T A B L E_T A L K Wherever you go, the barbecue seems to taste different. Find out where Table Talkers have found BBQ heaven in the Wanderlust discussion area   ___________________ Want to learn more about beads and beignets? Search barnesandnoble.com's huge selection of books about Mardi Gras ___________________ R E C E N T L Y Railway ties By Morrie Erickson A traveler discovers the real Burma on a train to Mandalay (02/26/99) Escape from Tashkent By Jeffrey Tayler A Peace Corps worker unwittingly falls into a romantic adventure with a Russian waitress stranded in Uzbekistan (02/25/99) Ground zero By Ellen Meloy Excerpt: The Last Cheater's Waltz (01/24/99) Death in Ghana By Tanya Shaffer A simple succession of events in an African village leads to a tragedy -- and a traveler's haunting sense of hopelessness (02/23/99) Walking on silk By Thomas Golembeski A massage teacher in Thailand changes a Westerner's life (02/22/99) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		--------------• Mardi Gras unmasked •| New Orleans' biggest bash features days of flesh, booze and flashy costumes. But what happened to the festival? BY ZACHARY KARABELL Fat Tuesday. The last chance to indulge before the beginning of Lent, the 40-day period from Ash Wednesday until Easter. Fat Tuesday, "Mardi Gras." The culmination of weeks of drinking and dancing, a carnival of bacchanalian excess. From Venice to Trinidad to Rio to New Orleans, Mardi Gras is an anarchic moment of archaic revelry, when people don fantastical costumes and try to get lost in an orgiastic moment of sex and sensuality. Mardi Gras. Flesh and reverie, colors, bodies. That's what I imagined, and that's what my friends pictured when I told them I was going to spend five days in New Orleans for carnival. I wanted to find that moment, that pure moment, when reality faded away, when my mind stopped thinking and my body started moving and the boundary between me and the crowd disappeared. On Bourbon Street. On the Mississippi. In the suburbs. At the grand balls. Surely, at one of these places, it would all suddenly click, and I would be there. Mardi Gras. Day One: Not even close Arrived at the airport and went to a theme party at one of the ugliest hotels I've ever seen, the Landmark in Metairie. Metairie is a typical bedroom community, indistinguishable from hundreds of other subdivision suburbs, except for the crawfish shacks. My traveling companion had told me to dress for a pajama party, and she bought me a lovely pair of burgundy silk pajamas for the occasion. Walking in the circular hotel lobby, I felt like Hugh Hefner, and I was looking forward to a bevy of women in lingerie to complete the tableau. I had visions of inebriated men and women, scantily clad, of tight lace and undulations. As it turned out, it wasn't just a pajama party. It was a "B.L.T." party: "Black Tie, Lingerie and Toga." Most of the men wore black tie on top and colorful boxer-shorts on bottom. A few pudgy, middle-aged men wore togas. Out of several hundred people, I was the only man wearing silk pajamas. Then there were the women, most of them over 40, wearing lingerie. Lots of cleavage, and more pancake than I've seen anywhere this side of IHOP. Half a dozen women who couldn't have been older than 20 were showing, shall we say, lots of cheek. Wandering around the dance floor attempting to dance to a band that I wouldn't wish on a Long Island wedding, I was suddenly caught in the middle of a line-dance. Drunk men in togas and in half-tuxedos moved through a series of precise steps perfectly in sync with 60-year-old women in nightgowns. Dozens of people, eyes glazed, moving across the floor in lock-step, as if someone had pushed a button and put all of them in a trance and then instructed them to square dance. Ten minutes later, one guy was still going, by himself, near an exit. Outside, my companion and I had fled to the Jack Daniel's hospitality table, where a 20-year-old woman from Chalmette was dealing blackjack with J.D. currency. We ordered two drinks, and she graciously cheated for us so that we could win 50 J.D. dollars and exchange them for T-shirts. We left at 1 a.m. They were still line-dancing inside. Day Two: The real Mardi Gras? This was it. I wasn't just going to see Mardi Gras. I was going to be inside it. I was going to put on a costume, get on top of a double-decker float and spend five hours tossing beads, cups, tiny frisbees, stuffed animals and women's underwear to thousands of people in Metairie. I was going to be a member of the Krewe Mercury, whose theme this year was "Mercury Loves the Movies." My float was decorated with motifs from the "Lion King," and everyone on it wore a tan-gold gown, with a gold-lamé lion stitched on. And like all members of all Mardi Gras krewes (a word invented by the Comus society in 1857 to give the club an Old English flavor), everyone wore a mask. It was a beautiful day. Unlike the "super-krewes" such as Bacchus, Endymion and Orpheus, which paraded downtown at night, this was a family-oriented krewe, with kids as young as 4 along with parents and grandparents. And unlike the established krewes such as Rex and Zulu, Mercury was a suburban upstart. The floats gathered in the parking lot of a mall, and we assembled at 11 a.m. for an early afternoon start. It took nearly two hours to hang all the beads on the little hooks at the top of the float, and I was looking forward to dispensing them to the crowds. Until the 1950s, the krewes threw glass beads from Czechoslovakia. In the late 1800s, the krewes were often manned by the very rich, and throwing little objects to the crowd was a form of noblesse oblige. Today, most of the krewes aren't so elite, though many are still by invitation only and can cost each member thousands of dollars to belong to. Even Mercury wasn't cheap. I had to pay $350 for the privilege, and that included a fee to the Mercury organization, which had to pay Metairie for street cleaning and police escorts, and money for the beads and assorted throws. Mardi Gras is a huge business for the people who manufacture beads and throws. Kern Studios, which outfits 33 of the Mardi Gras parades, gets nearly $20 million each season, and this year, I pitched in about $200. Of course, the "king" of Mercury had to pay as much as $10,000, and for the ultra-exclusive Rex parade, the Rex king, who is the official king of Mardi Gras, spends more than $100,000 for the right to govern the city from the night of Lundi Gras (the Monday before Mardi Gras) till midnight on Mardi Gras day. That afternoon, I tossed nearly a thousand different objects to men, women and children who lined the seven-mile route. For five hours, I entered a weird, meditative state, tossing one string of beads after another. As the float appeared, the crowds would rush toward it, arms raised, faces lit with hope and excitement and demand and lust. Judging from the expressions, you would have thought that we were throwing gold doubloons, precious gems or tiny bits of pure happiness. People leapt to intercept a string of beads meant for someone else. They fought over 99-cent strings of white plastic balls that landed on the grass. They dropped cups of beer, jumped up from picnic chairs and leaned dangerously far off of ladders, all to obtain beads and cups and little stuffed animals. Five hours of frantic, smiling, grasping faces passed in a blur. I remember a gaggle of teenage girls, flaunting cleavage and bare-midriffs, running alongside as I hurled string after string after string. I remember trying to toss a young boy some beads while the float was moving quickly. He began to turn away just as the beads reached him, and they smacked him in the face; stunned, he fled to his father and burst into tears. I tried to wave, as if to apologize, but it was too late. We were on to other people, and they were demanding, and I was obliging. At the end, my companion, electrically charged from the experience, remarked that it was like giving love. Several older members of the krewe quickly dismissed that idea. "Yeah," a hard-worn woman next to us replied, "greedy little bastards. They just take, take and take." "Uh-uh," another member of the krewe chimed in, "they'll say and do anything. They smile, say they love you, but five minutes later, they'd rip your heart out if you gave them the chance." N E X T+P A G E | Breasts and beads on Bourbon Street   PHOTOGRAPH: UPI-CORBIS/BETTMANN _________________________________ For more information: _________________________________