider or float could be allotted a given number of beads to throw, but some of the most generous parades have a great energy—King Arthur, Tucks, Bacchus, Orpheus—and it would be a shame to do anything that creates an incentive for riders to be more reserved. Besides, when riders are stingier with their throws, the class issues associated with Carnival are hard to avoid. When a float only throws a strand or two on a block, the dynamic of the rabble begging the wealthy for a pittance comes into focus too clearly to be fun.

A shorter parade allows riders to throw with all the abandon they feel, but it brings the parade to an end for fans along the route before it overstays its welcome. If a krewe has more members than parade spots, perhaps they could think of creative uses for those members. d’Etat had members in a dance team, and Muses had women in motorized bubble baths. Gestures like these could help add individuality to some parades that are otherwise hard to tell apart.

The problem isn’t only the individual parades, though. Most parade days and nights have at least three parades in them, so people who stay for all of them potentially hit the saturation point well before they’re over. Here’s a quick breakdown:

Friday, February 2 - 55 floats (Oshun, Cleopatra, Alla)
Saturday, February 4 - 100 floats (Pontchartrain, Mars, Choctaw, Freret, Spartan Society)
Sunday, February 5 - 126 floats (Pygmalion, Femme Fatale, Carrollton, King Arthur)
Wednesday, February 7 - 36 (Druid, Nyx)
Thursday, February 8 - 69 (Babylon, Chaos, Muses)
Friday, February 9 - 83 (Hermes, d’Etat, Morpheus)
Saturday, February 10 - 77 (Iris, Tucks) with another 37 at Endymion in Mid-City
Sunday, February 11 - 110 (Okeanos, Mid-City, Thoth, Bacchus)
Monday, February 12 - 62 (Proteus, Orpheus)
Tuesday, February 13 - 73 (Zulu, Rex)

Only on Wednesday did we see fewer than 50 floats, and while each new parade brings new desire to catch throws, interest usually narrows to a krewe’s signature throws as the day or night wears on. For that reason, I’d also like to see the number of parades on weeknights capped at two because the third parade is usually throwing to people who have already reached the bead saturation point.

A shorter parade night would also make Carnival weeknights more family-friendly. We watch relatively early in the route—on Napoleon or Magazine Street—but the only third parade we saw any of was Muses. We never made it home in time for her 9 p.m. bedtime, but we couldn’t leave the route between 9 and 9:30 and see Alla or Morpheus. It’s hard to imagine kids seeing the second parade beyond St. Charles and Louisiana unless they stay up really late.

City Council has announced that it will review this year’s Carnival with an eye on possible changes for next year. According to Nola.com, the paradegoers that abandoned Nyx in 2020 after its founder’s racially insensitive statements have continued to stay away. The sparse crowds have given City Council reason to question if Nyx continues to deserve space on the parade schedule.

The crowds for Zulu slowed the parade down to such a degree that when Rex followed it, it had to skip its traditional toast to its queen if it wanted to make its ball on time. That prompted Rex to press for something to be done, and Skooks’ breakdown of that situation on Twitter is worth a read.

I don’t expect City Council to take up the length of parades and parade nights, but if people are concerned about the environmental impact of the broken and unwanted beads left abandoned on the route, having fewer floats to throw fewer beads is a good start.