The Big Cheesy

The French Quarter has become one big fondue dish. The streets of downtown New Orleans are now a cavalcade of cheese. And in the the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel, where the Green Bay Packers are staying, the line to purchase the requisite cheese paraphernalia sometimes stretches out to the street.

Down here in the Big Cheesy, you can buy Mardi Gras beads with a wedge of cheddar stuck to the bottom for ten bucks. There are frisbees that look like cheese, Cheesehead CDs, ties, socks, sunglasses, baseball hats and, I'm told, cheese underwear. All of these products are actually more nutritious than Velveeta. But what no Packer Backer can be without down here is that classic block of cheddar hat, the literal Cheesehead.

Maybe that's because these hats and the fans that wear them seem to have mystical powers. A Green Bay fan credits the hat with saving his life in a plane crash. A wild wedge of Packer fans, wearing their native headdress, duct-taped a Chicago Bears fan to a street sign this season. And during the playoffs, members of this dairy mob allegedly angered San Francisco 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo so much with chants of "FOR...TEA...WHINE...ERS," that DeBartolo reportedly attempted to, uh, shred their cheese heads.

In fact, while Cleveland Browns fans are cryogenically frozen until another team can be brought to the shores of Lake Erie, these Packer Backers have assumed their place as the NFL's best fans.

Of course, everything the Cheeseheads do is not so easy to swallow. Two men in Wisconsin who claim to have "invented" the little provolone pyramids have spent considerable time in court suing each other over the right to become millionaires by selling the foam wedges for 10 times what a hat of actual government cheese would cost.

When, god forbid, the Cheeseheads join up down here in groups of more than five, they tend to immediately break out into chants of GO PACK GO. This, then, produces an immediate and even louder response from the Patriot fans wearing cheese grater hats of SQUEEZE THE CHEESE. It was all very cute the first eight thousand times I heard it. But now I quickly put my Walkman headphones on for something a little more soothing-like the Macarena.

This whole craze has also caused the good folks at the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board to create a Super Bowl XXXI Green Bay Packer All-Cheese Squad. The four page release lists 13 Packer players and what cheese they most match. A sampling: Andre Rison...Monterey Jack..."Natural, velvety, delicate, although slightly tart." Edgar Bennett...Havarti..."Often gets small holes." Gilbert Brown...Mascarpone..."Thick and soft, needs to be refrigerated." Mike Holmgren...Blue..."Great when grilled."

What the WMMB fails to mention is that like everything else with the Super Bowl when the cheese thing is allowed to get out of hand it's like a fine Brie left out on the counter for a week-it tends to stink.