Mardi Gras season is in full swing across the Mobile Bay area, and between elaborate mystical society balls, a first-year King Cake competition and a Hollywood film crew setting up shop in Fairhope, there has been no shortage of local buzz over the past week. The season’s mix of pageantry, pastry and celebrity has given residents on both sides of the bay plenty to talk about in the run-up to Fat Tuesday.
The Order of Osiris ball
The Order of Osiris, one of Mobile’s most flamboyant Mardi Gras mystical societies, held its annual ball on a recent Friday night, drawing a large crowd eager to see the group’s signature theatrical flair. This year’s presentation carried a Hollywood Walk of Fame theme, with King Gregory the 37th and King Marty the 37th leading a procession alongside the society’s emblems, Osiris, Isis and Horus.
Performers dressed as entertainment icons including Liberace, Dolly Parton, Freddie Mercury, and Siegfried and Roy took to the dance floor, and guests described the atmosphere as electric, with one attendee comparing it to being at a concert. A costumed performer portraying Cher made a grand entrance atop an elephant prop, followed by a stage production featuring performers in the style of Fleetwood Mac.
The evening built toward the crowning of King James the 38th and Queen Jason the 38th, after which roughly 3,200 balloons dropped from the ceiling to signal the start of the general dance floor. The Order of Osiris has built a reputation over the years for elaborate productions, and this year’s ball was no exception, drawing praise from longtime attendees as one of the group’s best showings yet.
Osiris belongs to Mobile’s tradition of festooned, production-heavy ball societies whose tableaus rival anything the parades offer. While the city’s oldest societies trace their lineages to the 18th and 19th centuries, the modern ball season is a showcase of themed productions — months of choreography, costuming and set design mounted for a single night. The Walk of Fame conceit let the society nod to American entertainment while keeping the procession structure, emblems and royal crowning that define the Mobile ball tradition.
The King Cake Cook-off
Elsewhere in the celebration calendar, the inaugural Mobile King Cake Cook-off brought together 18 teams at Azalea Manor for a sold-out afternoon of Mardi Gras tradition and culinary creativity. Local bakeries and restaurants, including Rouse’s, the Warehouse Bakery, ellenJay and Bake My Day, served up their takes on the seasonal pastry, while attendees sampled king cake-flavored cocktails alongside the sweets.
Organizers said the strong turnout for the first-year event has them already looking ahead to an even bigger competition next year. When the results came in, Wonder Wife Bakery claimed top honors in the traditional king cake category, while Cammie’s Old Dutch took the nontraditional category with a king cake-flavored ice cream that quickly became a crowd favorite.
Organizers credited the strong lineup of local bakers for making the event’s debut a success and said they expect even more teams to enter as word spreads about the cook-off. The king cake — a braided, cinnamon-filled pastry crowned with colored sugar and, traditionally, a hidden plastic baby — is the edible emblem of the Carnival season, and Mobile’s bakeries produce them by the thousands each year between Twelfth Night and Ash Wednesday.
A competition devoted to the king cake fills a gap in the season’s calendar. Mobile’s Mardi Gras is defined by its parades and balls, but food traditions — king cakes, MoonPies, the gumbo and red beans served at society functions — have long been an under-celebrated part of the local culture. A sold-out first year at Azalea Manor, one of the city’s established event venues, suggests the cook-off has room to grow alongside the season itself.
The nontraditional category’s winner, a king cake ice cream from Cammie’s Old Dutch, illustrates where the pastry’s culture is heading. Bakers across the Gulf Coast now spin the flavor into doughnuts, cheesecakes and cocktails, and the cook-off’s two-category structure gave both the purists and the innovators a title to chase.
Hollywood comes to Fairhope
Mardi Gras season is also drawing more than just costumed revelers to the area. A Hollywood production crew has been filming scenes in Fairhope for a new feature film titled “The Friend,” which stars Academy Award winner Casey Affleck alongside actors Jason Segel and Dakota Johnson. Notably, the film’s story is set in Fairhope, meaning the city is playing itself on screen rather than standing in for another location.
Cast members have been spotted around town throughout the shoot. Segel was seen dining at Mama’s Downtown, and all three lead actors were spotted together at Sage Lebanese Restaurant in Fairhope. Segel was also seen at The Grand Hotel and browsing at Page & Palette, the well-known downtown Fairhope bookstore.
The cook-off’s charity-minded spirit mirrored the broader season. Mardi Gras on the Gulf Coast has always been more than spectacle: the societies fund charities through balls and fundraisers, the parades throw MoonPies and beads into the hands of children, and events like the cook-off give local businesses a stage during the weeks when the whole region is already thinking about food and celebration. An 18-team field in a first year — sold out, with tasting tickets gone well before the doors opened — is the kind of launch that turns an experiment into an annual appointment on the Carnival calendar.
Page & Palette, a fixture of Fairhope’s downtown for decades, doubles as a gathering place for the town’s literary life, and a movie star browsing its shelves was the kind of sighting Fairhope residents trade by word of mouth. The Grand Hotel at Point Clear, just down the bay, has hosted cast and crews of productions shooting on the Eastern Shore for years, and its grounds remain the area’s best-known retreat for visiting talent.
Production also moved into Mobile’s Oakleigh neighborhood, with crews filming near Selma and Chatham streets. The district around the Oakleigh Historic Complex — one of the city’s oldest residential areas, named for the 1833 Greek Revival house at its heart — offers the antebellum and Victorian streetscapes that production designers seek when a story needs a period or upscale Southern neighborhood.
There has also been talk that Johnson may be doing some recording work at Dauphin Street Sound while the production is in the area. The downtown Mobile studio has recorded a range of artists in recent years, and a visiting actor working on side projects while between scenes is the sort of crossover the local music scene enjoys talking about, even when the details stay quiet.
The filming follows a string of celebrity sightings in the region in recent months, with actors Liam Hemsworth and Vince Vaughn also having been spotted locally, adding to a growing sense that the Mobile Bay area has become a regular stop for film productions looking for authentic Southern settings. Alabama’s film incentive programs, the region’s varied locations — bayfront, downtown historic districts, small towns like Fairhope — and the area’s relative affordability have combined to bring more crews south in recent years.
A season of spectacle
Between the mystical society pageantry, the new King Cake Cook-off tradition and a genuine Hollywood production filming on local streets, residents have had plenty to keep an eye on this Mardi Gras season, with still more balls, parades and festivities ahead before Fat Tuesday arrives.
The overlap of it all is distinctly Mobile Bay. The city’s Carnival season, older by generations than the celebrations that made New Orleans famous, unfolds in a metro area that also hosts film shoots, bookstores that draw browsers from across the bay and bakeries willing to argue publicly about whose king cake is best. For the societies, the bakers and the visiting producers alike, the season is a showcase — and the crowds, sold out or star-struck, keep proving there is an appetite for it.
For Fairhope, the production’s choice to film its Fairhope story in Fairhope is the rarer prize. Towns along the Eastern Shore have long traded on their scenery, but having a major studio production treat the place as itself — the bluff, the pier, the downtown, the restaurants — is the kind of exposure no marketing campaign can buy. Residents, meanwhile, get the simplest pleasure of all: watching their own streets on a movie screen when the film arrives.
Ball societies like Osiris also anchor the season’s economics. Costume shops, florists, caterers, bands and venues across downtown Mobile work their busiest stretch of the year between Twelfth Night and Fat Tuesday, and the society balls — dozens of them across the season — keep hotels and event halls full during what would otherwise be a quiet winter stretch. The production values on display Friday night, from the elephant entrance to the balloon drop, represent months of contracted work for seamstresses and stage crews across the city, part of the quieter economy that Mardi Gras sustains beyond the parade routes.
As the season built toward its final days, the usual rhythm took over: last balls on the calendar, parade schedules doubling, and families planning their spots along the routes. The cook-off’s organizers will spend the next year signing up bakers, and Fairhope will spend it waiting to see its bluff and pier on the big screen — two more threads in a Carnival season that keeps finding new ways to include the whole region.