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Sunday at Café Negril
Lately Big Man's been gigging with John Lisi and Delta Funk from 7 to 10 pm (roughly, give or take) on Sunday nights at Café Negril on Frenchman Street. It's basically for tips, and it's big money or anything -- like we're not gonna pay the rent with it or go to the real Negril on it, but it's a fun, musically rewarding, low-stress gig. Big Man really enjoys it and so do I.
In terms of crowds, some Sundays are better than others (obviously) but since this is the Southern Decadence weekend, tonight is a good Sunday indeed -- a good number of folks, really enjoying the music, dancing, drinking, flirting. Good street traffic too. You could tell a lot of them were first-timers at Café Negril, 'cause they had no idea where the rest rooms were, and kept trying to walk across the raised seating area...
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The Fifth Anniversary
It's hard to know what to say about the 5th anniversary of the federal levee failure after the landfall of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. New Orleanians were of two minds about it -- those who wanted to cocoon, stay home, turn off all media, and try to not to think about the whole thing; and those who with varying degrees of mixed feelings, felt that the occasion should be marked.
Accordingly, the variety of commemoration events was enormous, running from the religious (several interfaith/ecumenical worship services were held at congregations of different faiths, from St. Louis Cathedral to small neighborhood Baptist churches, to the grand St. Charles Ave. Presbyterian Church, where the Uptown Interfaith group held its service, in which I participated), to the cultural/spiritual (several secondlines starting at levee breaks and proceeding through recovering or struggling-to-recover neighborhoods, and at least one voodoo ceremony), to the educational (lectures...
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The Somewhat True History of St. Bernard Parish
(Abridged): A Love Story
As part of the Katrina Anniversary commemorations, I went with my sister and her husband, another sister, and several friends, to go see the premiere of this play at the Nunez Auditorium in Chalmette. The play was written and directed by a Chalmette High School English teacher, and performed with love and good will by a troupe of local amateurs. There were two acts, each with about six scenes, depicting different highlights of the history of St, Bernard Parish.
The play was alternately funny, silly, moving, angry, sad, and informative. Lots of jokes about St. Bernard accents and "cultcha" -- things like "berled" shrimp and Rocky and Carlo's baked macaroni. A particularly good line was made about a combination Betsy-Katrina Hurricane cocktail: you drink it and then 40 years later it knocks you on your ass. ...
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Only in New Orleans, Part Whatever
Walking in the rain today to go vote (earlier this morning, an Arab-American at a gas station Uptown told me it "always" rains on the Katrina weekend), I passed an open garage door on Euterpe Street and happened to glance inside. Stacked neatly against the wall inside the garage was a large double stack of sandbags.
I'm thinking that there aren't a lot of places where you'd see that -- or where else it might even be conceivable as a good idea.
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Hiatus over (Finally!)
Dear Readers (whoever you are, wherever you are),
I am sorry to have been away for so long. Part of the reason is that Big Man and I were away for 2 long trips this summer (we put over 8,000 miles on our van!), and since this Blog is oriented to tales of life in New Orleans, reporting on our travels didn't seem appropriate. The other part of the reason is that once you get out of the habit of blogging, it's hard to get back into it. (Approach-avoidance, don't you know.) There always seems to be something more pressing to get to first. But with the Katrina Anniversary hard on my heels, I knew I had to get back, and so here I am.
A few observations gleaned from our travels:
Everywhere we went this summer, west and east, during the...
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