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Sandra Blair as Miss Deville   
Sandra Blair
photo by
Jackson Hill/southernlights.com
© 2004
Doing Lunch With Miss Deville

non-fiction
by Diane E. Dees


For eight years, from the late 70's through the mid-80's, the Krewe of Clones reigned as the official send-up of Mardi Gras proper, and what an outfit it was. Founded by former New Orleans artist and contemporary arts maven Denise Chanel Vallon and sponsored by the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center, the Krewe of Clones honored everything from local camp television commercials to movie stars who had met horrific deaths. All good Mardi Gras parades are art, but the Clones organization refused to compartmentalize itself into art and "other": Experientially speaking, it was all art, from the brochures to the publicity shots.

Some time in the first few years of the krewe's existence, I was recruited to be the Clones' public relations director. At the time, I ran a P.R. agency and frequently did projects for the CAC, so I already knew the cast of characters. I'd spent years resenting Mardi Gras, with its exclusion of women from influential clubs, its stomp-on-children's-hands-to-get-beads savagery, and its invasion by thousands of tourists who assumed the entire city of New Orleans was a giant trash dump. To make matters worse, in the mid-70's, I was a victim of Carnival police brutality because I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time with drunken cops. In short, I did not like Mardi Gras.

My distaste for the event was mitigated somewhat, however, by my love of Mardi Gras art. The music, the old-line floats (not the hideous things that are associated with such commercial ventures as the Bacchus and Endymion parades), the beads, and the wonderful costumes of the Mardi Gras Indians comprise some of the greatest folk art in America, and influence all of life in New Orleans. (Only in New Orleans could there be public trash receptacles bearing the purple, green and gold message, Throw Me Something Mister!)

With Clones, I had it all: the art, the guerrilla intentions, and the attitude. Tossing aside my cynicism like a string of cheap Carnival beads, I rode every year in the limousine convertible at the front of the parade, while people screamed "Throw me something, Sister!" and swigged their cocktails as we meandered down Camp Street in the damp, sometimes freezing, February weather. Then it was off to the Clones Ball for a night of dancing, drinking and costume-gawking.

That, it goes without saying, would have been enough to satisfy me, but there was so much more. As the P.R. director of Clones, I took it upon myself each year to spend an entire day offering the Clones "queen" to the media for interviews and photo ops. This was not an elected position, nor was it a title of birthright. Rather, it was the annual duty of esteemed New Orleans artist and craftswoman Sandra Blair.  Sandra was known for her costumes and was frequently the best art in view as she made her way among opening night galleries, accompanied by a costumed pug named Emma, and by former New Orleans fashion designer Lois Simbach.

For Clones, Sandra dressed to suit the krewe's annual theme, appearing as Barbie for "Barbie & Ken Go to the World's Fair" (part of Barbie's 25th birthday observance), Sandra Sexless (a send-up of the famous Bourbon Street burlesque queen, Sandra Sexton) for "Celebrity Tragedy," Darlene the Stripper for "A Confederacy of Dunces," and Marguerite DeVille (her king that year was Jimmy Buffett) for "Nuclear Disasters."

The art of dressing in female drag when one is already a woman requires a certain inherent camp sensibility. (In his stream-of-consciousness memoir, Queer Street, James McCourt acknowledges some of the great practitioners of this art, such as Raquel Welch in Myra Breckinridge and Carol Burnett as Mildred Fierce. A personal favorite of mine is Linda Gray as The Wellington Woman in  All That Glitters, if one is willing to stretch "drag" to mean transsexual.) Sandra carried it off superbly year after year, with multiple applications of heavy makeup, feather boas, garters, fake breasts, leopard skin costumes and outrageous hats.

I, too, chose a kind of drag, always escorting the queen in my most serious of business suits. I am a great deal shorter than Sandra, a fact which added greatly to the madness of the image as we made our way through the city, literally stopping traffic. We would begin our day with coffee, usually at some place like the Pontchartrain Hotel on St. Charles Avenue, then travel—on foot as much as possible—(though consider the type of shoes Miss DeVille had to wear) to all of the local television station news rooms and the offices of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

I was an old hand at this type of nonsense. I had already appeared in local newsrooms in several unexpected incarnations, most notably as the front end of a camel during NOMA's "Treasures of Tutankhamen" exhibit. Nothing was more fun than arriving with Sandra Blair, however. Supposedly unflappable reporters and their jaded news directors and editors went slack-jawed when they saw Sandra, who was wide-eyed and beauty pageant-gracious in her eagerness to talk about the Clones parade. She never failed to make the 6:00 and 10:00 news.

It wasn't all business, though. Sandra and I "shopped" at Adler's on Canal Street for diamond bracelets, and for cars at the St. Charles Avenue Mercedes dealership. For luncheon, we chose Antoine's or Galatoire's, where the old-world-trained waiters attended us with unflinching palace guard faces, while the bankers and attorneys simply gawked and giggled.

Sashaying around media outlets can make a girl thirsty, so there was an occasional stop for cocktails at a lounge, or at the apartment of one of our favorite French Quarter entertainers. I can't speak for Sandra, but by the end of the day, I was usually wasted, though still stunning in tweeds and Adolfo hat. Once, after a lengthy champagne stop, our hostess took our picture with a 3-D camera, and the result is memorable: I am sitting with glass of champagne on a straight-backed chair. Above me on the wall is a poster of the Eiffel Tower, and leaning over into my head is Sandra in a gathered tiered rust-colored satin gown and black lace arm covers. It looks for all the world like she is the madame of a grand turn-of-the-century house, and I am the bookkeeper, there to celebrate the quarterly profits.

Media day wasn't our only chance to make an appearance; we also—along with other Clones dignitaries—visited the homes of Clones honorees, who received us in various states of readiness. Memorable was a visit to the home of the hospitable Allen Toussaint, who was weighted down by a multitude of rings and medals some years before bling-bling was obligatory among the funky elite. In contrast, Ellis Marsalis greeted us in an old white T-shirt full of holes, a sight that made the evening news.

Clones ceased to exist in 1986. The official reason was that there were scheduling conflicts with the city. However, the krewe had already become part of the establishment it sought to lampoon, and had therefore outlived its usefulness. It was a wonderful concept, with a wonderful queen. My most vivid memory of Sandra concerns a day we arrived at the front desk of the labyrinthine Times-Picayune building. She was dressed as Marguerite DeVille, and the Italian-American guard took one look at her, threw up his arms, and exclaimed: "Oh, darlin'! You look-a-like an angel!"

In truth, she looked like a Las Vegas transvestite whore, but such is the beauty of Mardi Gras that for one moment, she was one man's idealized vision of heaven.