Hey Mister: Feed me something

NEW ORLEANS — For hours before a parade of glittering floats rolls down stately St. Charles Avenue, Carnival watchers are hard at work. Ice chests filled with food and drink soon give way to fired-up grills in the Mardi Gras equivalent to the world's biggest tailgate party.

While boozing it up and flashing flesh get the headlines, the food cooked up or hauled to the parade routes is as much a part of Fat Tuesday as begging for beads and toasting the make-believe royalty with a cold one.

As the Carnival season wraps up with four days of almost nonstop parades, for residents — many of whom will give up their favorites for Lent — it's a great reason to take their food to the streets where the fun is measured in the consumption of everything from gumbo to hot dogs to fried chicken, topped off with king cake and washed down with beer.

"Well, maybe a bloody mary for breakfast, but that or beer for sure," said Barbara Spangenberg, a New Orleans native whose family has been staking out a spot along the parade route for generations.

"It's like a military operation — getting your spot, getting your food and ice chests there, making sure you have chairs and ladders," she said. "And a lot of food, because people eat all day long."

The streets are closed to traffic before the parades, but building crowds make driving in the area all but impossible long before that.

For Mardi Gras, the last day of Carnival, many begin arriving at the parade route just after midnight when the streetcars are shut down. By dawn, the wide median where the streetcars usually roll has become a village of tents, canopies and tarps to shelter chairs, cots, ice chests, tables and grills as celebrants settle in for a long day.

Soon the tantalizing scents of grilled meat, simmering gumbo and spicy jambalaya drift up and down the street. People drink beer from cans and fancy beverages from Mardi Gras cups — the large plastic glasses that are prize catches from floats. King cakes with purple, green and gold icing sweat in their plastic wrappers, while kids lick sticky fingers before asking for another slice.

"I start off with a batch of sausages," said Dewayne Swanson, 46, who has been cooking at Mardi Gras for more than 20 years. "I do crawfish sausage, deer sausage and boudin. Once they start sizzling I have complete strangers coming up asking for some."