Festival International de Louisiane
Thursday, April 28, 2011
A chance to look at the Festival International de Louisiane from the inside out: become a volunteer!
The festival simply would not work without worker bees who sign up for shifts during the five days of entertainment to sell beverages; provide security; welcome artists and VIPs when they arrive and at the hospitality tents, media centers and hotels; stock pins, shirts, hats, jewelry, posters and sell it at the all important Official Merchandise tent; set up and take down tents, kiosks, booths, barricades, tables and chairs; empty trash receptacles, recycle boxes and keep grounds clean.
Hospitality Director Sarah Moss with pt at large, who volunteered a shift at the Amis Suite on Thursday night. pt (wearing the official Volunteer T-shirt) greeted supporters at the level of Grand(e) Ami(s) $100 - $249; Tres Bon Ami(s) $250 - $499; and Magnifique Ami(s) $500+ “ who helped bring the world to Lafayette.”
Outside the Amis Suite at Malibu stage, guitar and percussion group Touhab Krewe is playing polyrhythmic, Afro-Caribbean, salsa, rumba, pop, trance, with sneaky middle east riffs, danceable if you like to improvise, as do a group of young girls sinuously winding their way past the suite like young Shebas.
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An Alligator Shake
When pt at large showed up at the food vendor tent named Alllgator Shake to buy what he thought would be a milk shake spruced up with some exotic alligator juice, he got instead Alligator Balls (in hand) - shredded and battered meat from alligator tails that's been battered and fried !
Patty and Mark Rotolo of Baton Rouge own this concession. Their business named "Jambalaya by Shake" was formerly owned by a man named Schexnaider, nicknamed “Shake” (I'm sure you can deduce the reason for his shortened - and pronounceable, nickname). Unable to use that business name "Jambalaya by Shake" at the Festival, Rotolo temporarily dubbed the business 'Alligator Shake'. I tell you this because everybody in Louisiana has stories about their roots, commercial or otherwise.
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Parc Sans Souci
The Parc Sans Souci (translate The Carefree Park) in the midst of downtown Lafayette lives up to its name tonight.
The distant chants and pounding drums from The Master Drummers of Burundi at the Parc International Stage on one side and music from an outdoor café float over the park like smoke from a campfire. Dusk is descending into darkness.
The smell of fried, roasted, or sautéed food drifts over from the food vendor tents. People savoring the international menu lounge on benches or the low brick walls that surround plantings within the park.
A cluster of ground level fountains shoots vertical columns of cool water into the summer sky - the perfect temptation for tots and teenagers, darting and weaving through them or standing like statues until thoroughly and giddily soaked.
The usual Louisiana constellations of age and race and class are mixing it up together within these couple of acres of public space: a mom and dad pushing a stroller, a trifecta of grandparent/parent/grandchildren checking out the scene, pre teens and teens roaming and squealing or sprawled on the grassy expanse texting like crazy, all of them in the moment, alive, exuberant, in a place they in which they feel totally at home - and visitors like me, who are met with a smile and taken into the fold after one how-do-you-do and treated like a long lost friend.
Parc Sans Souci by day and early evening (upper right) and The Master Drummers of Burundi on stage a block an hour later.
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A chair story.
This is another one of those wonderful, quirky, only in Louisiana customs that was on full display Friday night. Reserve a space at a concert or outdoor dance by depositing your chair in your preferred spot hours before the event begins…
The story: my Louisiana friend Bernard Ussher, who has his fingers on the cultural pulse of the city, texts me at 8:30 after I’ve finished my ‘shift’ as a volunteer at the Amis Suite on Jefferson Street. I'm absorbing the vibe at one of Lafayette's public parks. Sunset at the Parc Sans Souci, shirtsleeve weather, a celestial navy blue canopy blooming overhead, is a glorious hive of activity. “Come to City Bar, margaritas and food await!” the text reads. Ten minutes later, I’m consuming both with a bunch of Bernard's and his wife Rubia’s friends. (I could easily digress here to say how welcoming people from this part of Louisiana are but…)
9:45 PM: time to walk to the main stage where Ke’Mo is scheduled to play at 10:00. “Don’t worry, we set out chairs for the three of us a few hours ago,” Bernard says, “ we’re in the second row.”
My jaw drops as we enter the Parc International. There are way over five thousand people there, filling the park front to back, side to side, seam to seam. All I see is a wall of people, all shoulders, heads, backs – no aisles, no loosely kept alleys to pass through –an impermeable mass.
“No waaaay,” I’m thinking to myself as Bernard and Rubia skirt the thin edge of the throng. “No chance we get through here.” Imagine a cornfield with plants growing inches from each other, no rows. Bernard dives in. People shuffle feet to accommodate the trio of invaders. We pepper our advance with the occasional “Thank you,” “Excuse me,” or a smile of a “Hello” and edge sideways toward the middle of the barricade set up ten feet from the elevated stage.
Mind you, it is not possible to see the ground (cement, to be accurate). It is not possible to advance more than a foot at a time. But the sea parts. No one grumbles. Everyone treats this as Standard Operating Procedure. They’ve all done it themselves.
If we’d headed in without the strategic purpose of finding the chairs Bernard and Rubia set out hours earlier, we could have just kept on aiming for the center and found a place to stand. There is always room for someone to join the crowd. It happens on dance floors, it happens in concerts like this one. The nature of territorial imperative is flexible in Louisiana crowds.
Except with chairs. If you put down a chair at 3 PM for an outdoor show or a parade that begins at 8 PM, it will be exactly where you placed it when you arrive at 7:45…in this case with thousands of people standing around it. By the time we’re closing in on our chairs, Bernard, Rubia and yours truly are in our own little conga line holding hands to keep from getting separated. If I lose sight of them, I’m doomed.
Rubia senses the final location. Bingo! There, three tiny blue canvas atolls suddenly appear at our feet. Our chairs! In the exact coordinates in which they’d been deposited. People around us smile. They’ve been expecting us.
I consider it a miracle, they consider it normal.
Ke'Mo in on the big stage at Parc International on Thursday night.
Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.
What charming stories re the Festival! You have such a wonderful way with words and such a flair for always accurately getting to the heart of what you are writing about!
Hope to see you this weekend at the Crawfish Festival
Posted by: May Louise White | May 14, 2011 at 02:28 PM
I'm grateful for your feedback, May Louise, especially since you've been to the events I write about and have a sense of what makes them special. Good to know that I hit the right chords when I paint them the way I feel them.
Posted by: Paul aka pt at large | May 14, 2011 at 02:32 PM