(Jan. 2) Before al Qaeda and ISIS, before the age of attacks at crowded celebrations such as the Boston Marathon or the prelude to a Sugar Bowl, the “dangers” at a New Orleans New Year’s celebration were considerably more, well … entertaining.
As one year passes to the next, the famous French Quarter is usually jammed in the hours just before and after midnight, especially along Bourbon Street and around Jackson Square. If you were one of the thousands upon thousands of revelers there, you knew the pitfalls. You might get jostled. The crush of people might separate you from your companions, and in the era before cellphones, finding them was a major challenge. You might have underestimated the cold and discovered that your hands were freezing, and inebriated people near you might, well, get sick.
Or perhaps you might be at the corner of Jackson Square, where busy Decatur Street crosses St. Peter Street. There, a traffic light with one of those long, extended arms stretches across Decatur, perhaps 14 feet above the fray. There, as the circa 1990 crowd watched, some drunken loon might clamber up the vertical pole and then, straddling the extended arm beam, shimmy 20 feet along it, arms aloft in triumph above the writhing crowd.
Then, losing his physical balance to match his loss of rational equilibrium, suddenly the loon would start to fall and, desperately grasping with his knees, would find himself hanging upside down, gravity and alcohol making it impossible for him to use his arms to reach the crossbar and pull himself back upright.
The throng below him would press together, arms upstretched, ready to avert disaster. A thousand-person gasp would erupt as the loon’s knees lose their grip and, headfirst, he would plunge. The carpet of revelers below him, though, would be so thick, and their upstretched arms so determined to catch the loon, that somehow he would emerge from his plunge unharmed…. [The full vignette is at this link.]
