Will there always be a New Orleans?

摘要

Kevin Farrer is a connoisseur of festivals. He attends several each year, all around America, to warn revellers that they risk burning in Hell. But he has to admit, standing on Canal Street with a judgmental placard about various deviants and a badge that reads "God hates Mardi Gras", that New Orleans's annual knees-up is in a class of its own. As the born-again roofing contractor from San Francisco waxes wrathful about the sinners before him, Kay King, a 57-year-old mother of two in a shiny blue miniskirt and outrageous wig, walks up and poses coquettishly beside him. She was offended, she explains later, by Mr Farrer's homophobia. The spirit of New Orleans is one of tolerance, insists Ms King, and neither storms nor street preachers should be allowed to crush it.