Queen Ida and <i> les bon temps </i> will roll at Hermosa’s Mardi Gras.

New Orleans is the most famous Mardi Gras city in the United States. There, the whole town has been celebrating for well over a century.

But this year, tiny Hermosa Beach will strive to start its own carnival tradition, as the foundation that supports the city’s Community Center stages its first Mardi Gras concert and costume ball Saturday.

Louisiana-born entertainer Queen Ida and her Bon Temps Zydeco Band will headline the evening with a concert in the Civic Theatre. After that there will be dancing to blues and Cajun tunes played by the band, dining on Louisiana specialties including jambalaya and oysters Rockefeller, and reveling until 1 a.m. at a ball in the nearby gym.

“We’ll see what kind of a party town Hermosa is,” said Laurie Byren, chairman of the foundation program committee. Her hope is that Mardi Gras will blossom into an annual fund-raiser for several community organizations, as well as the Community Center.

People are encouraged to capture the carnival spirit by wearing costumes Saturday, but party planners caution that they don’t have to be formal or lavish. “They can dress any way they want because anything goes at Mardi Gras,” Byren said.

Costumes will range from 1920s flapper and hotel bellhop get-ups to pirate and cavalier ensembles. Byren describes her own short white skirt and long black cape as a “Mardi Gras Snow White.”

For those who don’t have costumes, there will be alternatives. About 40 people got together earlier this month to make Mardi Gras masks, and some will be available for sale at the celebration. “They’re mostly gaudy, glitzy things, with lots of feathers, bangles, sequins and glitter,” Byren said.

The motifs of the masks include butterflies, cats and Egyptian Pharaohs.

If people want to forgo masks and simply have their faces painted, that will be available too. “It’s for people who want to be in the spirit, but not too crazy,” said Terri Edison, acting coordinator at the Community Center.

For the ball, the cavernous gym will be enlivened with balloons, streamers and confetti in the official Mardi Gras colors of purple, gold and green. Simulated street lamps will point the way to Bourbon Street, and there will be thrones and crowns for the king and queen of Mardi Gras, who will be chosen in a drawing at the ball. Honors will be given for best costumes and there will be several drawings, with the key prize being a New Orleans vacation.

There aren’t going to be any parade floats, but 30 costumed actors will move periodically through the crowd to suggest the traditional parades that lead up to Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, which is next week.

Beth Hansen, who stages festivals professionally and is helping with the Hermosa Beach event, calls it capturing the “Mardi Gras flare in one room.”

Since it began presenting concerts seven years ago, the Civic Theatre has always launched its season with a star gala. Past luminaries have included Mel Torme, Diane Schurr, David Benoit and Paul Williams.

But signing Queen Ida and her band as the 1990 openers provided the occasion for something more than, as Byren put it, “a concert with some food afterward.”

Before fame came to Queen Ida, she was Ida Guillory, a singer and accordion player who worked as a San Francisco school bus driver and sang to her children for fun. She was crowned Queen Ida by a San Francisco newspaper reporter who saw her at a Mardi Gras event in the Bay Area. According to her manager, Irene Namkung, Queen Ida went from an unknown to a Grammy in 10 years.

“The main thing about her show is that it’s a lot of fun,” Namkung said, calling Ida’s lively zydeco music with its French and English lyrics something you can’t listen to without moving, even if you’re sitting down. “The rhythm makes the music.”

A musical melting pot, zydeco--which takes its name from a French word for snap bean--combines waltzes, two-steps and jaunty Cajun melodies with blues, country, rock, Latin, Bluegrass and reggae. The accordion is a key ingredient in the zydeco sound, along with the saxophone, guitar, bass, drums and a metal washboard worn like a bib.

Reviewers of Queen Ida’s shows have likened them to big, warm family get-togethers where people start dancing wherever there’s room.

Byren hopes that this spirit will be transferred to Hermosa Beach on Saturday. She calls the Mardi Gras extravaganza “a big experiment, for fun. We hope it sells out.”