The first Mardi Gras I went to, I stayed at the Tulane AE Pi house on Broadway. Slept on a pool table one night, slept under it the next.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I love Mardi Gras. I'm a street rat.
My family's business was actually an amusement park in New Orleans. My grandfather had started that, and my grandmother was a dance maven in New Orleans. It was just the theatricality and the Mardi Gras and the pageantry that I fell in love with at an early age.
I like visiting people's homes on Saint Joseph's Day, when people set up altars, serve food as a tribute to the saint, and invite the public - I enjoy that much more than Mardi Gras.
My mom and dad got divorced, so it was one of those things where Sundays I'd go to Dad's apartment, and this was, say, 1970-whatever, and it had a pool table on the top floor in a very traditional kind of divorced-dad apartment building.
I'm from New Orleans, and we have a Mardi Gras group called the Chewbacchus. It's celebrating all things geeky: science fiction, fantasy, 'Star Wars,' 'Doctor Who,' 'Men in Black,' 'Ghostbusters,' everything.
I looked at the circus, and I looked at the carnival, at the fun fair. But I looked at sleeping accommodations and decided I was too middle class to put up with that! So then I joined the theater and found I could choose my own bedroom. I loved the atmosphere. I loved that we worked till midnight and didn't start till ten.
A little bit about my family: We didn't really come from much, and we didn't take family trips to California, so my first trip to California was actually my first day of school.
When I was growing up, I was really into 'Rent' and I actually slept on the street in New York all night to get to sit in the first few rows for it.
We slept in the park before we had a house, and eventually we shared a home - my parents, my grandparents and five uncles, my family, all of us - on White Oaks Street by Magnolia Street near the railroad. Those were hard times, but I loved living there.
My honeymoon night was spent on the floor in the bathroom with my mother.