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For a relatively small city, New Orleans has a remarkably vibrant and varied performing-arts community. While there are many traditional performance venues around town, one of the most exciting movements in recent years is the fringe theater action along Saint Claude Avenue, in the Bywater neighborhood. The annual Fringe Theater Festival brings pop-up performances, but there are also some permanent venues as well.
The biggest event on the city's cultural calendar is also the oldest—it's been around for more than a century. Parades roll almost nightly for the last few weeks of the Carnival season, which starts on Twelfth Night and culminates on Mardi Gras (or Fat Tuesday), the last blow-out party before Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. The big day itself is a city holiday, with the streets taken over by costumed revelers, floats, marching bands, and throngs of partiers. Plastic beads are the currency of the day. Every year, Mardi Gras falls on a different date, but it's always in either February or March.
Top-notch local, national, and international musical talent takes to several stages the last weekend of April and first weekend of May. The repertoire covers much more than just jazz, with big-name rock and pop stars in the mix as well as dozens of lectures, quality arts and crafts booths, and awesome food to boot. Next to Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest is the city's biggest draw; book your hotel as far in advance as possible.
Throughout the month of December, Canal Street sparkles with the season's decorations, and historic homes across the city put on their holiday best. St. Louis Cathedral opens its doors for free weekly concerts, and thousands of carolers gather in Jackson Square to raise their voices by candlelight. You'll find specials at hotels, as well as holiday reveillon menus at restaurants. Celebration in the Oaks lights up City Park, and bonfires are set on the Mississippi River's levee from New Orleans into Cajun Country—a Cajun tradition illuminating the way for Papa Noel.
Three fun parades hit the streets of the French Quarter on Easter Sunday: one led by local entertainer Chris Owens, another dedicated to the late socialite Germaine Wells, and the last an incredible gay parade that takes the festive bonnet tradition to a whole new level.
Socialite Germaine Wells, step-daughter of the founder of Arnaud's Restaurant (and eventually its owner), started this New York–style Easter Parade in the French Quarter in 1956. Her legacy lives on, as women riding in convertibles and carriages don floppy chapeaus and hand out stuffed bunnies along the route. The parade ends in time for noon Mass at St. Louis Cathedral.
Fashion takes a front seat at this parade, which ambles through the Quarter midafternoon on Easter Sunday, passing gay and gay-owned bars, restaurants and shops.
For more than 65 years, the Irish Channel St. Patrick's Day Club has put on a Saturday-afternoon-before-St. Paddy's Day parade with floats, bands and marching groups. Preferred throws here include green beads, cabbages, carrots and the occasional potato.
A couple of big parades roll on the weekend closest to March 17: one starts at Molly's at the Market and winds through the French Quarter; the other, in Uptown, goes down Magazine Street and turns the area around Irish Channel neighborhood bars Parasol's and Tracey's into one big, green block party. Two days later (March 19) the town celebrates St. Joseph's Day with home-cooked food and goodie bags filled with cookies and lucky fava beans. Check the NOLA tourism website for announcements of altars that you can visit.
Every July, heralded mixologists, distillers, writers, chefs, and cocktail connoisseurs converge in the city for several days of cocktail competitions, seminars, tastings, pairing dinners and other spirited events.
The annual March multi-day tribute to the Streetcar Named Desire playwright draws well-known and aspiring writers, lecturers, and a handful of Williams's acquaintances, along with music and theater, both classic and original. It closes with contestants re-enacting Stanley Kowalski's big "Stella-a-a!" moment.
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