Parade Takes Evacuees Home

By LINDSAY PETERSON lpeterson@tampatrib.com

Published: Jan 22, 2006

To the Landry family, Gasparilla was just a funny-sounding name when a member of the Krewe of St. Brigit asked them to ride on its Children's Parade float. It's sort of like New Orleans' Mardi Gras, Krewe members said.

Arion Landry, 13, wasn't so sure. Nothing about Tampa was anything like her New Orleans, and she and her family still would be there if it weren't for Hurricane Katrina.

On Saturday afternoon, Tampa pulled the homesick girl into its heart with a wild hug as she, her mother and three brothers rode atop the Krewe of St. Brigit's float and threw beads to people who acted as though they were precious jewels.

It was like nothing she'd ever seen, she said, and she'd seen Mardi Gras parades.

She cracked a smile big enough to bring out her dimples. "This place is crazy," she said.

She had arrived several hours earlier with a few doubts. While her brothers, ages 6, 9 and 10, chased one another around the Krewe of St. Brigit float, waiting 108th in line with all the other waiting-to-go floats, Arion sat quietly.

Leaning against the Bayshore Boulevard seawall, she said Tampa was OK but it just wasn't home. She had lost her home almost five months ago in the floods that followed Hurricane Katrina. To survive, she, her mother and brothers had to walk through the drowning city to a medical center where a relative worked. It took them more than seven hours.

Even after getting safely to Tampa, where the family had other relatives, she didn't feel like eating for a week. The Krewe of St. Brigit heard the family's story and decided to invite them to the closest thing Tampa has to New Orleans' Mardi Gras, Krewe member Laura Bruce said.

By mid-afternoon Saturday, Arion still was waiting quietly. But by now she had donned a pirate eye patch. She and her mother, Dwan, laughed when her 10-year-old brother, D'Jonh, raced up to them and said, "Argh, your booty shivers me timbers."

Soon, Arion and about 40 other children and their parents had filled the top of a float stuffed with bulging bags of beads. By now, still wearing her eye patch, she had put on a black leather pirate hat.

The float finally began to roll. The crowd was sparse. Arion looked skeptical. People on the ground waved and she, standing next to her mother, waved politely back.

Ahead was the line of floats, both flashy and plain, from the decked-out Caribbean Cowboys to the two antique cars of Feldman Orthodontics. They crept toward the official starting line and the crowds at Bay to Bay Boulevard, although Arion couldn't see them yet.

Don't throw any beads until the float crosses Bay to Bay, the float riders were warned. That's the rule.

The St. Brigit float crawled forward. The crowds slowly grew thicker. The noise began to rise as Arion's float crossed Bay to Bay. And suddenly, the spectators were no longer a sparse collection of people watching a parade but a shrieking, whistling, hollering mass of waving arms and grabbing hands.

Arion and her mother had draped bunches of beads around their necks, but what once seemed like an unending supply was disappearing like water through their fingers.

They couldn't get their beads thrown fast enough. People yelled, screamed, begged. "Beads, beads, beads." "Beeeaaaaaads." "Here, beads, here, here, me, me, me."

At first, Arion couldn't throw her beads far enough to get them past the barricades that kept the people off the street. They were stacked four to six deep along the mile-long parade route. But she kept trying, eager to feed the hungry crowd. After 10 minutes or so, she was throwing like a pro - and connecting.

She watched her beads fly out across the concrete into the outstretched hands of strangers: a middle-aged white man, an Asian teen, a black mother. And nearly without exception, they'd look directly at her and smile or yell, "Thank you!"

She had run out of beads and started searching the floor of the float for more. Every now and then, she would keep a strand for herself, almost always a blue one. By the middle of the bead frenzy, her mother, Dwan, had gotten off the float to throw her strings from the ground, closer to the crowd. Arion joined her. Her mother doled out piles of beads for all of her children to throw.

Then, almost as suddenly as it started, the great shriek and roar stopped as the float reached Rome Avenue, the endpoint of the parade.

Dwan panted. "That was exciting," she said. "I met a lot of nice people, a lot of kids. It reminds me a little of our home."

Arion agreed, "It's cool." But there's one thing that made it different from home, she said. In New Orleans, they might attend a Mardi Gras parade, but there's no way they would ever be in one.

They had to come to Tampa for that.

Reporter Lindsay Peterson can be reached at (813) 259-7834.