It’s a Wild New Orleans’ Circus Story

NEW ORLEANS — You don’t need a tailgate to party in Sin City.

Trading their bratwurst and chowder for andouille sausage and gumbo, Green Bay and New England fans created a carnival atmosphere along the plaza outside the Superdome on Sunday while waiting for the Super Bowl to begin.

And this city loves carnivals even more than it loves football.

The accouterment of choice for Packers fans was the now-famous foam cheesehead, of course. But there were also cheese baseball caps, cheese neckties and bow-ties, cheese seat cushions, and green and yellow Asian temple-like thingamajigs.

“Chinese cheeseheads,” explained Mike Shohoney, a Packers season ticket-holder from Green Lake, Wis., who said his trip is a pilgrimage to the “Cajun Tundra” and the hat is a shrine to former Packers coach Vince Lombardi.

Concessionaires hawked po’ boy sandwiches of all kinds, fried green tomatoes, stuffed okra, Creole gumbo, gator sausage, pecan pralines and plenty of beer, trying to satisfy the culinary desires of the visiting Yankees.

“But nothing measures up to the old Johnsonville,” Shohoney said, lamenting the absence of his favorite brand of brat.

On a stage nearby, blues musicians threw Mardi Gras beads to the crowd, but the tacky trinkets measured barely a ripple on the scale of bizarre fashion accessories.

Among those turning out for the game were brightly dressed men on stilts, others in Revolutionary War garb, another with a replica of the Vince Lombardi Trophy emerging from his football helmet and yet another dressed as a spotted cow, udders and all.

“Every weirdo in the world is here,” said Roger Wargin, who dressed up his Sunday best with a foam cheese necktie. “You could probably fit all of Green Bay right in here.”

“One of the Patriots fans said to me, ‘Your city must be empty,”’ added his neighbor, Sharon Ryan.

“I told him, ‘No, I left the kids at home,”’ Wargin said.

Amid the sea of Brett Favre and Drew Bledsoe jerseys filing into the dome was Steve Fine of Marblehead, Mass., wearing an old-style Steve Grogan No. 14. Fine’s friend, Scott Gilefsky, was at the dome in 1986 when Grogan’s Patriots lost to the Chicago Bears 46-10.

“The worst part of that trip was the game,” he said, explaining that the trip to New Orleans was worth it either way. “It’s amazing what you can get for some beads, let’s put it that way.”

One reporter was offered $3,000 for her press credential. Scalpers were getting up to $4,000 for prime seats, with tickets costing at least $800 just to set foot inside the stadium.

Harvey Shropshire of Memphis said he was prepared to go home empty-handed--as he has in three of four previous Super Bowls he attended--if he can’t get a pair for under $1,000.

An unknowing Patriots fan from Tampa was taken for $100 by some three-card Monte hustlers before the police pulled up to crush their cardboard box set-up and chase them away.

“That was all my partying money,” said Matt Morris, who might have been pegged as an easy target by his replica Drew Bledsoe jersey.

One fan made a poignant case for pity.

“From Cleveland. No team. No tickets. Please help.”

No word on whether he got in.

The players also had their share of adventures in the week leading up to the game.

The Green Bay Packers and New England Patriots may not know a roux from a stew, but by now they’re more than a little familiar with crawfish, crabs, oysters and alligators.

“Since I got here, I’ve eaten more reptiles than I ever knew existed,” said Green Bay Packer guard Lindsay Knapp. “I even liked most of them.”

Knapp, a 6-foot-6, 300 pounder, doesn’t back down from much.

He put away turtle soup, boiled crawfish, seafood gumbo.

“A lot of people don’t know how to classify seafood,” said chef Paul Prudhomme, of K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen. “And when you have people who are suspicious of anything that’s not oblong like a potato or round like a steak, some of our food can take a little getting used to.”

At the Gumbo Shop players could sample three kinds of gumbo: shrimp and crab, chicken and andouille (a heavily smoked and spicy pork sausage), and a specialty gumbo.

“Most of them started out kind of cautious,” general manager Guy Telliteri said. “Once they tried it, they liked it and would end up getting other things.

“But I’d have to say a lot of them were a little suspicious at first.”