The merriment of Mardi Gras is like the exaggerated greasepaint smile of a sad clown in a celebratory city still mired in miseries.
For the sake of the Big Easy's psyche and pocketbook, the Carnival goes on this week, as big and brassy as before Hurricane Katrina devastated this storied place 18 months ago.
There are as many parades and balls as ever as the extended celebration moves toward its climax next week on Fat Tuesday. Hotels are booked nearly solid.
But Mardi Gras could be the institution most back to normal in a New Orleans where violent crime and a lagging recovery have already changed the commerce and culture forever.
"This one event is very healthy," said Arthur Hardy, a historian and publisher of an authoritative Mardi Gras guide. He said that other than the Saints, who were "abnormally good" in making the National Football League playoffs, Mardi Gras is probably closer to pre-Katrina standards than any other aspect of life here.
Before Katrina flooded New Orleans in early September 2005, the city's population was about 444,000. The Louisiana Recovery Authority found the population is now about 191,000, not even half of what it was.
Instead of continuing to grow as former residents return, the population has hit a "plateau" and could even tilt the other way, said Elliott Stonecipher, a Louisiana demographic and political analyst. A recent study of moving van companies "quite frankly showed an out-migration," he said.
Because "the city lost 108,000 housing units" in Katrina, said Greg Rigamer, a demographer with CCR & Associates in New Orleans, it will remain a much smaller city for many years. A population of 300,000 in five years "might be realistic," he said.
Riding down streets in the Ninth Ward and Lakeview, lined with ruined houses and deserted except for National Guard patrols, it's hard to believe that a year and a half have passed since Katrina.
On Lamanche Street, clothes and a Spider-Man sleeping bag are still in tree limbs where floodwaters deposited them. Power wires are still down in front of the Holy Family Spiritualist Church, where someone left Mardi Gras beads on a statue of the Virgin Mary.
In a drying scrapbook on the driveway of a demolished house in the Ninth Ward are pictures of a family's vacation to Atlanta and student IDs from a daughter's years at Dillard University.
One resident who did return home to New Orleans only a few months after Katrina was Stacy Brundrick, an accountant. But she moved to Birmingham, Alabama after city services were slow to resume, and crime spiked.
"When people call and ask me when I'm moving back, I jokingly tell them 'When I don't need a bulletproof vest any more,'" she said.
She has come back for Mardi Gras, though, and will ride in a parade Saturday as a member of the all-female Iris Krewe.
"I will always love New Orleans," she said. "But a lot of young professionals are like me. I have a friend who says he wavers every day on whether to stay or to leave."
There were 162 killings in New Orleans in 2006, "and one conviction. That's ugly," said Peter Scharf, director of the Center for Society, Law and Justice at the University of New Orleans. There were 21 more murders in the first 42 days of this year.
The murders of Helen Hill, a well-known local filmmaker, and brass band musician Dinerral Shavers destroyed the illusion that killings were concentrated in certain neighborhoods, Scharf said. "The truth is now there are really not that many safe places in the city."
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