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It was a dark February night on the narrow, tree-canvassed streets laid out below the shadows of the state capital when two buddies from Spanish Town drove home from a fishing trip with a long pirogue fastened to the top of their pickup truck. They had been drinking what people drink when they fish and drove up and down Spanish Town Road honking and hollering about Mardi Gras. The ruckus attracted a couple of young black kids who fell in behind the slow-moving pickup rattling off second-line beats on found cardboard boxes. Neighbors crept out of their bungalows and stepped off their porches for a spontaneous street party.

This is how many people will tell you the Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade began. There are several versions of the myth. In some the boys drum on overturned paint buckets. Others say the fishermen were just hanging out on a porch.

“All those stories are probably about me,” architect Don Zeringue laughs from behind his desk at the State Fire Marshal’s office. “I love to fish.” Having grown up in New Orleans, and lived in the carnival of the French Quarter, the Spanish Town import thought it ridiculous that Baton Rouge had no Mardi Gras celebration of its own.

Parade founder Don Zeringue: "A parade is more meaningful when it's on your home turf, because it's about community."

Zeringue thought, “People in Mamou don’t have to go to New Orleans to celebrate Mardi Gras, so why should people in Baton Rouge?” Neighbors like Nick Spitzer, Ted and Margo Hicks, and Charles Fisher agreed. But Zeringue and Spitzer, a folklorist who hosts NPR’s American Routes series, wanted something more than a traditional parade. What they wanted bypassed the gawdy, towering floats and faux-regalia that had become tradition among modern New Orleans krewes, and harkened back to the close-knit neighborhood fetes of mid-century America. That is, if those neighborhood fetes were politically punchy and bold enough to raise some eyebrows.

“A parade is more meaningful when it’s on your home turf, because it’s about community,” Zeringue says. “When you own it, it means more to you.”

It was February 1981 when Zeringue acquired the permit for a “small street party” in Spanish Town. A handful of residents played volleyball to the rhythm of kids thumping on cardboard boxes. Neighbors formed a walking parade. Michael Beck volunteered to serve as grand marshal. “Although, I don’t think they even needed a grand marshal for the first one,” he admits.

Seizing the chance to satirize the city’s dicey political climate, Zeringue passed out fake dollar bills he called “beaucoup bucks.” On one side, the mug of Gov. Edwin Edwards replaced that of George Washington. Baton Rouge’s newest attraction, the USS Kidd, bombarded Exxon on the other.

And that was it. No gender-bending costumes. No X-rated floats. One keg was all they needed.

Last year marked the 25th Anniversary of the parade that now rumbles down Florida Boulevard through Spanish Town proper and into a revitalized downtown. Most estimates put last year’s attendance at nearly 125,000 people. Hurricane devastation to New Orleans could increase that number considerably this year, say members of the Society for the Preservation of Lagniappe in Louisiana, the board of volunteers that organizes Spanish Town Mardi Gras. What’s more, the group’s annual ball raised $15,000 last year for the city-parish, and has given more than $125,000 since 1986 to the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank and other charities.

Charles "Fish" Fisher and the 1996 King of Spanish Town Mardi Gras, Rubin the Dog.

While the popular neighborhood parade has turned into a Mardi Gras celebration and fundraiser for the entire city of Baton Rouge, it has done so with little publicity and absolutely no corporate sponsorship. It is also beset on both sides by opposition. Conservative baby boomers and protective parents have always shied away from the bawdy humor and sexually charged themes. For some, exposing their children to floats that parody pedophilic priests and inebriated women sucking on popcicles molded in the shape of male genitalia would be like exposing them to the plague.

“It’s always had a flare for the obscene,” says Drew Tessier, a lobbyist for Union Pacific who has celebrated Mardi Gras in Spanish Town with his father, Pat Tessier, for as long as he can remember. “If you look back at all the parade themes like ’25 Flockin’ Years,’ they’ve always been risqué, or else they’re bashing the governor or bashing somebody else.”

On the other front, some hard-line Spanish Town residents—including Beck, the first grand marshal—have grown disillusioned with the current incarnation of the event. They believe the original spirit of the parade got lost somewhere in the growing crowds.

“It was hijacked by people who don’t even live in the neighborhood—aging alcoholics from the suburbs who think they’re being edgy and perverted, when in fact they are the squares, and they’re just trying to outrage the sense of middle class decency that they live out in their everyday lives,” Beck says.

Those are fighting words, but Beck’s viewpoint is probably bolstered by the fact that of the 12 SPLL board members who organize the parade, only one, Doc L’Herrison, actually lives in Spanish Town.

According to esthetician and longtime Spanish Town resident Shawn Humphrey, talk among a neighborhood supper club has turned critical of the parade’s “fraternity party” tone and nostalgic for the way things used to be. Len Bahr, an applied science director for the governor’s office, is organizing a spin-off Spanish Town Mardi Gras celebration—a walking parade like the original—that will take place on the same date and time but remain strictly in the neighborhood.

“You do have that contingent,” says SPLL organizer Bruce Childers. “Obviously a parade this size causes a lot of inconvenience and quite a mess afterwards. That’s what aggravates most residents.” But as the SPLL’s logistics man and visionary, Childers is willing to trade the temporary inconvenience of Spanish Town residents for a bigger draw on the day of the parade.

Packing more people than attend a Tiger football game into an area smaller than the LSU campus can produce a lot of trash, but Beck’s concerns go deeper. “Homoerotic frat boys have taken over the parade. It’s an establishment thing now, not edgy at all.”

If Beck sounds bitter, it hasn’t soaked in. Come Feb. 25, he will be celebrating with the rest of his neighbors and friends. Edgy or not, the parade remains a good excuse to throw a great party.

With 125,000 people, a number of families must be warming up to the parade. After the ‘90s saw a battering of right-wing criticism, the SPLL has taken great care to make it more family-friendly. That means a spacious alcohol-free zone (see map, page 34), and encouraging krewes to buy throws kids will enjoy.

Duz Hamilton, an SPLL board member and vice president of LSU’s Campus Federal Credit Union, believes it is important for Spanish Town Mardi Gras to be a place where parents can take their children to celebrate the holiday. He rides in each parade with his childhood pals as the Krewe of Boyd Avenue. Last year his krewe spent $4,800 on throws that included stuffed animals and bouncy balls for kids.

Inevitably, values will clash at an event that draws such a diverse group of people. Risqué behavior is bound to happen, Childers concedes. Still, as long as floats do not break local obscenity laws, the SPLL will not edit them for content.

“If you’ve got thin skin, and you’re sensitive about sexual issues, then maybe this isn’t the parade for you,” Childers says. “But out of all the floats, I’d say you won’t find 10% that are offensive. The purpose of the parade is not to offend. It’s to have a good time.”

Sue Bourgeois, a sales rep for Pfizer, moved to Spanish Town in 1990 when the area rarely was someone’s top residential destination. The way she puts it, the neighborhood then was eclectic. More specifically, a crackhouse was two doors down. Each Mardi Gras she hosts a house party with more than 60 friends and family. Since 1990 Bourgeois has seen the parade explode.

“It’s lost that neighborhood feel, but you’re still guaranteed a good time,” she says. “And we still have the lawnmower brigade.”

At the same time the Mardi Gras parade grew, Spanish Town’s seedier stigma began to fade. Now Bourgeois is proud to live in what she calls the oldest true neighborhood in the city, and the only one that could have fostered such a phenomenon. “It wouldn’t have worked anywhere else in Baton Rouge,” she says. “Everything else is so subdivisiony.”

Parade organizer Bruce Childers: "If you've got thin skin, then maybe this isn't the parade for you."

The roots of Spanish Town can be traced back to Sep. 21, 1779. It was on that date Governor Don Bernardo de Galvez, inspired by the American Revolution, drove British infantry out of the Port of Baton Rouge.

As the U.S. pressured Spain to sell southern portions of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana’s Florida parishes in 1805, Spaniards and Canary Islanders living in Galvez Town on the Amite River moved West toward Baton Rouge to remain under the Spanish flag. Surveyor V.S. Pintado was charged with laying out residential acreage for these settlers. The result was what we now call Spanish Town.

The neighborhood has survived 200 years as a true living history of Baton Rouge. It was completely destroyed during the Civil War and hosted the first LSU faculty and fraternity housing in the 1880s when the Old War Skule was located at the U.S. Army barracks downtown.

Now the neighborhood lays claim to a patchwork of characters, second generation old-money Baton Rougeans, artists, politicos, professors, state employees, and one of the largest cultural events in the city’s history: the Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade. This year’s theme, FEMAture Evacuation, points a finger at the federal government’s response to Katrina.

“It’s not like this thing is just coming around,” says Tessier. “I think it’s just now getting out of hand.”

Despite the logistical challenges, former DPW director and Spanish Town homeowner Fred Raiford has always supported keeping the city’s largest Mardi Gras parade in the neighborhood it was founded, even as part of the route spilled into surrounding areas. “Some things you have to bend the rules for,” Raiford says. “It’s a narrow road, but it’s all about having it there in the neighborhood.”

Open containers are such a non-issue at the parade, Childers can’t even recall BRPD’s official stance on the subject. Other than examining drivers and making sure there are no open containers in the cabs of float-driving cars, Charles “Fish” Fisher says policemen look the other way.

The parade’s growth can be attributed to early support from the gay community and inexpensive entry fees, says Hamilton, the SPLL board member. In the mid-80s, Baton Rouge’s gay community was one of the most vocal supporters of Spanish Town Mardi Gras and made jaw-dropping carnival costumes de rigueur.

The early years featured little more than convertibles “full of gay guys parading around through Spanish Town,” says Brad Benedict, a freelance writer for Ambush, an alternative lifestyle magazine. Fewer and fewer local gay clubs and organizations have participated as of late, he says.

But for a $300 fee—a fraction of the cost of most other parades—anyone can round up a krewe and enter a float. Bob Applegate is a proud member of the Wasted Krewe. He dressed as Daisy Duke last year “because I had the legs for it,” he says. Ten months later, the manager of Applegate Industrial Materials still sports a straggly mullet blond at the tips from a Jessica Simpson die-job. He is the perfect example of someone who fully embraces and celebrates the parade’s two dominant characteristics: political satire and lewd humor. The Wasted Krewe marries those traits whenever possible.

Applegate’s recollections of Spanish Town Mardi Gras are those that ring like shots across the bow of convention. Dressing like an inmate and satirizing Edwin Edwards to the tune of “Prison B***h” is a memory he holds dear.

“The first thing I wanted to do when I got down here was join the krewe,” the Chicago native says. His brother David and several friends have been riding as the Wasted Krewe since 1989. “Spanish Town is the most irreverent parade. It’s the best thing in this town as far as Mardi Gras goes. The others are like imitations.”

The Applegate warehouse—an old railroad hotel on Government Street— plays host to the Spanish Town flockers who create the phalanx of pink flamingoes that invades university lakes and unsuspecting yards in the weeks preceding the parade. The flamingo mascot was an early addition to Spanish Town Mardi Gras. They lampoon the pink lawn ornaments that became popular in West Coast suburbia after WWII.

Out back sits the Wasted Krewe float, the winner of several awards including Best Overall and the equally-coveted Worst Overall honors. It’s a sturdy, two-story vessel with a balcony and a urinal trough fueled by the remains of an ’88 Ford Probe. Brothers Bob and David Applegate convene the Wasted Krewe each January to vote on a theme and redesign the float accordingly. A giant fiberglass “Midas Man” has played an integral role in Wasted Krewe floats in the past, doubling for John Wayne Bobbitt, David Letterman and a flamboyant fireman.

While the Applegates relish in the carefree celebration of Spanish Town Mardi Gras, 65-year-old Ward Bond understands the subtleties of the event and the niche it occupies in the Capital City’s cultural landscape.

“Mardi Gras is a send-up of royalty, and this parade is a send-up of Mardi Gras,” says Bond, owner of Talking Signs Inc. “So it’s a send-up of a send-up. Being risqué is so much better than being vulgar, which is what many believe New Orleans has become. Risque is more amusing.”

Growing up in the ‘50s, Bond’s mother would drop him off downtown where he would spend entire Saturday afternoons carousing from Third Street to Spanish Town Road. He now spends every Saturday before Fat Tuesday photographing the parade and the people of Spanish Town Mardi Gras. Bond has captured the passing of the mid-90s café culture led by M’s Fine and Mellow Café and the oncoming of the “young puppies,” but he sees a bright future for Spanish Town Mardi Gras as long as it doesn’t sell out.

“What I love is that there is absolutely nothing commercial about it,” Bond says. “All those people aren’t coming because a PR firm brainwashed them. It just shows we can still do something on our own.”

To that end, Childers acts as watchdog, barking away attempts by campaigning politicians and businessmen to use Spanish Town Mardi Gras for their own promotional purposes. Occasionally, companies do ask about sponsorship possibilities. Better than giving them a flat “no,” Childers mails a videotape of parade highlights, and never receives a second inquiry.

And that’s the ultimate irony of Spanish Town Mardi Gras. A completely grassroots event now attracts 125,000 spectators, artists, chefs and musicians each year, and corporate machines are not making a single cent off of any of it. So no matter how big the crowds grow, or who sits on the SPLL board, or who does the offending or who gets offended, the parade belongs to the people, and it’s theirs to do with what they choose. And that’s something even the guy who got a permit for a “small street party” can appreciate.

“Don Zeringue and Nick Spitzer really dreamed up the parade,” says Beck. “I just lived next to them. But they’ve moved on to other things, as creative people tend to do.”

In the mid-80s, Zeringue packed up for the Garden District but continued to help organize the event. It was the move to Rosedale in 1988 that caused the architect to step away from Spanish Town Mardi Gras. Since then he has watched from afar the neighborhood party he started 26 years ago blossom into an extravagant, free-spirited blowout where anything goes, everything is celebrated and nothing is above a satirical swipe.

“I’m very proud of the parade and the money that continues to be raised for charity,” Zeringue says in all humility. “I put it on my résumé.”