Dames de Perlage

Seated in a rocking chair on South Carrollton Avenue in New Orleans, Carrie Fisher ponders her corset. In the past six months, she’s spent 100 hours beading the artwork she’ll eventually attach to it, and with 100 days until Mardi Gras, she has at least another 100 hours to go. Then she’ll turn to other matters: how to design her feathered headdress, the requisite annual patch and all the other accoutrements that comprise a costume for the women’s marching krewe Dames de Perlage.

As the streetcar rumbles past, Fisher — Dame Carrie, in krewe parlance — runs her needle through the green turf of Tiger Stadium. Its purple-and-gold end zones contain hundreds of beads. Soon, she’ll resume work on the half-finished crowd. They cheer, tens of thousands, beneath an operatic sunset. Like the other fifty-nine Dames, Fisher’s latest costume celebrates one of the many ways Louisianians gather as community.

Every April since the Dames de Perlage debuted in 2013, Julie Lodato and Christine Clouatre — founding members and, therefore, Grande Dames — announce the krewe’s new theme. Unlike previous years, when Fisher researched possibilities, she heard this year’s theme, “Southern Nights,” and knew right away what to do. “I’m an LSU fan, and I’m a Dames fan,” she says as she gauges her progress.

For nine months after that annual announcement, Fisher, Lodato, Clouatre and the other Dames prepare costumes they will wear during four Mardi Gras parades — Freret, King Arthur, Tucks and OAK — and on their season’s exclamation point, Dame Fine Second Line on Lundi Gras. They practice perlage, French for beading, and parade in “walking canvases” that they concoct and create in what averages to 250 hours of annual work per Dame.

Past themes have included “Fierce Women of Louisiana,” “They All Ask’d for You,” and “Patron Saints of New Orleans.” Lodato and Clouatre based this year’s theme on Allen Toussaint’s 1975 album, “Southern Nights.” Dame Seran Williams says, “It’s about all the things we do from dusk ‘til dawn.”

Each year after the announcement, the Dames devise plans and prepare to present their sketches for the Grande Dames’ approval. Watch it unfold like an NFL Draft. Carnival season ends. For a few weeks, the Dames recuperate. Then they receive the April announcement and await notification of their selection slot, based on the order in which they’ve paid annual dues. To pay early means to earn a higher slot, something each Dame wants since no two can march in similar costumes, so they must consider alternatives.

While waiting this year, Fisher contemplated the krewe’s goal “to preserve and respect the art of perlage.” At the back of her mind, she also considered an unwritten goal, namely that each Dame continually up the ante in design and artistry. “I was floundering,” Fisher says, smiling as she runs her needle through another patch of turf. “There’s a lot of anticipation and anxiety.” An LSU grad, she wanted Tiger Stadium. A Louisiana native, she needed to pay tribute to all it means to everyone who has ever congregated there on a Saturday night.

Like many of her krewe members, Fisher carves out time for beading after working all day, an hour here and there, her goal always three square inches of progress. She beads, also, during required monthly meetings, like the one today, with fellow Dames offering support as they work side by side and keep the theme secret until its online unveiling on Twelfth Night. “We all help one another,” Lodato says. “And we’re often beading until the last minute.”

All the rules and rituals: It didn’t begin that way. “Not one of us knew how to bead when we started,” Lodato says. Twelve years ago, she found herself alone at home on the Northshore, an hour’s drive from her native New Orleans. Like many displaced New Orleanians, she drifted into New Orleans dreams. Across their surface floated the usual suspects — music and food, the pulse of a brass band that you hear long before you see it, all those aromas that plop you down in your grandmother’s kitchen in some distant decade. But true places reveal themselves through what happens when people come together to celebrate amid all that music and food, so Lodato’s dreams whirled around sisterhood.

At the time, she had been marching in another women’s krewe. Helping her fellow members prepare their costumes, she realized that she wanted to create something new, something her own. She started calling old friends. “If I pull people together for a krewe, would you be in?” she asked.

Clouatre received the first call. A week later, the two devised a plan. They would honor the city’s African American clubs whose titles — Social Aid and Pleasure — reveal their priority: Always support the community that you carouse among. Twenty women attended the first meeting. Lodato said, “We aren’t just going to glue Mardi Gras beads over our corsets. We’re going all in. And we’re not just throwing a party.” Word spread about a new krewe that would offer women a space to care for one another and give back to the place that had infused so many of them with those New Orleans dreams.

Lodato called several Mardi Gras Indians, asking if they would teach the Dames their beading tradition. Two gave workshops. “From that, we ran with it,” Lodato says. “Our techniques are definitely different, but they inspired us.”

During their first Mardi Gras, the Dames marched without a theme in three parades. Afterward, Lodato revisited the master plan. “We needed a uniform, I realized. This would create consistency and allow the individual designs, beadwork, and feathers to stand out, and for the Dames to reveal their personalities. Since then, we all wear bustle belts, corsets and feathered headdresses.” Then the Dames accessorize.

“We show it off,” says Williams. “After spending nine months building your baby, you want people to see it.” A Chicago native, Williams developed a childhood passion for jazz. That’s prologue to the epiphany she had during her first Jazz Fest. “Of course,” she thought. After Hurricane Katrina, she bought a house in New Orleans. “I wanted to make a statement: I am not just using this city. I’m part of it.”

For many members, the mission to participate and give back provides entrée into a world they didn’t know they had been missing — until they saw it in the Dames. “The support we give each other, that’s where the sisterhood comes on strongest,” says Williams. Renée Russo made her Dames debut last year. “My friends all said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so happy.’” Inside the house on Carrollton Avenue, she watches her fellow Dames sit together on the floor and bead. “It’s pure joy,” Clouatre says. “Anything can happen to me in my life, and one of these women will come to my rescue.” 

Kate Bartels first saw the Dames parade during Mardi Gras. “I fell in love with everything about them,” she says, “their spirit, the way they were trying to keep old traditions alive, the way they passed those traditions on, and being there for the community.” About her own first time seeing them, Owen Phyfer says, “I was transfixed.” She joined the next year. “You’re anonymous in the parade. You don’t have to be that extroverted. It’s a community of women, but once you’re on the route, you join a new community.”

The Dames’ existence stems from Lodato and Clouatre’s desire to build a place that supports both. Each year, the Dames promote a different nonprofit organization. They have also planned blood drive, held events for breast cancer awareness, hosted benefits for organizations that have included the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic Assistance Foundation, Second Harvest Food Bank, and Animal Rescue New Orleans. At the height of the pandemic when families couldn’t visit dying loved ones in the hospital, Dame Leah Henricks, a nurse at Ochsner, wanted to help. To do so, she asked the Dames to bead small hearts. Henricks then gave them to dying patients. In the absence of loved ones, they embraced the Dames’ hearts.

Because they consistently steep themselves in new service projects, the Dames often forget such past deeds. Here’s another example. When Hurricane Harvey struck Houston in 2017, the krewe collected clothes and food. “My house ended up being like Goodwill,” Lodato says. From there, Dames delivered donated items and other supplies to Texas. They worked around the clock, but too much time went to sorting donations, so Lodato began thinking of ways to streamline the process. “I thought, ‘Why don’t we start using Amazon Wedding Registry?’ I immediately set one up for clothes and food. Our social media skyrocketed after that. People were asking, ‘Who are these women doing all this to help?’”

Four years later, the community found itself in need once again after Hurricane Ida. The Dames set up another registry. Many had lived through their own disasters — the deaths of loved ones, breast cancer, a lifetime of hurricanes. “Katrina did this to me,” says Fisher as she inspects the beadwork for her corset. “The future is uncertain. Let’s live in the moment. You don’t know. So I’m doing this for the day, for the marching, for the experience. I want to look as good as I can look on that day.”

Inside, a near-dozen Dames gather in the kitchen. “I go from zero to Parish in six seconds,” one says as coda to a tale, and laughter permeates the room. Beside them, Lauren Asche quietly paints faces for Dames who will soon leave for Halloween parties. As a non-member in the inaugural year, Asche painted faces on the bus before the Dames hit the streets. She had so much fun that she later told Lodato, “I’m never riding this bus again if I’m not a Dame.”

“Get on the bus with us,” said Lodato, who now steps into another room. Feathered headdresses sprout from tables, in-progress corsets perch on chairs and couches, and on the living room floor sit three Dames. They stop beading occasionally to examine one another’s work and offer encouragement. Lodato smiles. “I will know these women for life,” she says.