A Confederacy Of Dunces Takes On The New Orleans Jazz Festival. By Ernesto Slab THE WORD OF the day," said Dr. Brooks, scanning the local daily over breakfast in the French Quarter's Tally-Ho, "is bacchanalia." Honest to God, there it was on the paper's puzzle page: Bacchanalia: a riotous or drunken festivity; orgy. While those ingenious minds at the puzzle syndicate wanted to know how many words we could make from the letters in "bacchanalia," we had bigger challenges in mind--like, for example, how many bacchanalias we could cram into five days. (Plus, we were too hung-over to tackle such a complex brain-teaser.) Truth be told, it seems as if bacchanalia is always the word of the day in New Orleans. Louisiana is the only state in the union where there are apparently no liquor laws. This means bars never close and drunks are welcome to carry cocktails on the streets. It also means bartenders mix up an amazing array of three-gallon fruity drinks named for natural disasters ("the hurricane") and implements of destruction ("the hand grenade"). Federal regulation requires the recipe for these drinks to be a closely guarded secret, because if just anybody could make these intoxicating delights, the cocktails would spread beyond Bourbon Street and soon the nation's productivity and the gross national product would plummet to the level of, oh, Somalia. But our crack investigative staff was able to convince one bartender, Gus at the Big Gus' Chez Soufflé du Monde (which is French for "place to get really fucked up"), to share his recipe for the Unabomber. Here, for the first time ever in print, is Gus' secret mix: The Unabomber 4 oz. rum 3 oz. gin 4 oz. vodka 3 oz. triple sec 6 oz. tequila 3 oz. lighter fluid 4 tsp. Grenadine 2 oz. absinthe 5 oz. whiskey 4 tsp. sugar 3 tsp. lime juice Combine all ingredients; shake gently. Pour over ice into very large highball glass. Stir with fuse and decorate with shishkabob of Maraschino cherries, pineapples, lemons and olives. Take five sips. Awaken in the gutter in a pool of vomit, which may or may not be your own. Warning: This drink is extremely flammable. Do not smoke while imbibing. BUT GETTING SHIT-FACED is nothing we needed to go to New Orleans to do. You can do that in Rocky Point. No, we were in town for the world-renown New Orleans Jazz And Heritage Festival. Over two four-day weekends at the end of April and the beginning of May, some of the greatest musicians in the world can be found at the New Orleans fairgrounds. With 10 different stages and six acts a day on stage over eight days...well, I'm no math whiz, but that must be, like, more than 8,000 different shows or something. It's more than jazz--it's more like jazz meets blues meets Zydeco meets country meets reggae meets gospel meets folks meets boy meets girl--a real clusterfuck of musical traditions, all cooked together like some kind of audio jambalaya. We're talking folks like Van Morrison, the Neville Brothers, Beausoleil, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, Phish, Marcia Ball, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Cowboy Mouth, the Indigo Girls, Joan Osborne, Better Than Ezra, Béla Fleck, The Radiators and many, many more. The Jazz and Heritage Festival is the second-biggest party New Orleans throws. (The first is Mardi Gras, which is French for "Tuesday on which to get really fucked up and show off your tits"). This means that many, many people show up. The crowds can be a little daunting at times, so, unless you're prepared to find a spot near the front and set up sandbags and AK-47 automatic rifles, you can expect to be near the back when the big legends take the stage, which is disappointing to some people. One small boy was complaining that he wanted to go home during Van Morrison's late afternoon performance one day. His wise father tried to convince him that this day was a memory he would carry forever: "Someday you'll be able to tell your kids you saw Van Morrison." "Saw," of course, was stretching the truth a bit, since from where we stood, Van Morrison looked very, very tiny--about the size of a quark or two--but I'll tell you what: He sounded great. But hey: When your blood alcohol content is .92, what doesn't sound great? For information about next year's Jazz and Heritage Festival, call somebody--anybody--in New Orleans. Please.

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