Moveable feasts

By Kevin Scrantz

Like ghosts out of the distant past, they filed into an excavated gymnasium in the ancient Roman resort of Pompeii on a balmy afternoon early last year. Musicians in carved masks playing cymbals, sistra and pipes. Spear-bearing centurions rippling with muscle. Wealthy patricians in togas of blue and scarlet silk. Hercules looked on while slaves dressed in rough wool chitons served wine to guests who gave the setting an anachronistic slap in the face with their jeans, sunglasses and digital cameras.

It was an orgy of conspicuous consumption unseen in Pompeii since it was covered by Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, something on the scale of a Cecil B. DeMille epic, a wild bacchanal that promised to get even better with the appearance of slaves carrying in two roasted pigs.

A moment, according to events designer Joel Theriot, meant to be the climax of a grand feast that had begun two weeks earlier in sunny Monaco.

“The caterer was supposed to cut these roasted pigs open, semiprecious jewels were supposed to spill out, and birds were going to fly,” Theriot said.

“For a year and a half I’d been hearing this. They walked all across this yard with these pigs. They cut the pig, and the stones wouldn’t fall out. They had to pull them out with their hands. It was gross. So at

that point, the women from the organization were walking away like, ’I ain’t eating no pig that you put your hands in.’

“And then the birds didn’t fly, it took about five minutes for the birds to fly. They were under the table. God knows what it cost for that presentation, because nobody ever ate the pigs, they were just props. They were real pigs, but...”

A showman in the grand tradition of Ziegfeld, Theriot specializes in giving clients the most visual bang for their bucks, creating one-of-a-kind events designed to beguile their guests for a few hours and leave them talking about the experience for a lifetime.

Wiry and energetic with a marked sense of humor, he appears relaxed describing upcoming Mardi Gras events in Lafayette and preparing to open his own studio and showroom at the site of the former Baudin’s Supermarket on Grand Point Road.

“I do interior design work. I do events — meaning weddings, Mardi Gras — I’m in charge of the whole look/conception/idea unless it’s preconceived, like for a wedding. I do costuming. I paint, I’m an artist. God just has blessed me with a lot of talent. And my parents gave me the work ethic end of it and so I guess that’s in a nutshell what I do.”

Theriot’s career began as a florist with Flowers, Etc., where he spent ten years before moving on to work for Pellerin Marble and Granite, designing their showroom and learning how to create furniture out of stone, a stint that allowed him to build up a network of associates that included area architects, interior designers and builders.

Early last year he had a rare opportunity to display his talents on a global scale when he was hired to plan and design a two-week European event rivalling the fetes of ancient kings for an international organization of business moguls.

A year and a half in the making, it was a moveable feast for 300 guests set in some of Europe’s most fabled settings. The great adventure began in Monte Carlo, with five events on the ground that included dinner at the Hotel Hermitage and an antique car museum, and another five events on a yacht.

“What I had every day was an interpreter, a driver. Everything was flown in prior to the event — the linens, the containers — all I had to do was go to the flower markets and create. And the quality was like, oh my gosh! I’d walk around and I’d point: ’Give me 20 buckets...’”

While the guests boarded the boat taking them to the next stop on their destination — Pisa, Italy — Theriot and his assistant drove through miles of pristine French and Italian countryside swelling with enough fields of golden sunflowers and purple lavender to make Van Gough go crazy all over again.

In Pisa, the group’s arriving guests met for cocktails in a colonnade in the literal shadow of the famed Leaning Tower, each table dominated by glass cylinders filled with sparkling water, flowers and goldfish illuminated by a battery-operated lampshade.

Theriot’s good humor masks nerves of steel, a quality of character that serves him well when things can — and do — go wrong.

“When we hit Pisa, we realized that the six-foot orange trees that were being shipped for the next event weren’t going to make it. So we just went on.

“It’s three o’clock in the afternoon when we get to Pompeii. I have no trees. I have linens, I have everything else I need, but no props. So I thought, Let me just find a flower shop, a florista. And he and I hit it off and he really produced the event for me, flower-wise. I would have to draw pictures to show him what I wanted. I let him go for it. That’s one thing about florists, they stick together. I’m happy it worked out to where the trees didn’t show up, because it was a lot of fun.”

The two successful weeks in Europe left him with countless good memories and new business contacts, but Theriot didn’t rest on his laurels when he returned home, diving instead into planning the Mardi Gras events he loves doing and working out the details of his newest passion: his own studio and showroom.

“As of now, everything is by appointment. I don’t want to get into retail. I don’t know where this is going to lead me. This is going to be my first real studio.

“I’m going to be showing them some wonderful things. That’s why I wanted to get this done. I’m going to be doing display again and they’re going to be able to see... And maybe in the future I may get into different things, I don’t know.”