The French Quarter's Most Eccentric Regular
In a neighborhood famous for its characters, Ruthie the Duck Girl stood apart. Born Ruth Grace Moulon, she was a fixture of the French Quarter for decades — a woman who could be seen on any given day roller skating from bar to bar, wearing eccentric furs regardless of the temperature, drinking Budweiser, smoking Kool cigarettes, and accompanied by a couple of ducks who waddled alongside her as if this were the most normal thing in the world. In the French Quarter, it was.
Ruthie was not performing. She was not putting on a show for tourists or creating a persona for commercial purposes. She was simply living her life, on roller skates, with ducks, in a neighborhood that had enough room for everyone, including a woman whose daily routine would have been considered clinical insanity anywhere else in America but was considered charming in the Vieux Carré.
The Ducks, The Skates, The Furs
The details of Ruthie's daily existence read like a character description from a novel that an editor would reject as too improbable. She skated — not walked, skated — through the French Quarter streets, navigating the uneven sidewalks and cobblestone alleys with the practiced ease of a woman who had been doing this for years. She wore fur coats and stoles, often in the sweltering New Orleans summer, creating a visual that was simultaneously glamorous and deranged. And the ducks followed her, tethered not by leashes but by whatever bond exists between a woman and her waterfowl.
She frequented the bars of the Quarter, stopping in for a Budweiser here, a conversation there, moving through the neighborhood like a benevolent apparition that the regulars had long since accepted as part of the furniture. She was friendly, eccentric, and entirely self-contained — a woman who had constructed a life that made sense to her and felt no obligation to explain it to anyone else.
The Wedding Dress
Perhaps the most poignant detail of Ruthie's legend was her annual appearance at the Mardi Gras parade in a wedding dress, stating that she was to marry her long-lost love, Gary Moody of the Moody Barn, whom she had met while he was visiting New Orleans during his time in the Navy. Whether Gary Moody was real, whether the romance happened as Ruthie described it, whether the wedding dress was hopeful or symbolic or simply another costume in a life full of costumes — these questions have no definitive answers, and that is as it should be. Some stories are better unresolved.
A Quarter Character
The French Quarter has always attracted people who do not fit anywhere else — artists, dreamers, drunks, geniuses, and people who are some combination of all four. Ruthie the Duck Girl was the purest expression of that tradition: a woman who found the one place on Earth where roller skating with ducks while wearing furs was not just tolerated but celebrated. She was New Orleans at its most accepting, its most eccentric, and its most human — a city that makes room for people to be exactly who they are, no matter how unusual that turns out to be.
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