Pompom the Duck and her humans. Pompom photos courtesy Ashleigh Sparks and Jack Murphy.

As all good family members do, Pompom helps with maintenance around the store. She keeps the nursery, The Secret Garden, running like a well-oiled machine. When she’s not entertaining customers, she’s nibbling weeds or ridding the garden of pesky insects. No need for insecticides and herbicides when an adorable duck can do the trick.

Ignoring her duck heritage, this princess of a duck loves to “bark” at passing dogs and keep watch for new customers. “If we are in the back and Pompom sees a customer, she will quack to let us know,” Ronda says. “Quack, quack, quack, bark, quack, quack!” Pompom always examines new customers from their shoes up. She follows them with a close eye and takes flight only when alarmed.

Pompom the Duck and her human, Ronda Laddin. Pompom photos courtesy Ashleigh Sparks and Jack Murphy.

When Pompom isn’t keeping order over her domain, she loves to swim in her bright blue kiddie pool. She will welcome any youngster with open wings to share in her fun, and if they bring watermelon, they’ve stolen her heart.

Pompom is no ordinary duck. “She is a crested Indian Runner; that ball of feathers on her head is like a human having red hair,” Philip says. Pompom’s white tiara is caused by a recessive gene that displays itself only in the most special of cases.

And Pompom is indeed a very special case. “She always makes us smile,” says Ronda. “I never knew such a little duck could bring us so much joy.”

Her Majesty Norah Rice Queen of the Mystic Krewe of Mardi Paws

Reigning over the 16th annual Mystic Krewe of Mardi Paws parade was Queen Norah Rice, a 3-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. The theme of the parade on Mandeville’s lakefront was “Mardi Paws goes BARK IN TIME!”

Norah Rice, Queen of Mardi Paws 2012.

Queen Norah was born at Luxxar Cavaliers in Arlington, Texas, where she was registered as Luxxar Don’t Blink. Her sire was Champion Rooftop Stickwitu of Luxxar and her dam is Luxxar Lasting Memory. Norah’s grandfather won Best in Breed at Crufts in Birmingham, England, the world’s largest dog show. Her grandmother was a multiple Best in Show Winner.

Norah has lived with her human parents, Jennifer and Tim Rice, at Innisfree Farm in Folsom since she was 8 weeks old. She resides there with two other Luxxar Cavalier sisters, Molly and Brigid.

Norah’s favorite activities are retrieving tennis balls and playing keep-away and chase with Brigid, with Molly serving as umpire. All three girls also enjoy chasing rabbits and Canada geese at the farm and watching polo matches held there. Norah loves to lay by the fireplace and watch Saints and LSU football games, as well as horseracing. Her musical favorites are folk, Irish and opera. She especially enjoys the Saturday afternoon Live from the Met radio broadcasts.

The Mardi Paws parade serves animals and underprivileged and disabled children throughout St. Tammany Parish. Proceeds benefit Have a Heart thru Art, Scott’s Wish and the St. Tammany Spay and Neuter Group.

It was an actual cannon ball, and it was fired from all the way across the Mississippi River, from the front gallery of one of New Orleans’ most notable landmarks—the Presbytere. A prankster, whose identity remains unknown, had loaded a Civil War-era cannon on display in front of the old building on Jackson Square with powder and a four-pound ball. The blast, which sent the ball sailing over Gen. Jackson’s head and over the river, was reported to have knocked out 60 windows and knocked down a night watchman nearby.

This might be the quirkiest story coming out of a building with thousands of stories to tell. It stands on ground set aside in the city’s earliest plans to house the clergy of the cathedral standing next to it and is the fourth building on the site that was called the Presbytere, or priests’ house. Construction on the present building started under Spanish colonial rule, after the fire of 1794, but was halted after the first floor was built in 1798 when Don Andres Almonester y Roxas, the philanthropist whose fortune financed its construction (along with the Cabildo and St. Louis Cathedral), died. It remained a one-story building until 1813, when the second story and roof were completed. The third floor and signature mansard roof and dormer windows were added in 1847.

The present building, while called “the Presbytere,” was never used to house the clergy, but was leased out by the church first as storage and retail space. Around 1822, it was leased to the city and became the home of the city’s civil courts, where they stayed until 1910. At that time, the Presbytere was turned over to the Louisiana State Museum. Following extensive renovations, it began telling the stories of Louisiana and has continued to do so ever since.

The first floor, once the home of two courtrooms, the Orleans Parish sheriff’s office and the Supreme Court’s law library, now houses the exhibit Katrina and Beyond.
But, as Al Johnson famously sings, “it’s Carnival Time, and everybody’s having fun”—and it’s time to take a look at Mardi Gras: It’s Carnival Time in Louisiana, the comprehensive exhibit on all things Mardi Gras housed on the Presbytere’s second floor.

The old courtrooms are now “krewe” rooms. Rooms where lawyers argued and judges judged and fortunes and liberties were won and lost as clerks furiously wrote down every word of it (for a time, one in French and one in English) now display costumes, masks, floats, doubloons, ball favors, invitations and beads—the trinkets, treasures and ephemera that represent the history of Mardi Gras, one of the many things earning New Orleans a place among the most interesting cities in the world.

The Presbytere. Photo by Jay Rosenblatt, courtesy La. State Museum.

Why do we have all these seemingly frivolous items, these souvenirs of passing parades and remnants of secretive and exclusive societies, housed in such a grand building that was built for a sacred purpose?

“The New Orleans Carnival is descended from ancient religious rites of the Greek and Latin World. Ovid described the Greek shepherds of Arcadia who, five thousand years ago, celebrated a spring festival in hopes of better pastures and the remission of sins.”
—Henri Schindler, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, 1997.

As Schindler points out, Mardi Gras is a very deeply rooted tradition. What’s celebrated in South Louisiana on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday has its roots in ancient culture and is celebrated in some form or another in almost all parts of the world that are predominately Christian, particularly where Roman Catholicism prevails.

Carnival, from the Latin carne vale (farewell to flesh), is the season just before Lent, the religious period of penance and fasting during which the church in its earliest days forbade the eating of meat for the 40 days before Easter Sunday. The last day of the season became Mardi Gras, French for Fat Tuesday, because on that day the Boeuf Gras, or fattened beef steer, was led through medieval towns and slaughtered for a final “farewell to meat” feast.

What are the things that set Louisiana’s Mardi Gras traditions apart from those in the rest of the world? The items that hold the answer to that question are on display in the Presbytere.

Prior to 1852, Carnival here was celebrated haphazardly, with a combination of public and private balls held throughout the city, and a tradition had arisen of street thugs throwing flour, or worse things, at passers-by on Mardi Gras day. Starting in 1852, the Mistick Krewe of Comus, the first organized krewe in New Orleans, held a public parade on Mardi Gras evening and a very private ball after the parade. It served as a model for future organizations.

The Twelfth Night Revelers and Rex were organized after the Civil War. Although at the time Rex was merely 10 years old, a British journalist visiting the city observed:

“The first essential in the successful conduct of the Southern carnival is an entire and unswerving belief in the personality and supremacy of Rex…[R]egal edicts…are not only implicitly believed in, but as implicitly obeyed.”
—George A. Sala, America Revisited, Vol. II, 1882.

Sala wrote several volumes about his travels around the world. He observed Mardi Gras in New Orleans at a time when organized revelry was but 30 years old. Rex’s proclamations, declaring Mardi Gras a holiday and inviting all of his subjects to participate, were printed up and distributed throughout the country in hopes of stirring up interest for travelers to visit the city. Sala had seen one at the train depot in Atlanta.

Preparations underway for a ball in the old French Opera house. Courtesy La. State Museum.

Rex’s early proclamations, along with hundreds of other items of printed Carnival-related items—ball invitations, admit and dance cards, sheet music and parade bulletins—are in the museum’s vast collection, only a fraction of which can be displayed. Krewes seemingly tried to outdo each other in the golden age.

Examples of the elegance and splendor of those bygone days grace the Presbytere’s display cases, which are filled with the jewels, costumes and gowns worn by the kings and queens of various courts, as well as smaller items such as ducal badges and ball favors.

Wayne Phillips, the curator of Mardi Gras: It’s Carnival Time in Louisiana, says the Louisiana State Museum was founded in 1904 and began its Mardi Gras collection right away. “It’s significant that in the 1900s people realized its importance and began collecting items related to Mardi Gras,” Phillips says. “Mardi Gras wasn’t that old then; several krewes were brand-new and the oldest were only 50 years old.” He says the first items collected were ball invitations because they fit well with the museum’s system of archiving documents. Ball invitations are highly collectible for another reason—many are individual works of art, which Schindler refers to as “These beautiful messages from the gods…”

In 1873, the Mistick Krewe of Comus, known for satirical social commentary through its allegorical parade and tableaux ball themes, reached an infamous peak with its representation of carpetbaggers and occupying troops through the theme “The Missing Links to Darwin’s The Origin of Species.” The despised Gen. Butler, who led the Union occupation of New Orleans during the war, was depicted as half man, half hyena and President Ulysses S. Grant as a tobacco grub. A booklet printed by the krewe with drawings of the 100 animals and their satirized counterparts is on display.

Comus Ball 1873. Courtesy La. State Museum.

Parade bulletins, poster-sized depictions of the floats that were to appear in the parades, were handed out or published in newspapers. The earliest Phillips knows of was printed in 1874. “Their importance was not imagined at the time; they offer the only record of what the parades looked like,” he says. The museum has about 350 bulletins, and Phillips says, “What’s unique about the 1874 bulletin is that it’s not printed locally but by an illustrated weekly on the East Coast.” In the 1880s, local printers, notably Walle & Co., printed color lithograph bulletins, which often had advertisements for local business on the back.

The crown jewels of the old-line krewes like Comus and Rex are in display in a room reached through the last vestige of the Presbytere’s role as courthouse—a massive steel vault door that entered what was a fireproof room where court records were stored.

“Crowns and scepters represent a real important collection for us. The crown represents what it means to be a monarch more than anything else,” says Phillips. “A lot of the time, the crown and scepter would survive, but the rest of the costume would not. They’re really hard to collect because, until the 1960s, the krewes gave the jewels to the king and queen, who would donate to us. Now they keep the jewels to re-use every year.”

His favorite story involves Elizabeth Nicholson, who was Rex’s queen in 1948. “The early crowns and scepters that were going to be worn by the king and queen of Carnival would be displayed in a jewelry store window on Canal Street before Mardi Gras,” he says. The public did not know who the royals would be, but Nicholson knew months in advance that she would be queen. “She would go stand in the crowd of people ogling her jewels, because she knew she was the one who would get to wear them. No one else knew that secret yet. And we now have that crown and scepter in our collection for everybody to see.”

It’s funny how things don’t change. Nicholson’s story echoes the observation Sala made more than 65 years before:

“Crowds have been gathering, evening after evening, before the window of a jewelry store in Canal Street, in which Rex’s ‘Crown jewels’—his diadem, his scepter, his orb, and his ring—have been displayed. A leading hardware man gravely advertises that he has been appointed to construct a fireproof safe for the custody of the Royal jewels.”
—George A. Sala, America Revisited, Vol. II, 1882.

Phillips strives to acquire and maintain artifacts from all over Louisiana. He recently acquired a small collection of ball gowns from Morgan City krewes that had been displayed at a museum there.

Of great interest are the costumes and masks collected from the Acadian Mardi Gras tradition, the Courir de Mardi Gras. Towns in Acadiana, such as Mamou, Eunice and Church Point, host celebrations far removed from processions on city thoroughfares and masquerade balls.

“Rural communities don’t have a float-based parade tradition,” Phillips says. “It’s based on visiting households on horseback, trucks and wagons pulled by tractors. Participants perform music, working for ingredients for the gumbo.” Masked revelers travel on horseback or truck from house to house in the Acadiana countryside, dressed as clowns, thieves or demons.

“One thing that is really important is the extent of the disguise, because they are performing acts of mischief. Cajun Mardi Gras mask-makers have devised a variety of ways to make sure the wearer can see out of them but no one can see through to identify the wearer. As a result, you have a group of well-known mask-makers that people regularly go to for Acadian-style masks.” Fifty or so masks are on display from the museum’s collection of over 100.

Acadian Courir de Mardi Gras masks.

Many more items observing Carnival from different cultural perspectives are found at the Presbytere. The Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club’s traditions are celebrated, as are the Twelfth Night Revelers, modern “super krewes,” marching bands and costumes from gay carnival clubs. Modern costumes made post-Katrina out of the then-ubiquitous blue-roof tarp material are displayed in the Presbytere’s Katrina exhibit.

Another item in the collection that’s become common at the parades is a ladder that’s been converted to have seating for children at the top (there’s no indication of whether its owners prefer the sidewalk side or the neutral ground side, though). We might think this is a new invention. But Robert Tallant observed in his 1947 book Mardi Gras that as he wandered from the French Quarter to view a parade on Canal Street, “Fathers held small children on their shoulders, or they held them high above adult heads in particular contrivances that appear in New Orleans only at Mardi Gras time—boxlike seats at the tops of long poles.”

So it is true that, at least with Carnival time in Louisiana, the more things change, the more they stay the same—but I’m guessing today’s ladders are safer.