Cotton Festival

Going strong since the early 1950s, Ville Platte's Cotton Festival, so named for the Delta and Pine Land Cotton raised there, features all the fun of a typical small-town fest, with a medieval twist: Le Tournoi. Le Tournoi (held at 3 pm on Sunday this year at Industrial Park) is an ancient sport, first played by French knights and later brought to Louisiana by its French settlers. It's a jousting sport, but in this case, the jousts are used to battle the seven banes of cotton—boll-worm, boll-weevil, flood, drought, rayon, nylon, and silk. You might well be turned away at the gate of the North Side Civic Center if you've forsaken the namesake material for one of those perfidious substitutes! Check out the plans for this year's food, fais do-do, carnival, and parade at louisianacottonfestival.com.