Subject: RE: BS: How You Chose Your 'Handle'
From:
PoppaGator
Date: 28 Apr 05 - 02:31 PM
To "pop" a "gator" is to execute a certain dance-floor maneuver (it would be an exaggeration to call it a "step," let along a "dance") known as the Alligator (c.f. "Do the Alligator," Chris Kenner, Land of 1,000 Dances). One simply places all four limbs, and/or the torso, in contact with the floor (in either the prone or the supine position) and mimes some kind of writhing or humping motion. The Alligator was a sort of precursor to breakdancing ~ same idea, but not nearly as acrobatically advanced.
When I got out of the Army in 1973 and returned to New Orleans, my communal-housemates and other friends were completely caught up in a "gator revival" centered around performaces by the newly-rediscovered Henry Roeland Byrd, aka Professor Longhair (or "Fess" for short). Fess played the most exuberantly joyful music any of us had ever heard, inspiring us to hitherto unexplored heights of ecstacy and public displays of abandon.
We began organizing parties and dances to feature Fess, providing him as many opportunites as possible to play (while providing ourselves opportunities to cut up). Our biggest extravaganzas were two annual events, the "Gator Ball" held on New Years Eve and also on the Saturday night before Mardi Gras. We began referring to our loosely organized group as the "Krewe of Gator" and our mythical monarch as "Poppa Gator."
Every venue we rented to host an Annual Gator Ball made it a point to ask us never to come back again, with a single exception: The 501 Club, a large barnlike bar and dancehall on the riverfront at 501 Napoleon, corner of Tchoupitoulas Street. After a couple of years, some of the gang chipped in a few hundred bucks apiece, bought the 501 Club as a permanent place for Fess to play and for the Gator festivities to continue, and named the new venture "Tipitina's," after one of Mr. Byrd's greatest compositions. You may have heard of it.
Anyway, it is very presumptuous on my part to claim the title "Poppa Gator" ~ no one mere human was ever intended to embody this mythical character ~ but I figured no one in my immediate circle or real-life 3D friends would ever be the wiser if I adopted the name amongst all you cyberspace strangers, scattered around the globe. Don't rat me out, please!
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sj
