“Home to New Orleans for friends, music and food”
Monday was a slow day after our early morning arrival back from Montreal. Diana didn’t even play pickleball. I was pleased that we earned a good review from our Airbnb host, Justin. It makes it easier to rent future places.
Catching up on local news, I read that Plas Johnson died last Wednesday at the age of 94. I wrote about him a few weeks ago – famous for the Pink Panther theme and played on numerous New Orleans soul and R&B records in the 50s and 60s.
At Tuesday trivia, we had a similar question about 1981 to one we had a while ago. Several events were given and you had to answer with the year they happened. The events included Charles and Diana’s wedding, MTV launching and others that I don’t remember now. I “showed my work” again – I was in holiday in France after finishing high school in 1981 and the family went to a common room at the caravan park to watch the wedding. The team listened.
We were ahead by 1 point going into the final question. This involved putting four events in order from oldest to most recent. Here’s the correct answer:
When did the Knicks last win an NBA title before this year? (1973)
When was Nikki Minaj born? (1982)
When did Nickelodeon launch Ren and Stimpy? (1991)
When did Nicolas Cage win an Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas? (1996)
The two Jacks knew that Nikki Minaj had her big hit in 2000 – so had to be older than the old folks thought. Denny knew that Anne loved Ren and Stimpy when they were first dating. With that and some lengthy discussion, we were able to arrive at the correct answer to secure a 1st place win.
A heat advisory greeted us on Wednesday – can you imagine what a “feels like temperature” of 118 degrees is like? Very swampy.
Tim called to check on us after storm Bertha passed through and told me about a book he got for his birthday from his daughter. They each have to draw an object daily and text it to the other. Tim was upset that the paper is too thick to trace through. I thought he had done a good job with his snake until I saw the competing version.
Isn’t that a great gift idea – keeps on giving every day.
We met up with Kenny for Happy Hour at Cafe Degas on Thursday. I called to coordinate with him and caught him visiting his Mom. He said he would need to stop home and change as he wasn’t dressed for Cafe Degas. I told him he would be fine in shorts and a t-shirt as that’s what I was going to wear. Some hilarity (from my perspective) ensued as Kenny’s Mom and cousin (she called his Mom during the discussion) shared their thoughts on what Kenny should wear. He ultimately came as he was and everything was fine.
We had a very nice time at Cafe Degas and then retired to Kenny’s porch for a little while.
We were up early for a walk in the park on Saturday morning. The humidity was relatively low, allowing us to enjoy a walk/run without sweating all the way through our clothes. On the drive home we came across Alvin, a cyclist who had hit his head on a low tree branch and been thrown out into Prytania Street. Another lady was helping and nurse D jumped into action. The police, and ultimately an ambulance, did show up and by that time Alvin was feeling a lot better. Diana walked with him and his bike over to the Emergency room and he decided he didn’t need to go in and could easily make the short walk home. Very nicely done, Diana.
We met the KKs, Denny and Anne for lunch at Tan Dinh Vietnamese restaurant in Gretna. Denny spends a lot of time on the Westbank of the Mississippi river with his car washes, and so we took his recommendation for a lunch stop.
Here’s a map that shows red circles around our home and the restaurant. You can see that we had to take the Crescent City Connector (CCC) bridge across to reach the restaurant – not something we do very often.
The trip took around 10 minutes – so not exactly an onerous drive. What were we doing over there? Aren’t there good Vietnamese places in New Orleans proper? Fair questions. We were enroute to a gallery opening at Brian Bush Art.
Brian and his wife, Lisa, are friends that we typically see a few times a year at music festivals. Brian has been making these wonderful Mardi Gras flowers for over 20 years.
They really are works of art. This building became available recently and Brian snapped it up as a place to store his art, show it by appointment, and host events like this one.
Ian Cunningham and Chris Senac, long time friends of Brian’s, provided some wonderful music – very skilled guitar playing.
Diana was up early on Sunday morning for the 8am girls tennis activity. She was pretty worn out from 2 hours in the sun after that.
The Desert Nudes played a free 5pm show at NOLA brewing (0.5 miles from home) on Sunday afternoon. Kenny and I had a robust mini-debate about the pros and cons of NOLA brewing during happy hour at Cafe Degas. Keith – “too many kids running around, the music is too loud if you’re in the front part, and too quiet in the back – you can’t hear over the chatter and kid noise, the pizza, food, and drinks are good.” Kenny – “kids are a given, you need to get there early and pick an in-between table or one on the right side of the stage to hear the music without it being too loud, the place is air conditioned, the music is free, and the food is great.”
Okay, I decided to take Kenny’s input “on board” and we arrived around 4:30 to get a good table. Apparently we needed to get there earlier than that as all but one of the tables were already occupied. We grabbed the one remaining and began to amass the chairs we needed for our krewe – KKs, Thom, Denny, and Mason. I was pleasantly surprised when the music started – I could hear nicely from our back table. The band was excellent – lovely three part harmonies and a fun repertoire of songs that you don’t hear too often.
A good version of “Don’t Fence Me In”, originally written by Cole Porter, led to Kenny claiming the song as his latest theme song.
I started “Truth and Beauty: A Friendship” by Ann Patchett this week. I read the first chapter of her latest, “The Whistler”, and can tell it’s going to be so good that I’m saving it for the perfect reading environment – whatever that might be. So I’m making do with one of her earlier books and am a little over half way through so far. Here’s an online summary:
“Ann Patchett and the late Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In Grealy’s critically acclaimed memoir, Autobiography of a Face, she wrote about losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, years of chemotherapy and radiation, and endless reconstructive surgeries. In Truth & Beauty, the story isn’t Lucy’s life or Ann’s life, but the parts of their lives they shared. This is a portrait of unwavering commitment that spans twenty years, from the long winters of the Midwest, to surgical wards, to book parties in New York. Through love, fame, drugs, and despair, this is what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined . . . and what happens when one is left behind.
This is a tender, brutal book about loving the person we cannot save. It is about loyalty, and being lifted up by the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how to live life to the fullest.”
Here are some passages that I enjoyed:
Thoughts about “worrying” early in Ann’s relationship with Lucy:
“I was stunned by the rawness of her pain. I came to understand that night in the sports bar, safe from the blinding rain, that I could not worry about Lucy anymore. I knew then it was just too enormous for me to manage and that worrying about her would swamp me. If I was swamped by worry, I would be useless to her. It was even possible that I would desert her, and that was the thing that could never happen. I decided that night I would take all the hours of my life that could so easily be spent worrying and instead I would try to help her. I had been raised by Catholic nuns who told us in no uncertain terms that work was the path to God, and that while it was a fine thing to feel loyalty and devotion in your heart, it would be much better for everyone involved if you could find the physical manifestations of your good thoughts and see them put into action. The world is saved through deeds, not prayer, because what is prayer but a kind of worry? I decided then that my love for Lucy would have to manifest in deeds.”
Some great advice from Mom and I presume this book might not exist without them:
“One night after work I was sitting on the edge of my mother’s bed, reading her Lucy’s letter. “Save all of those,” she told me when I was finished. “I save some of them,” I said, but she and I both knew I never was much on saving anything. My mother said it again. I was to save them all. “Someday you’ll both be famous writers,” she said. “And these letters will be very important to you.””
Patchett discovers the wonder of the service on a short flight from London to Scotland:
“All through the flight from London to Aberdeen I stared out the window at the rough patchwork of landscape and thought how beautiful it was, how beautiful it would be to live so far away from my mistakes. It was a small plane and we did a good deal of pitching and tossing, but everyone got a nice cheese plate and a glass of red wine and I managed to hold my snack steady. The world that existed in the air over England and Scotland seemed extremely civilized, even sophisticated, and for those moments I thought that Lucy was leading a glamorous life, at least when you compared it to being a waitress in Tennessee.”
On finishing her first novel:
“Then finally one day everything I had imagined for these characters while I was at Friday’s was down on paper. I wrote the last sentence of The Patron Saint of Liars in early April and stumbled out of my apartment and into the beautiful spring feeling panicked and amazed. There is no single experience in my life as a writer to match that moment, the blue of the sky and the breeze drifting in from the bay. I had done the thing I had always wanted to do: I had written a book, all the way to the end. Even if proved to be terrible, it was mine.”
A rumination on the varied thoughts and personalities of Lucy’s doctors:
“They were the busy, important men (and all of the pivotal doctors in Lucy’s life, to the best of my knowledge, were men) who occasionally sat on her bed and stroked her forehead, handsome men who for the briefest moment paid all of their valuable attention to her. They told her she was the most remarkable case they had seen and made promises of how they would shepherd her through to a better life. The surgeons stoked her deepest dreams of repair like coal men shoveling fuel into a roaring furnace. They told her not to worry about the money, and then presented her with enormous bills. They told her it would take three surgeries over six months, only to discover it was ten surgeries over three years. There were wonderful doctors, full of compassion and innovation, but they never seemed able to consider any surgery but the one they were about to perform. They never took her lifetime into account or figured in the enormous costs, physically, financially, and emotionally, of all that had failed so dismally before. They didn’t account for Lucy, only for her face. And maybe they couldn’t. She was too huge for casual consideration. But how can you operate on the face without understanding what the face means to the girl? How can the meaning of kissing, swallowing, speaking, be completely ignored in favor of mechanics? The doctors took what they needed from her body, sometimes without ever mentioning it, so even though her head was swollen beyond recognition, what she cried over was the scar running up her leg where some surgeon had taken a vein without asking. She loved her pretty legs.”
I love this comparison with slapstick comedy for Lucy’s money skills:
“LUCY WAS AWFUL WITH MONEY IN A WAY THAT ONE imagines the Marx Brothers or Laurel and Hardy might have been awful with money. There could have been a movie, Laurel and Hardy Go to the Bank, in which our heroes try to bring their life savings in for safekeeping but at every turn find themselves distracted: pretty girls, butterflies, squalling children. All the while the money flutters out of their pockets like a careless trail of bread crumbs. In the sequel, Back to the Bank, they would mistakenly spit their chewing gum into the big check they were supposed to deposit and then for the rest of the movie they would struggle to undo the sticky damage they had done.”
Heartbreaking:
“Lucy’s loneliness was breathtaking in its enormity. If she emptied out Grand Central Station and filled it with the people she knew well, the people who loved her, there would be more than a hundred people there. But a hundred people in such a huge space just rattle around. You could squeeze us all into a single bar. With some effort you could push us into a magazine shop. If you added to that number all the people who loved her because of her book, all the people who admired her, all the people who had heard her speak or had seen her on television or listened to her on the radio and loved the sound of her odd little voice, you could pack in thousands and thousands more people, and still it wouldn’t feel full, not full enough to take up every square inch of her loneliness.“
I’ve been rationing “Living in the Present with John Prine” by Tom Piazza (my autographed copy – thanks KKs). By “rationing I mean that I’m allowing myself a chapter a week. It’s just too good to read through too quickly.
The chapter this week has John and his wife visiting Tom and his wife in New Orleans. Tom takes them to Boucherie, one of his favourite restaurants. Prine struggles to find something on the menu and ends up opting for the ribs. They turn out to be Asian style and not the slab with barbeque sauce that he was hoping for. The next night they visit Brigtsen’s, one of my personal favourites. Frank Brigtsen comes out and makes a big fuss over John as do the rest of the staff. With all the wonderful dishes on the menu, executed flawlessly, Prine’s wife confides later that he would rather have had a slice of meat loaf and some mashed potatoes. I suppose it’s all what you’re used to.
Here’s a link to the latest Jon Cleary show playlist on Spotify. I’ve listened and there are several gems on here.
It’s been a while since I heard this song. It was on WWOZ the other day and I realized I didn’t know who played the amazing slide guitar. Research reveals it’s Bonnie Raitt.
