My spouse rode in Bacchus. No chocolate throws allowed. period. any violations of the rule would result in explusion from the krewe. The theme for Bacchus? There's No Place Like Home (Wizard of Oz)...with the second to last float, "Just click your heels three times" and the final: "There's no place like home" It brought tears to my eyes! It was a clean way to honor how much we love New Orleans...except that Michael Keaton didn't get the memo when he came on stage at the Ball to speak. More on that later...
Anyways, Every krewe had a Katrina angle to it this year.
KREWE of MUSES - which is by far my favoritest, had an empty float as the final one for Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, which said "We celebrate life, we cherish the past, we will never forget." The honorary float at the beginning of the parade that is for celebrity riders was for "our heroes" that was filled with first responders.
The theme for muses this year was games as in board games. All of them poked fun at Bush and his so called government. They were HYSTERICAL! The board game operation used bush as the patient - $600 to remove foot from mouth, $10,000 to remove oil on brain...etc. One of the floats, the riders didn't have headdresses (shipments from china got all screwy with the storm aftermath) - so they all wore placcards on their heads instead of headdresses. The placards said things like "Headdress evacuated to Springfield, Ark" "Awaiting Headdress from FEMA" "Brownie doing a heckuva job on my Headdress" "Headdress was looted"
There was also "Red Rover" float of the Gretna Police Department - refusing to let people escape through Gretna.
And of course, they had a float with a taped up refrigerator at the mast.
MID-CITY - the affectionately called "Tin Furrl" parade because they have their floats covered in foil to make it shiny. Their theme - The Blue Roof Blues. Each float was a satarized song. "Sign of the Times" was especially hysterical. The float was covered with a bunch of picket signs that had mobbed our neutral ground space following Katrina for businesses to advertise if they were open and available for work. The signs said things like "Se Hablo Espanol" (we didn't have mexicans here before Katrina) "Cheney shooting range" There was also the "MR. E meal" float for the MRE's we all came to know and hate. "You loot, we shoot" which was a float aimed at San Antonio and Oklahoma City who are trying to pillage our teams. Don't steal our teams - you have been warned! "2005 Recipe for Gumbo": green mold, bleach, storm debris. And of course, the Willy Wonka in the Chocolate City float - who can fill our city with fantasy and dreams? The Candy Man Can!
KREWE D'ETAT their theme was "Katrina Olympics" The logo for this year's parade was their ever present skeleton, but he was hurling a refrigerator and his t-shirt was emblazoned with "USA?" The question mark was quite telling. Most of the members of d'Etat are actually also members of Rex. Rex is the oldest krewe and they keep their floats the same every year, very proper and very clean. So the members started d'Etat to be bawdy and obnoxious. They call their "King" or "Grand Marshall" the "Dictator" of the parade. So among their many hysterical floats poking fun at our government leaders and with Fema - they had a marching group called DEMA - Dictator's Emergency Management Agnecy. It was a group of guys in super-hero costumes with a blue tarp cape. Bureacratic Hurdles - about all the crap to go through to tend to the hurricane and now to get our lives back in order. Agony of De Fema was of a slow moving turtle, scenes included "your trailer should be ready by christmas 2006" and "here's to you michael brown." And the final float was titled "Our Heroes" which had gold coins for everybody that did good by us: National Guard, Coast Guard, NOPD...
I saw one hysterical sign carried by a reveler in the crowd "We're from Texas, you owe us!"