Toni’s thread stands out in particular as reaching for the heights of Sirkian maternal melodrama and I mean that in a good way. She continues to allow the shards of her relationship with her daughter to lacerate her. Toni’s suffering stems from her grief over Creighton and from her guilt-ridden, masochistic embrace of Sofia’s (understandable) hostility. Sofia’s fragility and her resilience are vying for control over her story–at this point it’s neck and neck. Melissa Leo’s and Khandi Alexander’s faces express pain that won’t be healed soon or easily, or possibly ever. The damage in the Bernette and Williams families is under the surface, but it is festering. Even the fact that both women are middle-class and probably can pay for psychiatric care doesn’t mean they will have access to it in the health care wasteland of post-Katrina New Orleans.

But this carnival episode, like last year’s, also reminds me of the potential of every Mardi Gras to provide a transcendent collective experience. The heavily cross-cut montage creates a unity across the different stories to create a collective sense. While it’s true that everyone’s Mardi Gras experience is colored by his or her own emotional state at the time, as my dear friend Jolie says, there is also a group vibe. I risk repeating a cliche here because it is true: the value of carnival in my experience is the feeling that the whole city is transported together in a whimsical state of joie de vivre, the group high that engulfs the rich and poor, black and white, Uptown, Downtown, and back of town, the “family” fun and the more “adult” possibilities. The touristic elements of the show, as previous posts have pointed out, sometimes involve too many name-checks, too much striving to “get it right”–which, don’t get me wrong, is a welcome change from the travesties of the past. But this episode shows the heart of Mardi Gras without being corny, as virgotex argues in the Back of Town blog. For all their immaturity, Davis and Antoine each do the right thing. The sense of community that can come from carnival won’t erase the trouble in your heart, as the magical Cajun might say. But it can bring out the fellow-feeling in people and foster fleeting utopian moments. There is a sense of disaster averted–fears of violence prove unwarranted, as we see Colson’s character work “to protect and serve” at Muses and finally his coiled-spring tension easing at midnight on Mardi Gras. The cooperative spirit–that even the police (at their best) convey–is what I love about the line in the song “Carnival Time” that invites the listener to join in: “if you put a nickel well now, I put a dime / We can get together and drink us some wine.”