- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E_T A L K So you've purchased your Eurorail ticket. Now where do you go? Advise would-be travelers in Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Looking for Kathmandu By Jeff Greenwald Gossip, chickens and sex in Nepal (02/26/98) Landing the Big One By D.T. Max Fishing and frolicking in Cabo San Lucas (02/25/98) Arigato, Nagano By Cintra Wilson Weird TV, naked hot springs and the big heart of Japan (02/24/98) Tara and Michelle are great and I am a worthless protozoa clinging to their skates By Cintra Wilson (02/23/98) Lost in Nagano By Cintra Wilson Our correspondent's innocent search for the men's slalom turns into an amazing half-day odyssey (02/20/98) Browse the Feature archives		SINGING, DANCING, DRINKING AND OTHER TRADITIONAL MAYHEM ENLIVEN A STAY IN RURAL LOUISIANA. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY MARGARET SPILLANE AND BRUCE SHAPIRO BASILE, Louisiana -- At dusk, flooded rice fields extend out beneath giant prairie skies like black mirrors on either side of Highway 97, broken only by white plastic floats marking submerged crawfish traps. With over 200 miles of elbow room east to New Orleans or west to Houston, this is the heart of rural Acadiana: Cajun country. Out of the dark leaps a lighted sign. The parking lot of DI's restaurant by the roadside is jammed with cars; a steady stream of people -- neighbors even though their houses are separated from one another by those glistening rice fields -- moves through the door. A smaller number assemble on one side of the parking lot, by a long wooden wagon hitched to a pickup truck. The wagon is lined with benches and hand-painted in brilliant red, yellow and green: TEE-MAMOU MARDI-GRAS. Clustering around the wagon, they talk among themselves in quiet, purposeful tones. Most are garbed in pajamalike costumes stitched from vivid scraps of fabric and heavily fringed along the seams and hems; on their heads are capuchons -- tall, pointed caps such as those worn by ladies of a European court centuries ago. In their hands, not yet on their faces, are masks crafted of pieces of window screen, with designs meticulously painted on, so that the face of the wearer flickers behind the terrifying or comical grimaces. For a week we've been bunking in cabins at two nearby state parks, Sam Houston Jones and Chicot, where our windows look out on Spanish moss and cypress marshes, graceful snow-white herons and red-headed muscovy ducks. The deep silence promotes the kind of sleep critical to paying good attention: We need to be fully alert to grasp even a fraction of the deep and ancient and farcical and serious events we're witnessing, events that will culminate at midnight on Fat Tuesday. Hours away, New Orleans is readying its bacchanalian carnival. But in the Louisiana prairie -- in towns like Basile, population 1,700, or the adjacent cluster of farming neighborhoods known as Tee-Mamou -- Mardi Gras signifies a different tradition entirely: a community festival in which spectacularly masked citizens go from house to house in the countryside singing, dancing, drinking and unleashing temporary, playful mayhem. While the ostensible purpose of the courir, or run, is to arrive disguised on the doorsteps of neighbors and cajole offerings -- sausage, rice, money, a live chicken -- for a communal gumbo served up at day's end, what compels these modern Cajuns to this annual reenactment is an almost inarticulable but electrifying connection not only to their own families' difficult circumstances earlier in this century, but to the celebration's direct descent from the pre-Lenten carnivals of medieval France. Outside DI's one of the uncostumed men -- in Mardi Gras terminology, a capitaine who will play his own part in the pageant -- climbs into a wagon and calls for order. "OK. Now listen. We're going to have a good time. Any money you collect, you give to the capitaines. We're going to sing the song. We're going to dance. Then we cut up." The capitaine is the linchpin in the balance between order and chaos: He keeps people to script -- how they sing the Mardi Gras chant while linked arm in arm, how they collect the alms and food. Then one of the women calls out: "Allons, Mardi Gras!" To Cajuns, "Mardi Gras" takes on new and rich meaning. Mardi Gras may be the name of the celebration on the day before the long Lenten fast begins. But it is also the name for the whole band of maskers, and it is the label for the individual participant as well. "Look at that Mardi Gras!" someone may exclaim of a masker clambering over a roof. Individual, community, festival merge into a single phrase. Inside DI's, the Cajun band, which has been playing to a crowded dance floor, suddenly falls silent. Then just the fiddle picks up again, a repeated driving figure. Enter the masked Mardi Gras: in tight line two abreast, arms linked, stomping and swaying. The individuals from outside are completely unrecognizable, transformed in bearing as well as by mask. As the band picks up the beat they form a circle with the capitaine, who now bears a whip of braided rope, in the middle like a ringmaster. At the conclusion of this spiral dance, the crowd tosses coins onto the floor and the maskers scurry about collecting them. Then, unaccompanied, they start to sing in Cajun French: a pulsing, minor-key tune that could come out of a Renaissance town but is known throughout the Cajun world simply as the Mardi Gras Song. "Greetings to the master and mistress," goes the last verse of Tee-Mamou's particular version. "We ask you for a little something." They approach people in the hall, palms open in supplication, begging in disguised voices for change: "Cinq sous? Cinq sous? Five cents?" Then the band picks up a lively two-step and the maskers grab stray civilians for a dance -- touching their pockets to lure more change out in the process, or abruptly hectoring them to acts of generosity. And there is still one more act to this pageant: When the dance number ends, the capitaines must eject the Mardi Gras from the hall. "Then we cut up," the capitaine had declared: This is what he meant. As the Mardi Gras cling to pillars or clamber onto tabletops, the capitaines whack them down with the rope whips, or haul them out bodily as Mardi Gras twist and scurry, until finally the whole entourage exits to applause. On Mardi Gras day, the scene becomes even more wild. In Basile, master mask-maker Potic Rider assembles dozens of Mardi Gras at 7 a.m.; by the time they leave at 7:30, they are already shouting and stomping and rocking the open wagons that will carry them house-to-house in town. Careening off the wagons at each stop, the Mardi Gras dance to the door led by a lone accordion player, whooping and hollering. They scramble up trees, or commandeer a wheelbarrow; spectators are likely to be approached by a begging Mardi Gras only to find their shoes slyly tied together, or to be hoisted suddenly aloft before a capitaine whacks the masked miscreant with a whip. Then, suddenly, Rider will appear on a doorstep to announce he has permission from the host for the visit. Suddenly, the cavorting Mardi Gras go silent and fall to their knees in supplication. In a thrilling baritone, Rider sings out the first line of the Mardi Gras song over the crowd; it becomes a call-and-response chorus, ending with exuberant shaking of fists aloft. N E X T+P A G E+| This is not a tourist event