Or does it seem that all the footage and photographs I see coming out of NO MG celebrations are filled with middle aged to boomer white suburban looking folks?
So boomers are now post-middle-aged? What are the age cutoffs for each group?
twicks, who considers herself both a boomer and middle-aged, so think carefully before you answer this. 
MSNBC told me so. Don’t kill the messenger.
)(ducks and runs)
Look, sonny …
Just to finish picking my nit: The Baby Boom generation is generally understood to have been born between 1945 and 1965, give or take a year on either end – so Boomers are currently roughly 40 to 60.
Just sayin’.
I will agree. Watching the footage, the groups seem to be older and a lot less wild.
Alas, where will Girls Gone Wild get their footage this year?
These date ranges are always so vague anyway. I know one of the guys in the Stone Temple Pilots, a group definitely associated with early 1990’s “grunge” and hence with Gen-X, was born in 1961. Being 48 definitely makes me a boomer, and middle aged, chronologically at least :D.
Having gone to the parades on Sunday, I can vouch that there are also plenty of families (black and white and all colors), white preppy teens, frat boys, sorority girls, plenty of young people around.
It’s primarily due to the reporters hanging out in the French Quarter. Locals don’t usually venture there during MG, so you’re seeing images of out of towners. Apparently the boomer demographic is the one making the trip this year.
The Ivorybill family was at several parades this past week, including Rex today. I can assure you that young, middle aged, old, black, white, and everything and everyone inbetween were out. For instance, our family - - kids, 12, 9, 6, and 4 - - shared space with an African American family on St. Charles Avenue today. The 82 year-old matriarch sat in one of our lawn chairs, her adult children stood around us, and her late teen/early 20s granchildren came and went. Our kids sat on ladders. We all had fun.
This is what they like to show you on television so that it seems safe, and like it’s wholesome family fun. This is not how it really is.
I got the hell out of New Orleans Friday morning and won’t be returning until tomorrow. I’m just not into carnival anymore.
The local media has been saying that this has been the best Mardi Gras ever, but what I’m hearing from people that were there is that there has been a lot of violence on the parade routes that they’re not covering on the news.
Grandmaws gone wild?
jasonh300, I’m surprised to see you writing this. My family has gone to roughly 8 parades this year, I have numerous friends on the Uptown parade route on Napoleon and St. Charles, and have neither witnessed nor heard a peep about any trouble on the route. Where are the rumors of violence coming from? Metairie/Kenner? West Bank?
As for the best Mardi Gras ever, I haven’t heard that either. There are very few bands, fewer parades, fewer parties, fewer people in town and on the parade routes, and fewer tourists. There is more trash afterwards since there are fewer trained street crews to clean up. Local media here has been pretty universal in saying that we’re doing a pretty good job going through the motions but that while this will be a memorable MG due to the circumstances, and memorable in that it wasn’t what it could be, it would otherwise be considered a failure by usual standards.
Ivorybill ,glad to hear your take on it. I wanted to make it down this year but couldn’t. Especially sad because my nephew was in his first two parades this year in Jr High band.
Today, while driving from a work-related conference, a great radio station up here in NC, WNCW, devoted the whole day to NOLA music. When they played Irma Thomas, with an extended “Here’s how to do the second line hankerchief thing” riff, I just cried. I know that most of the second line is gone right now, but hope it will come back soon, and as par the course, more determined and stronger than ever. I so hope.
From my time down there, if you are NOLA born and bred, it would be hard to live anywhere else; it’s such a unique culture, and other places in the US would be rather dull by comparison.
To the OP: I think that the media is trying to show that NOLA is a viable place for most tourists, can’t say that’s a bad slant as bad as shape the city is in. NPR has had some good coverage of other people in the city, and their views.
Many of the blacks were dispersed by the hurricaine, and from CNN:
“Thirty-seven percent of blacks and 10 percent of whites said it should not be held at all.”
probably contribute the the lower black turnout than usual. Can’t believe anyone would feel that way, though, and I’m not even a huge fan of Mardi Gras.
Heh… at the gay costume contest I attended Tuesday afternoon on Bourbon St., an 85-year-old woman got up on stage with a shirt that said “I’m Sophia from the Golden Girls!”, shook her moneymaker a little, and showed us that she could still touch her toes. So don’t think it can’t happen!
I know this is several days old now, but I forgot about this thread and wanted to post a followup.
One personal example: A friend of mine was camped out on St. Charles Ave. (Uptown) with his girlfriend’s family taking up a small section of the neutral ground (that’s Yat for ‘median’). A black guy and his kid came up and stood amidst them, which would be no problem except that he was walking all over their stuff. When someone politely asked him to move off of their stuff, he declared that New Orleans is now the Chocolate City™ , not the Vanilla City and that they had no business being there. At this point, a fistfight was probably going to ensue, but 3 NOPD cops showed up on the scene out of nowhere (two of which were black incidentally) and led the guy off in handcuffs for disorderly conduct or drunk and disorderly or something like that.
Anyway, the news I heard on WWL after it was all over was that parade related violence and crime was down 60% from previous years. But they also said the estimated number of people at the parades as opposed to previous years and I don’t remember the exact numbers and didn’t work out the exact percentage (I remember being under the impression that the crowds were around 20% of the normal crowd), but what it lead me to believe is that the proportionate amount of crime and violence (crime to people ratio) was WAY up.
My place of business is in Gretna on the Westbank parade route. I didn’t really hear much about any problems over there, or at least in the immediate vicinity. And that’s unusual. Having been there in previous years, I’ve witnessed fights and heard about many other problems.
This would be my guess. The city government probably asked the news media to downplay the sex and rowdyness, so as to make New Orleans seem more family-friendly.