Columbia brings the Ya Ya for annual Mardi Gras celebration

Ohhhh Ya Ya!

Macho Man Randy Savage – err, Columbia attorney Ed McDonnell, that is – radiated the spirit of Mardi Gras, donning a green fringed “Macho Man” jacket with layers of jewel-toned bead strands and hollering “Ya Yaaa!” at City Roots farm on Saturday.

McDonnell is a member of Columbia’s Krewe de ColumbiaYaYa that organized the city’s first Mardi Gras parade and festival six years ago. The event has grown from a crowd of about 200 its first year to some 3,000 celebrants last year, McDonnell said.

After an excellently garish morning parade, which featured Eme Crawford and state Rep. James Smith, D-Richland, as Mardi Gras queen and king, this year’s festival crowd was expected to be even larger than the last with the event offering, for the first time, free admission.

“We don’t want to celebrate what somebody’s doing elsewhere. We want to have the celebration here,” McDonnell said of why the Krewe brought Mardi Gras to Columbia. “We look for things to make people come out of their houses and embrace the community and partner with each other.”

Saturday’s celebration had a way of overstimulating the senses – in a good way.

Look here! A feather-masked woman shimmies her way through a crowd, swinging her hips beneath a purple gown and gold shawl.

Listen there, there and there! Three or four bands at a time crank out tunes that waft over the farm and mingle with cheers of “Ya Ya!”

And there? That’s King Drybones.

King Drybones was hard to miss – a purple, pink and teal skull-faced parade puppet standing five or six feet tall above Jessica Willis’s shoulders.

Willis, of Florence, spent about a week and half constructing King Drybones, made completely from recycled and repurposed materials and supported on her back by a wooden trellis from her garden.

Parade puppets are a common feature of traditional Mardi Gras and carnival celebrations, Willis said. A storyteller in Florence, Willis makes many puppets and takes them to various festivals.

“I just wanted an excuse to build and bring out a puppet, so this was perfect,” she said.

While others stopped to gawk and take photos with Willis and King Drybones, 10-year-old Jackson Fitzgerald made friends of his own by leveraging one of the most popular Mardi Gras commodities of all (besides, well, maybe booze): beads.

Stacked from his shoulders up to his neck, the dozens upon dozens of strands of beads were weighing Jackson down, he said. So he was giving them away.

Jackson’s bead bounty came from a family trip to Mardi Gras in New Orleans a year ago, when he collected “thousands” of strands, he said. Saturday, he shared the beads to spread the Mardi Gras love and shed the weight.

“Generous Jackson,” Cathi George called him, as she and her friend Loretta Hammond thanked their new bead-bearing friend.

Their necks now properly embellished, they were ready to Ya Ya.

This story was originally published February 6, 2016 at 5:42 PM.