Joseph O. Patton: How I survived Mardi Gras in Mobile

  I will freely admit that I had strong misgivings about letting loose on the grand city of Mobile, Ala., during the madness of Mardi Gras -- especially with my girl-crazy coworkers, Matt ("lookin' for love in all the wrong places").

  The sky was clouded over Montgomery before we hit the road, and it was under those foreboding skies that some idiot at the Super Lube overfilled my oil tank, causing my baby, the Buick, to overheat and take an unexpected rest stop in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant. If it weren't for a kindly gentleman with a spray bottle full of water and whatever voodoo he worked under the hood, the four-doored wonder would still be taking a nap.

Joe Cain returned Mardi Gras to Mobile

  Though Mardi Gras had been celebrated for nearly a century and a half in both New Orleans, Louisiana and Mobile, Alabama, as with many things, the Civil War had nearly ended this celebration permanently. Though no one ever gets to know what might have been, one thing is certain, Mardi Gras was no longer being celebrated once the long and gruesome war had come to end.