Parade Observations

My abomination of the day is the picture in my morning newspaper of actress Marisa Tomei (The lady in "My Cousin Vinny") riding on a Mardi Gras float she graced as one of the celebrity honorees in a parade Saturday. Marisa is a good actress and a nice lady. but her photo in the newspaper showed her talking on her cell phone as she sat atop the float throwing goodies to the crowd. The caption bellow the picture said "Marisa calls Mom". If so, I hope mom told her it was ill mannered to use her cell phone that way.
Some observations about two Mardi Gras parades seen Saturday night. We saw two parades here in suburban New Orleans, The Krewe of Isis and The Corps De Napoleon. They were a tale of two cities, one being excellent and the other poor. To the Isis parade first........... Isis had big beautiful flats, good marching bands, some jazz band truck floats and plenty of organization. The parade is an all women's Krewe (we spell crew that way when it involves a Carnival organization) As we both know, women are smarter and better organized. No wonder the parade was brisk and had no gaps whatsoever. All of the floats, including the double deckers, had plenty of maskers who were properly dressed and who tossed great amounts of goodies to the crowd. We caught most of our "stuff" from Isis that night, little from the second parade, Corps De Napoleon. As to Corps De Napoleon, it was a lesson in no no's for parades. The floats were ordinary, some shabby, there were too few riders who threw much less than the Isis members, some were not wearing the obligatory masks, the marching bands were few and instead rag tag "dance teams" marched out of step with blaring music. There wee some gaps in the parade (we left before the end because of the delays) one of which lasted almost 15 minutes. And what most distressed me about Napoleon (It's a good thing the real Napoleon didn't see this parade. He surely would have declared war and invaded it) was that I saw 3 riders chatting on cell phones during the parade. And one of those was on a "Duke's float.
This is the first parade of the season (we have seen 5 so far) in which I noticed cell phones on floats. I am not hallucinating (this time) because Jane made a remark also about this tech no/rudeness. I do hope the parish officials who monitor our Mardi Gras parades take note of some of the deficiencies of Napoleon. And how was the crowd? It was good, large and as a whole were congenial. There were some partial costumes (costuming is usually only on Mardi Gras Day) and all were polite.
Everyone is usually friendly at Mardi Gras parades. There was one pack of drunken adults, mostly middle aged. But they harmed no one and were probably unaware of their condition. Haha Maybe that drunken group should have been in the Krewe of Napoleon.