Today was just plain beautiful, so after work I decided to be a tourist and rode my bike down to the French Quarter to check out a museum and then enjoy beignets and coffee–delicious, sugary goodness. I decided to go to the Presbytere to see their new exhibit, “From Tramps to Kings: 100 Years of Zulu.” I’d heard great things about the exhibit, and those rave reviews were right. Seeing the costumes up close was just fantastic. They are so intricate, so enormous. When I first saw the Zulu krewe, I was a little bit confused by their blackface, banana stalk scepters and grass skirts. Playing in to stereotypes is always risky business. Where’s the line between reclaiming those stereotypes and draining them of their power and simply taking on the negative assumptions a dominant group holds? This is the question for all kinds of groups reclaiming words and images that have been used to harm them: queer, cunt, crip, etc. The exhibit dealt with these questions intelligently and showed the complex and varied reactions to this miming in New Orleans’ African American community over time. I highly recommend hopping on your bike and forking over the six bucks for this show. I snapped this particular picture, though, because that woman in the orange hat? She’s famous. To me. She was featured in the documentary Mardi Gras: Made in China as a New Orleans-native bead whore. The documentary didn’t tell her what the film was about, instead using her, I thought, to show the silly side of Mardi Gras and the fruitlessness of bead-hunting. I hated how the film exploited her excitement. She was just as excited as I was to be getting this taste of Mardi Gras at the museum, and it was honor to traipse through this place with her. So there.