Mardi Gras Float Builder Creates Giant Moon Pie
Mobile's New Year’s Emblem Part of Gulf Coast Carnival Tradition
Feb 9, 2009
He has been in the business for more than 30 years. Mussel builds and paints Mardi Gras floats for several of the mystic societies that parade during Mobile’s Carnival season, which generally lasts from mid-January to midnight on Fat Tuesday, when Lent begins. He has ten full-time employees at work in five float barns scattered around downtown Mobile. Mussel and his crew were able to shoe-horn in a hurry-up order for a giant moon pie to lift on New Year's Eve, December 31, 2008, getting the job done in about four weeks.
They typically start work for an upcoming Mardi Gras season as soon as the mystic societies have drawings for their new floats. “We are in the barn working two or three weeks before Easter,” Mussel said. “Last year Mardi Gras was early. On a short year, you have to get back in [to work] as quick as you can.” (The date for Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, changes every year but always falls six weeks before Easter, the date of which is determined by the lunar calendar. Mardi Gras can roam all over the winter calendar. For example: Fat Tuesday 2008 = February 5. In 2009, it’s February 24; in 2010, February 16; in 2011, March 8.)
Designing Floats
Every mystic society’s parade has a theme: fairy tales; movies; the stars and planets; myths; pirates, the color pink, etc. The societies then work with artists to come up with ideas for the individual floats. For a fairy tale theme, for example, floats might be Little Red Riding Hood; Rumplestiltskin; Jack and the Beanstalk; Old Mother Hubbard. Mussel often works with Mobile artist Mark Calametti. “We talk about it; we kick things around. I can build whatever he draws,” Mussel said.
Designing and building the floats can a tricky business. In addition to the year’s theme, plans must incorporate practical issues such as how high or low the ‘rides’ (spots where riders stand) are on a given float bed and how the float beds, or wagons, will be ordered in the parade. In some mystic societies given groups of riders always parade in a certain order, but the float beds they ride on may change. In other societies, the same riders are always together on the same float bed every year, but the float beds’ places in the parade change. “If you are first in line this year, you will go to the back of the line next year,” Mussel said.
Bulding the Moon Pie
To make the moon pie, Mussel said in an interview, he put a plywood skin on the front and back of a metal armature shaped something like a gigantic spool and filled in the middle with cardboard. He then covered the shape with paper mache to make a smooth surface for painting. To lift the moon pie into the sky, cables attach to sturdy metal eyelets at the top of the armature, Mussel said.
Lifting the Moon Pie
The finished moon pie weighed about 900 pounds, according to Barry Dicks, vice president of Mobile-area crane company Robert J. Baggett, Inc. The company donated the crane and crew that lifted the electronic moon pie on New Year’s Eve 2008. Early on December 31 they did a couple of test lifts, Dicks said, but 20-knot winds prevented them from lifting the moon pie to the crane’s full 200-foot height. Strong winds continued to be a problem on New Year’s Eve, preventing them from raising the electronic pie any higher than 125 feet.
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