Ash Wednesday is a big day for me, and not just because I was born Catholic. Some 22 years ago I went to Mardis Gras with a group of gay men (and one other straight woman). It was 10-days of…well, of decadence, really. Of decadence.

If Mardis Gras is a combination of the sacred and the profane, so was this trip.

After a crazy Fat Tuesday, I will never forget our fabulous Ash Wednesday together in the Garden District of New Orleans, complete with going to church for ashes. Sacred and profane, indeed.

Just got an evocative email celebrating this anniversary from one of my friends who was on that trip. It sums it up so well and here it is, in part:

Sweet nostalgic images of Nor’lins: French Quarter, spicey bloody mary’s w/ dilly beans, Good Friends, mardi gras, riding crops & leather bustiers, Vieux Carre, 4am powdered sugar bignets Cafe Dumonde, gumbo & shrimp etouffee, Burgundy Inn, Anne Rice, Lafayette & St Louis cemeteries, bourbon & coke, Magazine St antiquing, streetcar named Desire, Restaurant Atchafalya, blacken voodoo lager, k.d.lang, Constant Craving, Metarie, nights on Lake Pontchartrain-flipping mattresses-crotch crashing model tall ships, the Esplanade, Rex Harrison’s son Noel @ Mississippi River Bottom [MRB], blue eyes-blonde hair, “even thou he’s 60, he’s hot in Dixie”, shrimp poboys, Lafitte in Exile Bar, beads, Bourbon St, show us your tits, parades, krewes, the lords of leather ball, show us your dick, hurricanes, Commanders Palace, vampires, sazeracs, St Louis Cathedral, Decataur St, Central Grocery muffalettas … and on and on and on … lovely decadent memories.

Oh, to recover that lost youth!