http://www.lawrence.com/users/photos/2014/feb/24/269544/

If you’ve listened to Truckstop Honeymoon’s 2011 album Steamboat in a Cornfield, you know that Katie and Mike West’s arrival in Kansas had everything to do with the floods that chased them here. Fleeing from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and taking their two daughters on the road to tour, the duo finally settled the family in the middle of the map, bringing their southern-inspired jazzy bluegrass tunes with them.

But something was missing in their new home away from their New Orleans home.

Their second year in Lawrence, Mardi Gras fell on Mike’s birthday and Katie mentioned how the previous year was the first time their kids hadn’t gotten to celebrate the holiday highlighted back home with thousands of people in parades wearing beads and brightly colored outfits.

“They knew it was cold and there was nowhere to go, and it was kind of a letdown,” Mike says.

They decided they would round up a few friends and have a tiny marching band down Mass. Street for the kids just to give them a small taste of what they were missing in their favorite neighborhood parades in New Orleans. Katie called a few musicians and asked them if they’d be interested in learning a few songs in their living room, and on the first night, at least 40 people showed up.

“It was so much fun having the house full of people singing and playing in this lovely cacophonous way,” he says.

After a few weekly rehearsals, the day to march arrived with bitter freezing rain, and the couple thought they would have to throw in the towel.

Then they got a call from some of their friends down at Aimee’s Coffeehouse asking, “Where are you guys?”

Seven years later, musicians in their early 20s to their late 70s show up to the West’s living room for weekly rehearsals in February to build on the song repertoire for Mardi Gras in Lawrence. Some dust off horns they haven’t played since high school, others bring their guitars, fiddles, tambourines, banjos or accordion. Loud “joyous” music fills the house, kids run around and throw paper airplanes around, trying to land them in the tubas.

“Anything goes,” Mike says. “We’re really lucky that people here are willing to go along with it and have fun with it and do this goofy thing on a Tuesday in the depths of winter. It’s a little attempt of breathing in a little bit of sunshine in the midst of the cold.”

Like the unofficial neighborhood parades in New Orleans, roads aren’t officially closed, Mike says, otherwise people would think it’s a spectacle where they should stand on the sidelines and watch, much like the St. Patrick’s Day parade. This is a participatory event where you join in, dress up in tutus, wigs, bright colors, big, bold frocks, and play if you want to play, sing if you want to sing and march down the street wandering in and out of coffee shops and bars, Mike says.

“If it’s freezing we just wear our thermals under our tutus,” he says.

They rehearse traditional and modern Mardi Gras songs, as well as brass band songs. They are designed for everyone to join in, simple chants to sing along and be a part of it, as well as some standard gospels like “Down By the Riverside.” It’s fun to introduce this repertoire to the Lawrence community musicians where they adopt the song and modify it to make it their own.

“Suddenly we have the Kansas version of ‘Cissy Strut,'” Mike says. “We really enjoy the openness and spirit of the people here.”

While he’s hoping most businesses have gotten used to them traipsing into shops during the noon hour with tubas, trumpets and drums at this time of year, Mike’s well aware that new businesses in town might find it a bit startling. They will go in anyway.

“I remember this young manager saying, ‘You cannot come in here!’ and I was like, ‘we’re coming in here,'” he says laughing. “But I think at this point most people know what to expect.”

They are thankful the city allows them to hold their own parade, not that there is too much traffic downtown on a Tuesday. The police escorted them one year making sure the group of kids and adults were safe in crossing the street (much of the parade is on the sidewalk) but they realized that it wasn’t unsafe situation.

Anyone interested in joining in the festivities can show up with or without an instrument in front of Aimee’s Coffeehouse, 1025 Massachusetts St., between 11:30 a.m. and noon March 4. The parade will begin at noon, “ambling quite slowly” up Mass. Street, taking about an hour where they will gather in front of Free State Brewing Company.

No worries if you can’t make it to NOLA to celebrate. The Wests started something special in Lawrence, and locals continue to own the holiday as if it always belonged here.

“Some friends of ours came up from Louisiana to spend Mardi Gras in Kansas, which I thought was golden,” Mike says. “Certainly cheaper finding a hotel here.”