FILMMAKER ROYCE OSBORN AT THE PRYTANIA THEATRE
October 29, 2007

Sponsored by One Book, One New Orleans in partnership with the Neighborhood Story Project

The Neighborhood Story Project is a great program. You know, a writer can do just so much research.  You really have to let the people tell their story.  That’s what Coming Out the Door does and that’s what this movie, All On A Mardi Gras Day,was trying to do.

We need to tell our own stories.  Everybody in this city has a story now.  We might have thought we did before, but we always did.  Our ancestors did and all of our families did. They’re valid, they’re important, they’re beautiful, and they’re worth telling.  Just lately, it seems like the rest of the world wants to hear it.

One that really inspired me to make All On A Mardi Gras Day was hearing an interview with Tootie Montana on the radio on WWOZ—sitting in a parking lot in Winn-Dixie while he talked about Indians and Skeletons and Baby Dolls and his experience with Mardi Gras.  I was just transfixed.  I couldn’t get out of the car.  I couldn’t go in Winn-Dixie.  I just listened to Tootie’s voice and his stories and I thought, “That’s it.  That’s the movie.  I just need to put the pictures on.”

SPIRITUAL CONGO SQUARE
I want to start this program with a short film.  It was the first film I made at YES.  When I moved back to New Orleans in 1997, I wanted to tell New Orleans stories, particularly about the black history and culture of New Orleans, which I thought was neglected.

If I had a time machine, Congo Square’s one place I would definitely want to transport myself back to.  I think the best way to really experience it today is to go to a second line on Sunday.  When you see black people dancing in the street, there’s this expression of freedom that’s not like anything else in America.  It can only happen in New Orleans.  The people of Congo Square: The slaves and free people of color were able to gather for just a few hours to express that freedom, meet their relatives and friends, play music, and, as Bob Marley would say, “Forget your troubles and dance.” I thought we would just try to recreate Congo Square in City Park with a budget of $200.  We scaled it down a little bit.  Fortunately, I was able to get some wonderful help on this film.

There aren’t any credits on this, so I want to recognize them.  Luther Gray, who is a fanatic drummer, provided the most authentic music we could get.  Ausettua and her dancers, Kumbuka dancers, were wonderful. Kalamu Ya Salaam, whose poem runs through the film and counterpoints the narration. My friend Freddi Evans, who has done all the heavy lifting on researching Congo Square.  She’s done more than anybody that I know. And my great friend and mentor Eluard Burt who passed away this summer, but he’ll always be remembered in New Orleans.  He was still stuck out in California and we’ll hear his beautiful flute playing through the opening scenes of this film.  Later, you’ll see that I actually cannibalized parts of this film into All On A Mardi Gras Day.

ALL ON MARDI GRAS DAY

I would try to tell people what I thought the real Mardi Gras was about and the whole cultural and spiritual experience of it.  But, they couldn’t really get it.  You know, Indians and Skeleton Men—it just didn’t mean anything to them. I wanted to make this movie to really show the world what our Carnival is really about.  I knew I wanted to get as many of the real people who do Carnival as possible to tell their stories, but trying to break into an Indian tribe and put a microphone and a camera in their face was not an easy thing to do.  It’s a fairly closed society, and although they seem a little more accessible today, it was not easy.   

My wife kept encouraging me to go talk to Tootie Montana. We were active in the same church, St. Augustine’s.  When I finally did approach Tootie, he was the most bighearted, generous man I ever met.  You just get him started, and he’ll tell stories for hour after hour and he was a wealth of knowledge.

A lot of my Carnival documentation, you can’t go to a historian and say, “What was this about?”  They didn’t live it the way Tootie did, masking over fifty years.  Tootie raved about the Batiste family—and Tootie was somebody who very rarely gave out praise about anybody.  He said, “The Batiste family, now, they put on Carnival.” So I went to see Uncle Ronald Batiste and Uncle Lionel, who is the most elegant man in town—the world’s sharpest dresser—and they laid out for me what the Dirty Dozen was about: The Kazoo Band and the Baby Dolls.  He introduced me to his beautiful sister, Miriam Reed, who was the last surviving Baby Doll of her generation. When I met the Batiste family, they were in their 70s.  Their parents were doing this in the 20s and 30s.  It was something that had been passed down through their family for a while.  Miriam still had Baby Doll suits in her attic.  She had paper suits.  She had an amazing collection of things, which she was very generous in sharing with me. 

Finding the Skeleton Men was a real problem. I had heard about Al Morris, who’s the Skeleton Chief of the North Side Skulls.  Al, I heard, had masked with Big Arthur, who was a legendary Skeleton and Tootie said really brought the Skeletons into the 30s and 40s.

It took me weeks looking for Al Morris. I’d go to one corner, “Have you see Al?”  Well, you know, people didn’t trust me.  They didn’t know who I was.  I didn’t have my New Orleans accent any more.  So it’s like the cops looking for him.  They didn’t give me shit.
I finally tracked him down at the Backstreet Museum. Al’s sitting on the steps of the Backstreet looking at me with a big smile and going, “I hear you’ve been lookin for me?”  Yeah, for quite a while.  And he’s like, “I wanted to make sure you were really serious about what you’re doin.”  If I’d given up he would have just said, “Eh, another fake.” 

After I talked to Al, I decided I wanted to be a Skeleton.  The idea of it just took hold of me.  I vaguely had an ancient memory of Skeletons on the street at Mardi Gras, but I might have repressed it completely because it was too scary and weird.  But we came up with a Skelton gang—my brother and I, a few friends of ours, my little nephew.  When I told Al we were gonna come, Al said, “Oh, we’ll wipe you off the street.  We’re gonna humiliate you and then we’re gonna run you into the dirt.”

We came out and went to the Backstreet looking for Al.  When he finally showed up, he said we looked like shit.  But he was all alone, he didn’t have a gang with him, and although he thought we looked terrible, he let us follow him all through Tremé and the Seventh Ward and up to Orleans Avenue.  It was my greatest Mardi Gras of all, and ever since then I’ve been a Skeleton Man.

So this film today at WYES TV, our public television station, Walter Bardel is the cameraman, Peggy Laborde was the executive producer, and then a great editor was Larry Roussarie, who I was trying to get here tonight.  You rarely see him in public.  He’s an elusive guy, but a great editor.

At one point, I was literally going door-to-door in the Sixth Ward looking for footage, home movies, photographs and got a few of them.  But most of the Indian footage that you see was shot by Jules Cahn, who is a businessman and amateur photograph in the city in the 50s, 60s and 70s.  He shot some wonderful stuff.  He was crazy about black culture.  He shot the parades and the Indians and if it was black he was shooting it.  He had a love for it.   He couldn’t dance, he couldn’t play music, but the camera kind of gave him an intro to the thing.  When you see some of his footage, you can tell he was not only the cameraman around, he was the only white person around in most of these scenes, too.  People just didn’t come down to fool with this at the time.  He loved the culture and God bless him for it.

How many of y’all have actually seen the movie before?  Ah, quite a few.  Good.  Yeah, it’s very watchable I think.  Everybody has their favorite characters in the movie and the more you see it, the more you can enjoy it and anticipate some of the lines and some of the music and things that come up.  Seeing it on the big screen is a real experience. I’ve noticed some things seeing it projected this big that I hadn’t even noticed before.  So feel free to dance in the aisles and let’s go, All On A Mardi Gras Day.

WALKING TO NEW ORLEANS
For a lot of different reasons, All On A Mardi Gras Day could not have been made today.  We, unfortunately, lost a lot of the Carnival heroes, the culture warriors of this city—some before and some after the storm.  The great Tuba Fats died a couple of years after we interviewed him.  It really hurts the heart.  Aaron Minsk, the white dude who was the witch doctor of Zulu, passed away.  And Big Chief Tootie died a warrior’s death on the floor of the City Council fighting for the rights of Mardi Gras Indians in this city.  My Chief Al Morris suffered a stroke weeks before Mardi Gras in 2006 and is now recovering in a nursing home.  But he’ll be back.  You can’t get a Bone Man down.

Some other folks have been displaced since the hurricane.  Baby Doll Miriam Reed is still out in Los Angeles.  Al “Carnival Time” Johnson had his home in the Lower Ninth Ward bulldozed.  He’s now living in Houston.  Our city will not be the same without them.  But, of course, you can count on Al to be around for Carnival Time.

I still think about all the Indians and the maskers and musicians and dancers and second-liners who haven’t made it back to this city.  Keeping the culture alive is something the city talks about, but has done a very poor job of doing.  When we were evacuated to Los Angeles, I was invited to do an interview on the Tavis Smiley Show and I showed some of the footage from All In A Mardi Gras Day.  I also I had my camera here with me when we were in the flood and showed some of that memorable footage.  Afterwards, I got a call from the National Black Programming Consortium to do a new documentary on the recovery of New Orleans, and we agreed to document the cultural recovery of the city. 

My cameraman, William Siborne, is in the back there.  He doesn’t have to stand up.  He’s tall enough as it is. We went out and shot for a year the second-line of Mardi Gras Indians, musicians—everything that was going on for that year after the hurricane.  We found that the people were having more problems with the city, the police, the agencies that run this city, than they were with anything that was hurricane related.  Even before the hurricane, the police had been running Indians off the street.  Later, they raised the fees for social clubs to parade, which made it impossible for a lot of them to do.  They wouldn’t allow some of the nightclubs to have live music.

RENEW ORLEANS SECOND LINE
We kept hearing these statements that the city was protecting the culture of the city, but it didn’t seem to be happening.  They were seeing to try to keep it down.  This next clip I’m gonna show is from a parade that was organized in January of 2006 by the New Orleans Social and Pleasure Club Task Force, who came together to try to get some of the social club members back into the city, give them information, and help to get into their homes.  It was a parade that almost didn’t happen because the police tried to shut it down, but here’s some of what went on that day.

CREOLE WILD WEST
One of the Indian gangs that we were following was Creole Wild West Uptown.  I met Big Chief Walter Cook, and he gave us access while they were making their suits.  It so impressed me that these guys who had lost their homes and lost everything they owned were still obsessed with making Mardi Gras suits.   I’d been planning to mask with Al and the Skeletons downtown, but just a couple weeks before Mardi Gras Al had his stroke and he wasn’t able to come out, so Walter invited me to mask with his tribe and to be a Skeleton Man with Creole Wild West.  It was just the biggest thrill of my life.  It was the biggest honor I’ve ever had.

And before they came out on the street the gang got together and sang “Indian Red.”  It was a moment I’ve been waiting for my whole life.  When they sang it, I got so choked up I couldn’t sing.  When I saw people coming out of their houses, screaming and clapping and following the Indians—this big wave of color and beauty coming down the street—I realized why this was so important to them and to the whole city.  I think it gave a lot of people hope that things were gonna come back.  Seeing Indians on Mardi Gras gave people hope for New Orleans. 

You can see other clips of it on the National Black Programming Consortium’s website.  It’s nbpc.tv and comment on it if you go there. Tell them you want to see the movie.  They’ve kind of forgotten about New Orleans lately.  I think a lot of people are kind of forgot what we’re all about again.  They’ve moved on to the next tragedy.

Q&A

Royce: Yes, sir?

Audience Member:  Are you working to complete Walkin to New Orleans?

Royce: Yeah, we’re doing the post-production work on that, and try to get some funding to complete that.  There are various other things. It’s just so little time and so many stories to tell of New Orleans.  Anybody else?

Audience Member: Right here.  Are you going to have DVD’s?

Royce: I’m working on that.  I’m working on a DVD project for All On A Mardi Gras Day.  It’s a matter of licensing all the music in the show, which is tremendous music, and I hate to lose any of the songs in it.  In fact, I’ve got two of the licenses today, “Go to New Orleans” Professor Longhair and Earl King, “Street Parade.”  I promise to have it out by Carnival Time in 2008 with a lot of extra footage and things that maybe you haven’t seen before. 

After the movie first came out in 2003, we started really seeing a revival of the Baby Dolls.  There were a couple dozen Baby Dolls in 2004 or 2005.  They all came out of the Mother-in-Law Lounge, and then after that year they split into rival factors.  So I knew it was gonna be strong.  And then the Skeleton Gang started getting bigger and bigger and Al was just such a celebrity that he couldn’t deal with all these people wanting to be Skeletons. 

We were seeing a strong revival of that culture which got cut short by you know what.  But people have embraced it.  Of course, a lot of white people want to be in the Skeletons and the Baby Dolls.  We had quite a few.  They were coming up that year we had Miriam Reed give a Baby Doll seminar to show how to make the costumes.  Miriam would say, “Well, I like to have Scotch and milk in my bottle but you can drink anything you want.” Then she got to really show them how to do the walk—the dance with it, and how to roll with being a Baby Doll.  Anybody can do it. 

We’ve seen a few white Skeletons come out, too. Al has always said, “There’s no black or white Skeletons. Everybody’s the same under their skin.  When you’re in bones it doesn’t matter.”

It’s just odd to me that these traditions, that came out of or born out of segregation, are now becoming really embraced.  There are quite a lot of white riders in Zulu now and that’s fine.  We just don’t want to see Rex coming out in black face or anything next.  Make sure we keep it real.

Yes?

Audience Member: How can you be a Baby Doll?

Royce: Well, first you gotta dress like a Baby Doll.  You gotta get you a little bonnet, and then, you know, hit the street with a certain attitude.

Audience Member: Are there any organizations now?

Royce: I would advise you to go down to the Mother-in-Law Lounge on Claiborne Avenue and talk to Ms. Antoinette K-Doe because she’s got quite a little troupe of Baby Dolls there.  So I think they’re called the K-Dolls.

Audience Member: Are you masking this year?

Royce:  I’ll always mask.  I came out a couple years ago in a devil costume that I brought my mother out of retirement to sew for me.  Miriam Reed had told me about a guy that came out as a devil on Mardi Gras one year in the 50s or 60s, dressed in the perfect red devil suit that her father had made.  He was going out to the Circle Store to go buy some wine, and he came out and scared the piss out of this little white girl.  The police arrested him.  He wound up spending all of Carnival in jail in his devil suit.  And when he came out he was just this bedraggled devil man, you know?  I told Miriam I was dressing for that guy and I try to do these things.

But this year I’ll be a Skeleton, I think, just because we always need more Skeletons, and it’s just impossible for me to try to make an Indian suit.  Thanks, y’all.  I’m glad you came.  Mardi Gras is just around the corner, don’t forget.