Mardi Gras and Day of the Dead are two very different holidays. But in 2020 Mardi Gras Death is a real thing. It's Ash Wednesday 2020, the day after the deadliest Mardi Gras, possibly of all time.

Julie Couret is a witness to what happened. As a regular TV commentator camera crews sought Julie out right after the event and today, with the benefit of a bit hindsight, Julie gives us a first hand account of riding in the Nyx Parade just a few floats behind the woman who was killed trying to walk between the two sections of a tandem float. Was she cut in half, as people reported? (Julie says she knows the person who tried to give her CPR so it's doubtful she was in two pieces.) Was Mardi Gras 2020 cursed by the spirits of the dead people trapped inside the collapsed Hard Rock Hotel on Canal Street? (The jury is out on that one.)

Dr. Mark Carson is a professor of history. But nobody mentions that small detail until the last moments of this Happy Hour, after Mark has played one of the nearly 2,000 songs he's written - this one appears on a Papa Grows Funk album and it's about a New Orleans character who used to hang out outside the Maple Leaf Bar where this show is recorded - and recounted his worst nightmare from years in bands. You'll wish you had a nightmare like this. Julie summarized it as, "having to deal with the oily grease from a stripper's tits." 

All in all, for the day after the deadliest Mardi Gras ever - in which two separate people were killed in bizarre Mardi Gras parade accidents, both run over by the back half of a tandem-float - this Happy Hour is pretty punchy.  We get to hear how Julie get meets a guy on Bumble, and how - thanks to Ancestry.com and Facebook - she finds the brother she never knew she had, who came to be born as a result of a date her father barely remembers going on back in the day. 

For photos from this show by Jill Lafleur, and more, visit our website at www.itsneworleans.com