Coviello, who underwent what she calls a "classic conversion experience" at her first Bacchus parade in 1992, is founder of Box of Wine, a marching group whose Bacchanalian revels have greatly enlivened the scene along the parade route before the main event rolls. Think of it as her gift to the thousands of dedicated paradegoers who come out early to secure prime viewing spots for Bacchus.

Members of  Mr. Quintron's Ninth Ward Marching Band

While very much a grassroots affair, Box of Wine is not without flash. The participants, many of whom accent their costumes with grape vines, are accompanied by the creative Ninth Ward Marching Band, which, under the direction of Mr. Quintron, performs a tightly choreographed routine that never fails to amaze the crowd. "We always get people who are going, 'Man, they ain't throwing shit,' " relates Coviello, "but then something happens. The parade stops and the Gun Girls start going into their routine"—twirling their guns, which shoot confetti—"and its magic. No one can resist it." A native of Oak Park, Ill., Coviello came to New Orleans to teach English at George Washington Carver, a public high school in the Lower Ninth Ward, after graduating from the University of Iowa. Having lived in Kenya for a year, where she'd been exposed to drum-and-dance processions and funerals, the peculiar festive customs of her newly adopted home were not entirely unfamiliar.

Carver draws from a predominantly African-American working-class neighborhood, and many of Coviello's students lived in Desire, one of the nation's largest public housing developments. She'd watch Carver's marching band practice outside the school. As most any New Orleanian can attest, the sound of the drums always builds up the excitement of a parade, and for Coviello, "it was completely compelling."

Also helping stoke Coviello's anticipation of the Mardi Gras festivities were her hairdresser's descriptions of costumed celebrants in the French Quarter on Fat Tuesday. She recalls hearing about "a man painted gold, perfectly proportioned in every way, carrying a silver tray with a perfectly proportioned midget on it painted silver." Needless to say, she was "transfixed."

Coviello's initiation into the rites of the season came courtesy of the Army of Clowns, a group of revelers, now defunct, who indulged in ritual excess on Bacchus Sunday. "They did costume pieces for everybody, like a big ruffled collar or cuffs. It was funny and brash...a big group of friends walking down the street together," she remembers.

Among them was a woman named GeeGee, who, recalls Coviello, was "wearing a 1930s velveteen dress and playing a drum with a glass bottle. And of course, the bottle broke and glass went everywhere."

Starting out at the Half Moon Bar in the Lower Garden District, the Army of Clowns eventually made it to Lucky's, a bar on St. Charles Ave., to watch the Bacchus parade. Lower St. Charles was then in a state of neglect, and the rundown buildings offered a stark contrast to festive encampments—tents, barbecue grills, picnic baskets, boom boxes and stepladders—set up by families lining the parade route.

The King of the Clowns was a flamboyant bartender at Lucky's named Mickey, now deceased. He was garbed in a collar measuring six feet in diameter and had platform shoes seven inches high, recalls Coviello. To pass the time, he traded drinks for drugs. Calling out "Whatdaya got?" he pulled people's heads over the bartop at Lucky's and poured liquor down their throats.

After hours of waiting, Bacchus finally arrived around twilight. Before long, Coviello found herself groveling for beads in the dirt of the median, known as the neutral ground, that divides the avenue. "I was hallucinating beads," she recalls. "People had beads coming out of their eyes and mouths and ears."

At one point she saw an apparition, in the cloud-like form of a bull's head, hovering over the parade. Coviello didn't know it at the time, but Dionysus—the equivalent of Bacchus in Greek mythology—was often represented in the form of a bull at ancient festivals held in his honor.

Like Bacchus—whose cult was connected to nature's fertility and whose worship generated emotional frenzy—Dionysus was no mere god but an entire religion unto himself. As The Horizon Cookbook and Illustrated History of Eating and Drinking Through the Ages says of the revels he inspired, "Intoxication was thought to wrest the human spirit from the mind's control. Wine, then, became everywhere in the classical world a medium of religious experience."

Delving into some reference books, Coviello later discovered that the "painful ecstasy" she says she felt at that first Bacchus parade was characteristic of a religious conversion experience. "I was a fan of Greek mythology from the time I was a little girl," she says, "but I didn't know about the religious dimensions of it at all, and I didn't know what had happened to me [at the parade]. I just knew it was really intense and was spiritual in nature."

Coviello—who subsequently enrolled in a master's program at the University of California at Berkeley—came to realize that all the things she was thankful for in life could be traced back to her first experience of Bacchus Sunday. So when Mardi Gras season rolled around again, "I told all my professors that it was a religious holiday, and I had to go."

For Bacchus, Coviello and six other costumed friends, some with drums, marched up St. Charles to pay ritual homage to his mythological majesty. She carried a sign that said "Thanks to Bacchus for favors granted"—verbiage that echoed the classified advertisements thanking favorite saints which customarily appear in New Orleans-area newspapers in the days preceding St. Joseph's Day (March 19). (Many Catholic residents of Louisiana observe this feast day, which is considered a respite from the fasting of Lent, by erecting alters that typically include food offerings for the less fortunate.)

After obtaining her master's degree, Coviello moved back to New Orleans and landed a job teaching English at Warren Easton High School. For Bacchus Sunday in 1995, she made a sign that said "Praise Bacchus" and once again took to the street with her band of revelers. By now, imbibing from boxes of wine had become something of a tradition—hence the name Box of Wine.

Joining in the procession that year were some friends of Coviello's who were associated with an avant garde performance ensemble, Crash Worship. Through hypnotic, propulsive rhythms and the extensive use of visual and physical stimuli—including pyrotechnics and the whipping and piercing of bodies live on stage—the group, along with its audience provocateurs, is known for creating an atmosphere of explosive, orgiastic intensity. "They're real primitivists," says Coviello, who became friends with members of the group, who were originally from San Diego, not long after they arrived in New Orleans.

The following year, with the Ninth Ward Marching Band joining the procession, Box of Wine assumed a much higher profile, attracting more participants than ever before. From its humble beginnings as a loosely organized, rag-tag Bacchanal, the ensemble had evolved into something more structured and elaborate. They have a banner and even print up fancy invitations, through there isn't any formal membership.

While the parade is open to anyone who catches the spirit, participants are encouraged to dress in costume. As is typical of the city's Mardi Gras subcultures, people tend to spend more time on their costumes in proportion to how often they've participated.

Jim is one reveler who, says Coviello, always makes a memorable contribution to the pageantry. He once made a giant cat head that housed a loudspeaker, and "was playing an electric guitar inside his costume." For the 2000 parade, he supplied Box's of Wine's only "float": a golf cart equipped with booming loudspeakers.

As Box of Wine's visibility increased over the years, so too did the likelihood of running afoul of a city ordinance requiring parades large and small to obtain permits. Many "unofficial" marching groups that roam the French Quarter on Fat Tuesday routinely slip under the police department's radar. But as Box of Wine discovered on Bacchus Sunday 1999, taking to city's main parade thoroughfare without a permit is a much dicier proposition.

When the parade, after winding its way through the back streets of  Uptown, hit St. Charles, the cops were waiting with paddy wagons. Coviello—who, in honor of the fact that it was Valentine'sDay, had a sign that said "Bacchus be mine"—says she tried explaining to them that the participants would "never do anything to stop the Bacchus parade from coming." After all, she relates, "whatever the stupid, bullshit theme, whatever no-brain, no-spirituality people ride on that parade, just the name alone is total power and magic to me." The cop in charge wasn't buying it. "He's like, 'Girl, you're going right in that paddywagon,' " recalls Coviello. " 'Where's your permit?' " Fortunately, though, cooler heads prevailed and no one got hauled off in handcuffs. The group wound up performing their routine on a side street and then hung around to watch the Bacchus parade.

Masker on Krewe of Bacchus float

Box of Wine had had run-ins with the cops before, yet somehow always managed to finagle or maneuver its way onto St. Charles. Indeed, says Coviello, "half the fun is the embattlement."
Nevertheless, for the 2000 parade, Box of Wine opted to go through official channels and obtain a permit. The alternative—banishment from the Bacchus parade route—was just too depressing.

For the big day, Coviello was got up in a wedding dress and carried a sign that said "Bacchus I do." "I'm married to everything that stands for," she says. "It's like saying yes to life and no to death. If you don't say yes to Bacchus, he pays you back hard."

Sadly, Larry, one of Coviello's best friends and the king of Box of Wine for 2000, died before he was able to reign. For his memorial service, she decorated a coffin that was displayed at the Audubon Hotel, at 1225 St. Charles.

Coviello attributes Larry's death to his lack of a healthy relationship with Bacchus, who may encourage you to indulge in pleasure, but also demands that you keep it in perspective. "The
number one source of misery is people's inability to cope with their addictions," she observes. "Maybe it just looks that way in New Orleans, but man, I grew up with an alcoholic father and it has really colored my view of the world."

Though other friends of Coviello's have stumbled on the slippery slope of overindulgence—a way of life laissez-faire New Orleans tends to promote—her romance with the city basically remains in tact. It's "a great place to make things happen," she says, because the indigenous culture encourages people to explore their creativity—frequently, in the streets. And in contrast to other cities, where people tend rely on more formal, structured venues to express themselves, New Orleans represents one of the "last bastions where people pay to entertain other people."

Speaking of mainstream Mardi Gras parades, Coviello admits that "as much as the guys on the floats are such assholes to me, I worship them at the same time." Why? Because they foot the bill for the festivities, as well as devote lots of time and effort to ensure their success—"literally out of the goodness of their hearts."

Although Coviello will won't be on hand for the 2001 festivities—she's teaching in Prague, in the Czech Republic, on a Fullbright grant—Box of Wine will still roll. You can catch the procession Uptown around Toledano St. and St. Charles Ave., before Bacchus.

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