I went to the St. Louis Mardi Gras celebration, and it was every bit as fun and disgusting and awesome as expected.
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I had never been to Mardi Gras, so I had no idea what to expect. I knew Soulard’s celebration was rumored to be epic. Decked out in yellow, purple and green, my friends and I were in for a treat.
At 9 a.m. on Saturday, we stopped by Casey’s for energy drinks and greasy slices of pizza, then began the trek to St. Louis. Getting downtown was easy enough, but then we were faced with a dilemma: How to get to Soulard when the entire city was on their way there? We parked downtown and decided we’d follow the crowd of other twentysomethings, many of them already indulging.
I watched someone chug a milk jug full of mysterious liquor. It was 10:30 in the morning. We were in the big city now!
With hundreds of people walking to Soulard, my friends and I decided we’d simply join in the three-mile mini-parade. We chatted with other Mardi Gras-goers and ran through busy intersections and generally were in the way of innocent drivers who had made the mistake of trying to navigate St. Louis during Mardi Gras.
Eventually, we managed to get to Soulard and locate the parade route cutting through the neighborhood. And it was chaos. A thousand people lined the street. The parade was an explosion of plastic beads and colorful floats.
My friends and I exchanged a look. When in Rome…
And so we joined in the fun. Yelling and waving at the parade, we laughed the entire time. The parade walkers were throwing beads left and right, and I finally managed to catch one of the flying necklaces. Triumph! I soon had a scarf of necklaces, the beads clattering as I jumped up and down.
When the parade ended, most of the families with children seemed to head out, and the real excitement of Mardi Gras began. My friends and I inched our way through the crowds, gripping each other’s hands so no one got lost. We eventually found ourselves on a street corner in the middle of Soulard, with tents lining the street where you could purchase hot cider with rum, cherry bomb hurricanes, frothing beers and funnel cakes.
We bought an entire pepperoni pizza and devoured it. I sipped a hurricane, letting the cherry syrup fizz on my tongue and stain my lips red. There was pumping music and men on stilts and people hanging out their apartment windows, throwing down beads to passersby.
The hours passed in a blur of dancing, joking and, inexplicably, eating Girl Scout cookies purchased from a very entrepreneurial Girl Scout who braved the Mardi Gras crowd lugging a wagon loaded up with Thin Mints.
My friends and I shouted at each other over the music and consumed way too much sugar and secondhand smoke. We crunched our way over broken glass, dodged suspicious puddles, and inevitably spilled our drinks down our wrists. It was gross and fun and sticky and silly and awesome. Why not just enjoy it?
Our Mardi Gras fun only lasted a few hours before we were exhausted, sunburnt and cold, with our feet aching and our stomachs threatening to rebel against the pizza and hurricanes. We hailed an Uber and made a harrowing escape out of the Soulard chaos and back home, where we collapsed into the couch.
A wild time and in pajamas by 6:30 p.m.? Sounds like my kind of party.
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