Kids in Soulard say the darndest things

Mommy, I could either use the bathroom in our house or I could just use one of those on the corner.
 

Says my son who asks everyday if he can use one of the porta potties set up on our block for Mardi Gras.

You know it's Soulard Mardi Gras when...

The whooping and hollering party people have descended into Soulard once again.  It's a constant stream of "WHOOOOOOOO-OOOOOO" and shuffling feet and clanking beads.  You know it's Mardi Gras season when you ask your husband, 

"honey, could you come down stairs and look at this drunk girl on the sidewalk across the street?  I can't tell if she's hurt, asleep or talking on the phone."

She was sitting hunched over in the tree lawn and very, very drunk.  John was going to ask her if she needed help but just then she stood up, brushed the snow off her and stumbled off.  I couldn't see her and she was therefore not my problem.

A lesson I will teach my children:  Never, ever let your friends leave a bar alone and always stay together.

Epiphany

Happy New Year!  I wasn't crazy about 2012.  I can't say it was a terrible year, but I am looking forward to 2013.  John bought me a great gift.  I have yet to find a perfect iphone app for my ever evolving to-do lists.  John bought me a to-do list calendar.  It is awesome and combines my favorite things:  list making, grid paper and good design.  See here.

We celebrated New Year's Eve at friends' (Darf and April) farmhouse out in the country.  We spent the night and the kids had a blast.

Chickens, horses, dogs, beer, bourbon, bonfire, barns, food and kids.  And the adults (carefully) shot clay birds.  John has decided that if there is a zombie apocalypse that we are going to his friend Darf's place for sure.  Here are Gus and Mimi.  Gus is looking very Mardi Gras in purple and green.

Oh yes.  Mardi Gras.  Today is Epiphany which means we transition here in Soulard from Christmas to Mardi Gras.  There's even a bunch of the local characters who have a mini-parade and proclamation declaring the start of Mardi Gras.  Every year my husband thinks there is gunfire.  It's not honey.  Just fireworks!

I like to send out our invitation to our Mardi Gras party near Epiphany.  They went out yesterday.   Punchbowl (my favorite of the evite sites) asked me, "you are about to send the invitation to 254 people.  Do you want to proceed?"  Gulp.  Yes.  Sure.  Click.  And now we are having a party where we've invited 254 people.  We always invite about that many.  And to date we've never run out of booze, food or toilet paper.  And that's all people really expect out of a Mardi Gras party.

The entertaining I do at Christmas is a mere warm up for Mardi Gras.  Take the extra leaf in the dining room table.  It sat 14 for Christmas Eve dinner.  Come Mardi Gras I push it against the wall and it holds 5 gallons of red beans and rice and a ton of other food.  The sweet pink and purple lights on the Advent tree?  They stay out for the purple/green/gold colors of Mardi Gras.  The green bow will stay on the wreath on the door; it's getting some purple ribbon to be Mardi Gras festive.

Here we go!

Avalanche Liquor Store

Here's a Colorado bad mansard.  I know it is not a technical bad mansard, but close enough.  I love liquor stores with mansard roofs.  That's my husband loading or unloading a child during the 14 hour road trip to Winter Park, CO.  And that is my van nearing 100,000 miles.

I almost made the novice mistake of picking up beer at a Colorado grocery store- just 3.2%!  You have to go to a liquor store for spirits or full alcohol beer.  We're somewhat spoiled in Missouri with full alcohol privileges.  You can walk in a grocery store at 8 am on a Sunday and buy whatever you want- vodka, beer, wine, whatever.

A timely subject matter.  Today marks the 1/2 way point to Mardi Gras 2013.  I better start stocking up.  And I kind of do.  If I overbuy wine or beer or booze, I say, "well, we can  drink the extra at Mardi Gras."

Any trip to a liquor store requires the parties sing this song by an old friend Steve Ewing and his band the Urge.  Now go inside and get my pickle.

Mardi Gras party

Mardi Gras 2012 is over. Well, it really hasn't even started since it isn't until Tuesday. But my night-before-the-parade-party is over and O.M.G. It was totally awesome. I loved it. I do regret feeling a little bit like a bride in that I know everyone if having a great time but I really don't get to talk to guests as much as I'd like.

total number of guests: 167

best investment: two bartenders/helpers. They cost $325 but totally worth it.

culinary hit: my red beans and rice is tasty. People love it. I take no credit. It's the wonderful andouille from G&W that makes it so good. I took my regular recipe and multiplied by 15 to make enough to fill a giant pot. My National rice cooker churned out enough rice to go with the red beans.

best Mardi Gras dress: MINE! An awesome retro DVF I picked up on the clearance rack at Neiman's. It screams Mardi Gras. (that's me in the green and black dress with my friends Amy and Janet)

how many beers: 275. We had about 40 left over. About 1/2 bottles, 1/2 cans. Almost all AB and Schlafly products.

Favorite beer: hands down- the vintage Busch can.

wine: I bought one of those giant boxes and that was pretty much gone, as well as about 5 additional bottles.

strangest thing people drank: coffee flavored Patron? Someone drank the whole bottle.

bourbon or vodka? Bourbon won. About 3 large bottles consumed. Rye too. Old fashioned's were popular.

Jagermeister, really? Yes really. About 1.75 liters of it. I read in Food and Wine or some other high brow magazine that the best way to liven up a party was to freeze Jagermeister and offer shots. Suddenly a bunch of 40 year olds remember when they were 21 and the party is a lot more fun.

time people left: about midnight

glad I purchased: 2 giant Rubbermaid recycling trash cans. Empties went in there and could be taken out to the dumpsters in the morning.

most surprising guest: a friend from law school who came with a school dad. I was really happy to see him. He was always such a gentleman, making sure us girls stayed safe at those crazy Mardi Gras parties in the mid 1990's.

guest break down: high school: 15%, family 5%, college 15%, work 25%, school parents 30%, neighborhood 10%.

best success: People went in the parlor! They had little choice with that many people in here.

nicest hostess gift: a St. Louis cheese plate from the Initial Design in WG. I had coveted its cousins the dish towel and Christmas ornament at Sign of the Arrow. Love it!

best thing about having a giant party: the house is as clean as its ever been. The laundry is in drawers. Everything is clean. The toys are put away. There are flowers and the house smells good.

3 stupidest things I saw the day of the Grand Parade: guy in drunken stupor walking down the SB Highway 55 on ramp in the dark about to merge into traffic on foot. Guys picking bricks out of my sidewalk and throwing them. Crazy meth head guy hitting a hipster in the head with a beer bottle.

One of the kids took this picture of the chandelier in the parlor. Not sure which kid. They frequently take the camera to take pictures of each other, the TV and random animals. The kid in the bonnet is my niece; the kid in green is Mimi.

I like how this picture turned out. The chandelier not original house itself but it is an original fixture from the 1880's. The ceiling medallion is original to the house.

The chandelier is the best part of the parlor. Okay- I like the fireplace too. I HATE the rest of the room. The chairs are too big. I hate the couch. I hate the fact I picked out red furniture (I bought the furniture in 2002 the day after we moved in. It was a hasty move. Dumb. I should have left the parlor empty until I really knew what I wanted).

Back the complaining- the rug is cheap looking. I like that the coffee table and end tables come from my grandmother's house, but they really don't work in the room or with the furniture. I want to re-do the whole thing. I keep seeing pool blue, maybe even with the red. Or make the entire thing white. I see a much smaller couch (like a love seat) with two smaller chairs all pulled to the middle of the room for actual conversation.

I scheduled this post for February 15 at which time I will be up to my elbows in making red beans and rice and a bazillion other things for the 175 people we expect to come here for our annual Mardi Gras party. It sounds like a lot of people (it is a lot of people!) but it's not too bad and feels more like an open house with people stopping by all evening. And when those 175 people come over, will they hang out in my parlor? NO! It's the most unwelcoming room ever. I guess I'll move the booze to the parlor and people will have no choice but to go in there. That's a sad parlor when the only way you can get guests to go in there is the lure them with booze.

Le salon

Our parlor. I guess if I had a garage I could offsite some of this junk. But I don't. This is high Victorian mud room. It has 4 seasons:

1. Mardi Gras party & Girl Scout cookies- usually it works that we have our big party first, then the cookies arrive a few weeks later. Except this year the cookies arrived before Mardi Gras. I serve as the cookie mom for two troops and therefore we skipped the party this year (for many other reasons as well)
2. Christmas. This is the only room I decorate.
3. Fall birthday party zone. My kids are born in July, September and October (2) so we use this room to open presents, play games, work on crafts, etc. See picture below of Audrey's Top Chef birthday party where the girls decorated aprons.
4. The hold on to your hats time we are in right now- float trip/summer camp/back to school/vacation/go to the lake with grandma staging area.

About now. We're cramming all the above activities into a 21 day period. So why bother putting anything away? Here's some junk that will stay in the parlor until school starts and it's time for birthday parties. Counter clockwise from the cute girl in the purple shirt:

• collapsed Easy Walker jog stroller. Love it. Got it cheap. Mimi is getting close to growing out the stroller but we will take it to the beach to transport the cooler, towels, etc.
• that cool Japanese print? My grandmother doesn't care for Japanese art and gave it to me. Love it.
• I love that mirror too. One of our first antique purchases. Got it from Sambeau's in the Central West End when we were first married in 1998. Had to have the mirror installed later (Chippewa Glass). It's huge.
• Mantle is original to the house. It has a nice shell pattern. I have seen some mantle twins around town. I feel a special kinship with those other home owners. "OMG! We are mantle twins!"
• Back to school supplies. Young Mimi can go to Montessori preschool this year with her older siblings so for the first time I bought back to school supplies for 4 kids.
• Some bikes and scooters. Total city thing. Put your bike in the living room. Where else am I gonna put it?
• Busch Bavarian and Bud Select cans. Hells to the yeah. I told you I was floating and going to the beach. Gotta have cans in coolies. Needn't fear. I have some better beer for drinking in the house.
• Puked on booster seat. Gus got car sick onthe way to the float trip and barfed all over this booster. That was weird since it's been years since he's gotten sick. And then I remembered. He had Sunny D before we left. My mom is convinced orange juice makes his stomach queasy and car sick. She was clearly correct, assuming of course sunny D qualifies as orange juice.
• There's Audrey. She's packing her shower tote for girl scout summer camp. She's the second oldest and gets a lot of hand me downs from her older sister. She was so happy to get a new shower tote and watch her older sister get stuck with the old one.

J'ai regret

So sorry I've been lazy at keeping up bad mansard. February is Mardi Gras month and we host a party for about 150 the Friday before Ash Wednesday. About 2 weeks of setting up and another week of putting the house back together. The party went well as far as I remember, but I lost track about 2 hours into the party when I declared, "F. it, it's my party, and I'm gonna keep drinking..." Here's a picture of me when I've been overserved. I'm doing the Der Komissar dance in my kitchen.

I present a baby mansard row of houses to ponder. Two replicas, one original, and one bitching yellow camero. Thanks to a reader (Matt?) for sending me the Google streetview picture of the mal ensemble. Appropriately, the bitching camero was also on Google streetview.

Tip: if you're going to build a new 2nd Empire next to an old 2nd Empire, please get the ceiling heights and scale correct. The replica dwellings look like section 8 dwarf housing.

Mardi Gras party recap

Our annual Mardi Gras party really has nothing to do with bad mansards other than the fact we live in a good mansard neighborhood in a lovely mansard house. Soulard goes into a frenzy for Mardi Gras with a giant, obnoxious street closing parade on the Saturday before Mardi Gras.

According to urban legend, "it's the biggest American Mardi Gras outside of New Orleans;" that may be true, or another of those urban party legends such as "I heard Animal House was based on [insert fraternity name here]" or "Mizzou was such a party school that Playboy listed it as a professional." We have our party the Friday night before the Grande Parade, the same night as the Mayor's Ball and the Preservation Hall Jazz performance at Powell.

This year's party turned out well.

The theme was Busch Bavarian cellar (I tricked out our beer cave in Busch). Bavarian Cellar really wasn't much of a stretch. The German that built this house was Bavarian and likely kept his beer in the cellar. Here's a recap, as much for my party planning purposes for next year as for your amusement.

Invitations: I used electronic invitations this year- very unlike me. I went through mypunchbowl.com. Loved it. Helped me keep my numbers straight and will give me a head start for next year. We sent about 120 invitations. That does seem like a lot, but it is Mardi Gras so people wander in and out all night going to other balls and parties. About 130 people came through.

Near misses:

• Water pressure tanked at 4 pm. Very concerned that we'd have no toilet flow or water. I called the water department and was told that the problem was already being addressed- seems the brewery lost its water pressure too.
• Door wouldn't open. When the first guests arrived we couldn't let them in.
• Basement refrigerator was warm, likely attributable to user error.
• Mimi is still nursing. She and the older 3 kids went to my mother-in-law's house. I forgot to pump until midnight. Ouch.

Help: I hired a coat check girl and a bartender. Money well spent. We put the bar in the first floor spare bed room. We left the beer on the back porch and in the shower on ice.

Liquor: Booze were available in the cellar, playroom and laundry room. We consumed 60 Busch cans, 60 Budweiser's, 40 Bud Selects, 30 Bud Lights and about 30 Schlafly's. Lots of red wine (12 bottles) and almost no white wine (just 2). 4 bottles of bourbon (2 Makers Mark, 2 Jim Beam), 1/2 Glenmorangie Scotch, 6 bottles of vodka (including 2 pomegranate). Next year: more tonic, less club. I'll tell you what people don't drink: GIN. I think too many of my friends snuck it from their parents in the 1980's and can no longer stomach it.

Non-alcoholic: surprisingly, only about 5 units of NA soda, juice, etc. Target/Market Panty blood orange soda was a big hit. 2 pots of coffee.

Food: I made a f-load of Red Beans and Rice using andouille from G&W, no seafood because it's too expensive and too easy to overcook. Made 18Qt., which was 6 QT. too many. Rice: OVERMADE. Next year cook about 18 cups of rice at most. Poor Scout the dog has been eating rice for a week.

Appetizers: aimed for liquor absorbing junk

party food. Big hits were chicken wing dip, Reuben dip, and massive platter o' taco dip. Also quickly ran out of friend Eli's crab cakes and andouille inhalers. My baby cupcakes were a big hit.

Party flow: you never know where people will congregate. I've long lamented that no one hangs out in our front formal parlor. Not this year damnit. People went to my parlor. I put the couch on a diagonal which i think made the room more welcoming. Guests spent a lot of time in the parlor, kitchen and front hall. Basement and cellar had good crowd. No one went in the TV room, which people usually cram in to. I moved the dining table against the wall so the dining room was big and open. Kids, by the way, don't want me to change it back. It's a wrestle mania dream come true.

Time: Party started at 6:30. First guests arrived at 7:00. Many people cleared o

ut at 12:00; another group left at 1:30. TIme at which I lost track of guests/food/topics of conversation because I'd overserved myself: 10:00.

Best hostess gift: bottle of vanilla. Not vanilla vodka, just pure vanilla extract.