Cap’n Ken’s Homespun Wisdom

As Baton Rouge leaders work on a set of rules for local parades aimed at fostering public safety and welfare, I”d like to relate my experience as a participant in the Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade.

The year was 1985. I was working at a little crawfish boiling, poboy making, snoball shaving, pig lip selling, gas pumping convenience store called Country Corner, and we were a fun-loving bunch. Most of the guys who worked there were LSU students from New Orleans who had a connection to the Yat that owned the place. I”d managed to get on there through a neighborhood connection, and by “85 (high school senior year) a very good friend of mine – who shall remain nameless in this piece for the sake of his now-important reputation – had joined me in the crawfish / poboy / snoball / lip / gas industry.

Our store”s manager – also a friend of the head Yat – thought it would be fun and smart to enter a Country Corner “float” in the Spanish Town parade. The theme that year was the Olympics (hey, just a year late) and our master creation was called “Crawfish Goes To The Olympics”. The “float” consisted of the store”s Ford F-150 pickup with a couple of plywood crawfish claws tacked on over the cab. Our gimmick? Instead of beads and doubloons, we”d be giving out fresh boiled crawfish. Seriously.

The back of the pickup had enough room for a garbage can full of crawfish, a keg and about five people. We put about 10 guys back there. Somehow driving duties fell to me.

We set up at the staging area in front of the state capitol about an hour before the parade started, which if I recall was about 10 in the morning. We tapped the keg, busted out the ever-present Country Corner bag-o-pot and waited around for things to get rolling.

As the driver, I didn”t have ready access to the keg … so I brought a 32-ounce cup. I loaded up heavily before the parade and would bang the cup on the top of the cab for more when I”d run dry on the route.

Driving at 3 mph ain”t hard no matter how much you drink; it”s stopping 1,000 times along the route that gets tough. Several times I stopped short and sent the whole crew in the back up into the cab window.

And back behind me, things got out of hand pretty quickly. The original idea for the crawfish was to put three of them into a baggie and hand the baggies out to people next to the truck. But not long into the parade, that strategy was abandoned in favor of tossing individual crawfish into the crowd. Cups of beer were handed out, cute girls were encouraged to drink directly from the tap and more than one parade goer enjoyed some of the gang”s special herbal refreshment.

The crowds around (and on) the truck were thick during the whole parade, and I”m still not sure how nobody ended up underneath it.

We didn”t win any prizes, but Crawfish Goes To The Olympics was a crowd favorite, to say the least.

After the parade was over, we stopped off somewhere (I seem to remember a grassy knoll) to rest up and get drunker/higher before driving the 2-3 miles back to Country Corner – because some of us had to go to work.

But nobody got hurt … unlike another incident that spring involving alcohol, pot (allegedly), a young man”s torso and the white-hot side of a gigantic crawfish pot.

I”d like to say Baton Rouge is over-reacting and parades don”t need no rules. But I know better.