Free Agents Brass Band “We Made It Through That Water”
If the title of today's Mardi Gras Moment was Mardi Gras Spirit makes you wonder just what that might be, I'll tell you. It's an enduring human capacity for merriment and make-believe, for mirthful mockery and the creative indulgence of whimsy, as expressed in the customs and traditions associated with Mardi Gras. The Mardi Gras spirit is what compels one to summon the lost innocence of youth and seek ritual transformation through masking and parading.
More fundamentally, it is associated with optimism and positive thinking, as was demonstrated by the heroic determination of New Orleanians, in spite of the devastation of wrought by Hurricane Katrina, to successfully stage Mardi Gras in 2006—which helped the city believe in itself agian. It is this aspect of the spirit that novelist and journalist Robert Tallant had in mind when he observed, in his 1947 book Mardi Gras…As It Was, that Mardi Gras “will live through whatever catastrophes occur,” because it is, in essence, “a symbol of the art of being human, and wherever people are still human, wherever they still enjoy living, it will exist in some form.”
