CARNIVAL A-Z: Young, Perry

Although it is currently lent, I have chosen to finish the Carnival A-Z so that I can move on to other topics and have this collection completed.

Perry Young was a man after my own heart. He was involved in the ports and shipping industry, which of late I have found to quite an interesting profession. As editor of Shore and Beach and Garden magazines he became an early advocate of coastal preservation (which now has become coastal restoration) the field in which I concentrated my studies and research in graduate school for my Master of Science in Civil Engineering. But most of all, Perry Young is known for his writings chronicling the golden age of Carnival in New Orleans. His book, The Mistick Krewe: Chronicles of Comus and His Kin has become the definitive history of the origins of Carnival in New Orleans. He notes that striking turning point for Carnival when everything changed completely:

At 9 o'clock, or thereabouts, the flare of torchlights shattered the darkness of Magazine and Julia Streets, bands burst into symphony, and the Mistick Krewe stood revealed — a company of demons, rich and realistic, moving in a procession that seemed to blaze from some secret chamber of the earth.

They came! Led by the festive Comus, high on his royal seat, and Satan, high on a hill, far blazing as a mount, with pyramids and towers from diamond quarries hewn, and rocks of gold; the palace of great Lucifer. The demon actors in Milton's Paradise Lost. The first torchlit scenic procession in New Orleans, a revolution in street pageantry, a revelation in artistic effects.

The Mistick Krewe, published in 1931, is a beautifully written account filled with details that would otherwise have been long forgotten. The initial printing of the book sat incompletely sold, of which a portion was sold to be recycled. Now the book has become a rare collectors item, and I am lucky to own a copy from the second printing.

Every year during the televised Meeting of the Courts Henri schindler reads the famous opening line from this book that seems to fit perfectly with the ending of Carnival Season. The feeling one gets reading that line fits oh so perfectly the feel of it all ending, and the eagerness for it all to begin again the following year.

Carnival is a butterfly of winter whose last real flight of Mardi Gras forever ends his glory. Another season is the season of another butterfly, and the tattered, scattered, fragments of rainbow wings are in turn the record of his day.