(An interview with Frenchmen Street Costume Bazaar Manager Cree McCree about the bazaar, local costuming culture, and the 2011 clash that pitted city officials against local artists.)
Getting involved, the Café Brasil years:
CM (in 2019): I moved to New Orleans from New York in August of 2001, so my first actual Mardi Gras season was in 2002. I had bought and sold vintage on and off throughout my career and wrote a book called Flea Market America. But when I got here to New Orleans, I was inspired to move beyond just buying and selling vintage and embraced the whole costuming culture. I very quickly became an assemblage artist and started making my own costumes, especially headpieces.
My very first year, in 2002, Tracy Thomson was running the annual Mardi Gras Costume Bazaar at Café Brasil. She had started that way back in the 1980s with Oliver Manhattan and several other local designers. I saw a flyer at Kabuki, Tracy’s shop in the Quarter, and it was only like $20 to sell. So I said, “Okay, I’m going to try this,” and that was my first costume sale in New Orleans.
Adé [Salgado, owner of Café Brasil] was always very erratic and that particular year, for whatever reason, Café Brasil was not open on the inside, so we were all on the sidewalk. The newcomers like me were on the shady side of the sidewalk, freezing our asses off because it was a pretty cold day. I remember looking up at the corner where the sun was shining and seeing Gail Kiefer with her rack of “Mardi Bras,” these great decorated bustiers she makes. And I was like, “Boy one of these days, I want to move up to the front row.”
That happened faster than I imagined. Because the very next year, Tracy decided that she didn’t want to keep doing it; she was very busy with her shop. I guess she must have sensed I was a good organizer or something, because she passed the baton to me and I began running the bazaars.
For several years–including before and after Katrina–I continued running the two annual costume sales: one at Halloween and one at Mardi Gras. They became really part of the fabric of Frenchmen. They were popular destinations. There wasn’t that much traffic on Frenchmen Street during the day, but there was still some, and I was always good with publicity. Sometimes Adé would open up Café Brasil and we’d have some fabulous costume shows in there too.
Adé was a great partner, but he could also be problematic. Twice a year when it came time for the costume sales, I’d have to try to run him down in person, which wasn’t easy. This was before the days of cellphones, so there was no way to call him. But even when there were cellphones you couldn’t call Adé. I don’t think you can call him now. So you just had to catch him at the right time.
This one time, I went to Café Brasil during the day and there had been a big show there the night before. Adé was busy talking to somebody upstairs so he said to stick around for a while and he’d be down in like 20 minutes. I said fine. I looked around, the place was a mess, so I actually started doing what I thought was a nice thing to do on my part. I started picking up the glasses and taking them to the bar, emptying the ashtrays. I had just gotten out a broom and was starting to sweep when Adé came down and started screaming at me, “What do you think you’re doing? What do you think you’re doing? This is my place! What are you doing!?”
Then he started yelling, “You lost the gig, you lost the gig,” meaning I wasn’t going to be able to have the sale there. I was really shocked by that reaction, because I thought I was doing him a favor. But I guess it was really kind of an affront. I don’t know if it was so much to his masculinity as to his ownership or proprietorship. That’s pretty funny, because while I was cleaning up, I remember thinking, oh this is a good way to get on his good side. Which it certainly was not! And I was already kind of on his good side. We liked each other, but he’s a real character.
Eventually I did get that straightened out with Adé, and we were able to have the sale. But I had to go back a few times and be like, “I’m so sorry I tried to help clean up. I’ll never do it again!”
David vs. Goliath: The Costume Bazaar clashes with The City
CM: When Café Brasil closed abruptly, I spoke to Jesse over at the Blue Nile and he very generously took us in there. We were bopping along at the Blue Nile quite nicely for a couple of years. It was a little cramped, a little dark—everybody had to bring little clip lamps—but it ended up working really well. We’d always have some vendors out on the street to draw people in and some vendors inside. It was an informal arrangement but we operated under the auspices of the Blue Nile. The club was our host.
But in 2011—you know how the city periodically wants to do some kind of crackdown or another? Well, during the 2011 Mardi Gras season, they sent out a mobile unit to patrol unauthorized sales. I think what they were actually looking for were those carnival carts of merch that go around preceding the parades; you have to have a license to operate those. I think they were after that kind of operation, but instead, they stumbled into ours. We may have been technically illegal because we were blocking the sidewalk. So, when they spotted us, they swooped in.
We’d started at noon and it was only like 1:00 or 1:30, so we were really just getting going and there were tons of people there, including a lot of reporters. They were always writing articles on us, in the Gambit and the Times Picayune. We were well-known in the community, so there was a lot of press on-site that day, both to report on the event and also just as customers buying costumes.
The city was really pretty nasty about it. I was the organizer, so I was the spokesperson, and I immediately said, “We’ll bring everything inside, if that’s the problem, we’ll make room.” They said no, they said they had to shut the whole thing down. They claimed that it was because the Blue Nile was only licensed to sell alcohol, not clothing.
This is the worst part of all. Jesse—who now owns the place but was at the time only the manager—was out on the sidewalk, trying to explain to these guys, “Hey, they were here under our eye.” Meanwhile, they go in and arrest the bartender—well, they didn’t actually “arrest” him and take him away in cuffs, but they gave him a summons.
The charge they had against him was for being behind the bar without a manager being on-site. And the manager was literally like six yards away, outside the door, talking to another cop.
That case began moving through the system and was actually going to go to court! I even had a sheriff show up at my door where I live Uptown and hand me a summons for me to appear in court as a witness when the case came up. This “critical” case of not having a manager on the premises where this bar was illegally letting local designers sell costumes.
I was really scared after the sheriff showed up. Really, really scared. Because I was the organizer; I didn’t know what was going to happen. Then, a couple days later, I got a call from the city, and I heard a voice on the answering machine, saying, “This is the City of New Orleans calling for Cree McCree.”
I went, “Oh, my God.” My stomach just sank, I was so scared, I was really scared.
It turned out to be the mayor’s Cultural Affairs Liaison for New Orleans. “First of all,” he said, “I would just like to say I’m sorry this happened, it should have never have happened.”
So, he started out by apologizing, and we have records of all that: the city did apologize, and there were lots of stories written about the situation. It was on the front page of the Times Picayune, there were letters to the editor. It was a big story at the time, because it really seemed like the city was bullying us. They were directing their resources in a really ridiculous way. It was David versus Goliath. Everybody was on the side of the local costumers, right?
It took a lot of maneuvering on the part of Scott [Cultural Affairs Liason] but eventually he was able to get the whole thing thrown out, so nobody had to appear in court or anything. But that started this whole period where, for quite a while, we had to find a non-profit sponsor. Otherwise we would have had to pay a ridiculous fee for a special events permit.
The Threadhead Foundation became our sponsor and we did a few more years at the Blue Nile before we eventually migrated to the New Orleans Healing Center. Since 2015, the costumes sales have been at the Healing Center, which is where I now run Piety Market in Exile as well.
Frenchmen Street: Changes over the years
CM: Before the costume bazaars on Frenchmen Street ended, we had a really good run there. There was a lot of community activity on the street in those days, all sorts of things going on at different times of the year. We considered Frenchmen to be kind of a local market place. It was a community thing.
Like, Otis on the corner with his FAB bookstore. That was one of the places you could go sell things, and he would always plug into whatever we were doing. He let me do pop-ups sometimes, and we did a lot of pop-ups for Southern Decadence along Frenchmen.
At night I used to go to Frenchmen a lot to hear music. I’m actually going this Friday, because the Happy Talk Band is playing at DBA. They’re sending off their drummer, Michael Andrepont, who’s moving to New York. But the last time I went, maybe three years ago, to see another band I really wanted to see–it might have been Rough Seven or possibly Morning 40–the whole experience was just awful. There were tons of bachelorette parties, women wearing these stupid outfits and spinning around with fake dicks strapped around their necks. Who acts like that in real life? I remember the bachelorette parties more than the bachelor parties because I’m an old lady—we didn’t have bachelorette parties in my day—but there were plenty of both. It’s really awful.
I will go this Friday because I would really like to see Happy Talk. But the fact that I now think twice about even going to Frenchmen Street to see music… it says something about how it’s devolved over the years. I think it’s great that the bands might make good money there, probably much better money than they used to make, so that’s a good thing. But as far as being an audience member, it definitely ain’t what it used to be. The clubs are full of people who aren’t really there to appreciate the music, they’re just there to drink and rage. The Air Bro-n-Bro factor, as my friends and I call it.
[Post-script from 2020: Of course now, with the pandemic lockdown, I can almost get nostalgic over the overcrowded Frenchmen Street music clubs, which we all hope will come back strong.]
