Nov 2009 / Part 3 of Below the Level of the Sea

Yours Truly in a Swamp

November 2009

Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

Below The Level of The Sea

- Part Three -

by

Leonard Earl Johnson

* * *

Even the Prince of Wales

Stopped on His

Way to a Party in San Francisco

One sunny day after Katrina and Rita, we stood on an empty Burgundy Street with L. A. Norma. Saint Louis Cathedral School had re-opened in the French Quarter, but little else. The City was in horror-book disarray. Military convoys prowled deserted streets. We awaited a glimpse of the Prince of Wales on his way to pat a poor little school person on the head. We waited with five or six others for a passing wave from the bonnie Prince Charles and his new lady, Camilla Parker Bowles.

They passed. They waved and smiled as warmly as neighbors. We could see them very well. They were as close as a Land Rover can be to five or six American citizens standing on a deserted French Quarter banquette.

* * *

Don't we love hearing our story?

Many New Orleanians found their road back home -- and much of what they had left. We struggled. Praise fell daily about how true our grit. And how foolhardy. Authors cobbled books about it. Poets sang it. Song-writers, amazingly, did both.

One who recently plucked the strings of our exhibitionist heart is Les Kerr, a Nashville guitar player with a troubadour's understanding of Bayou Music City, New Orleans. Kerr was at The Louisiana Music Factory promoting his very good collection of songs about us. The CD is titled: "New Orleans Set," and one song, "Below the Level of the Sea," would bedazzle any scribe on either side of the Faulkner embankment. It goes: "New Orleans . . . it is a writer's town / You live your life / You write it down . . . and it comes out sticky as the hu-mid-ity . . . and we do it all Below the Level of the Sea."

Another of Kerr's songs captures what the years before and after Katrina and Rita meant. Its opening line and title go: "Pray for New Orleans, if you love her too / from sinners like me prayers don't always get through . . ." Enough to make a poet set down their wine and recall once again those poems unwritten.

* * *

We watched in a soft rain for the U. S. S. New York, the most politically arresting ship to come down the Mississippi since Farragut arrived with news that we were no longer a part of the Confederacy. With that news came occupation under Major General Franklin Butler. "Spoons Butler," the dreaded Union Governor of Occupied New Orleans is said to have palmed the silver from the table. Perhaps. What he brought to the table was an end to the Union blockade of the port.

New Orleans commerce had suffered greatly from the Northern blockade. When New Orleans fell into the craven clutches of Spoons Butler the blockade ended. The City was saved -- by being lost. It might also be remembered that we did not put up a fight.

"Not till the tourists got here a hundred years later," L. A. Norma said, in a plume of Camel Cigarette smoke.

The U. S. S. New York hove into view. America's newest man-of-war was built at the Northrup Grumman Shipyard upriver from the Moonwalk. She was heading out to Sea, to christening in her namesake city. She had been built from the steel gathered after the collapse of the World Trade Center.

"Now, let us see those health-care-yearning Libs find the spot where Cheney put the explosives!" Norma chortled, through a burst of smoke and fire.

* * *

We Saw Michael Moore's CAPITALISM, A LOVE STORY, at Canal Place Cinema.
"Greater truth there than the levees girding The City," Norma said walking from the theatre.

We were on our way to a reception for Florida artist, Mark T. Smith, at the Angela King Gallery on rue Royal.
Unveiled were paintings done on canvas used in the Brad Pitt championed tent-project in the now world-famous Ninth Arrondissement of New Orleans. If you bought a tent your money gave a

poor person a new house prayerfully not-destined to flood some day soon. What you got if you bought a painting is the painting, another good deal. They are very emotive.

Next day we attended the ceremony in Washington Square Park presenting Faubourg Marigny (Yours Truly in a Swamp's sponsoring neighborhood) with a "U. S. Top-ten Neighborhood" award from the American Planning Association. Few other than politicians were in attendance.

City Councilmembers James Carter and Jackie Clarkson smiled and spoke of the neighborhood's vision twenty years ago. Faubourg Marigny Board Member, Gene Cizek dashed in from a preservation meeting in Nashville. Faubourg Marigny President Chris Costello spoke. The talented Lloyd Senset and others took us on house tours. We are blessed to have these people working with us. Everyone else was at the football game in the Superdome. "Life goes on," Norma shrugged.

That evening we went to Faulkner House Books' reading/signing at the Cabildo (one of those very old -- rated "Purple" by the Louisiana historical police -- buildings flanking the Saint Louis Cathedral). Roy Blount, Jr. was the reader. We bought his book, FEET ON THE STREET, RAMBLES AROUND NEW ORLEANS, which he cobbled together in the flood of New Orleans books following Katrina and Rita. We had never read it, but we had met and admired Blount for many years. He is something of a performance artist. His smart good-old-boy accent is his main stage prop. Given the chance, you will do yourself well to go hear him.

He signed the book: "For Leonard, whose meat will never go bad again," a reference to the Frank Parsley original refrigerator magnets sold on the false promise of saving your refrigerator from some future Storm.

Blount said he reads this column. We thanked him for that. He had never said it before.

"You never bought his book before," L. A. Norma said.

Les Kerr / New Orleans Set

Faulkner House Books / FEET ON THE STREET

Angela King Gallery / Mark T. Smith

U. S. S. NEW YORK

-------------------------------
Copyright, 2009, Leonard Earl Johnson

* * *

Be Safe This Hurricane Season

Get a Frank Parsley original magnet of LEJ's fat face to scare off hurricane vermin from your refrigerator.

"It'll keep bugs out'a your ice-box, next time, sugar!"

~ L. A. Norma

Send a self - addressed & stamped envelope along with $5, $10 for both images.

Mail to:

Leonard Earl Johnson

Box 202

302 Jefferson St.

Lafayette, LA 70501

October 2009 / Part Two, Below The Level of The Sea

Yours Truly in a Swamp
October 2009

Photo Credit: Melanie Pleash

One Week Later

and

The Last Ten-cent Martini Lunch Before The Storm

Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

Below The Level of The Sea

Part Two

by

Leonard Earl Johnson

* * *

Diaspora here is thy sting

Think of closing your front door one day and having all the Life you lived behind it disappear. You are not dead but the Life you lived is. The people where you drank your morning coffee are gone. The waiters are gone. Your job. The bar where you stopped on the way home. All gone.

We spent the day before Hurricane Katrina at Squalor Heights, our Faubourg Marigny garret apartment. We watched television.

New Orleans Mayor, Ray Nagin, spoke somberly in crisis appropriate but metaphorically odd phrases like, "Get out of Dodge."

This is the Deep South, we thought, not the Wild West.

By this time, The City had issued a mandatory evacuation order but offered no help doing so. Just the advice to "Get out of Dodge" if you can, pardner.

If you can not saddle up and ride off, then write your old S. S. number on your arm with one'a them indelible magic markers. Yup! "This is the real deal," the big bossman reckoned.

Jefferson Parish President, Aaron Broussard, said, "This is the 'Big One,' folks."

A few days later, in Saint Bernard Parish -- the parish below Broussard's -- thirty-five Saint Rita Nursing Home residents drowned after days of pleading for help. One of them was Mother to Aaron Broussard's safety director.

The following week, on Meet The Press, Broussard broke down and cried. He bowed his head in front of the nation and wept. Moderator, Tim Russert, had asked a weaving question laced with cool objectivity. The subject was FEMA. The transcript follows:

Mr. Russert: Jefferson Parish President Broussard, let me start with you. You just heard the director of Homeland Security's explanation of what has happened this last week. What is your reaction?

MR. AARON BROUSSARD: We have been abandoned by our own country. Hurricane Katrina will go down in history as one of the worst storms ever to hit an American coast, but the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history.

I am personally asking our bipartisan congressional delegation here in Louisiana to immediately begin congressional hearings to find out just what happened here. Why did it happen? Who needs to be fired? And believe me, they need to be fired right away, because we still have weeks to go in this tragedy. We have months to go. We have years to go. And whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chain-sawed off and we've got to start with some new leadership.

It's not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now. It's so obvious.

FEMA needs more congressional funding. It needs more presidential support. It needs to be a Cabinet-level director. It needs to be an independent agency that will be able to fulfill its mission to work in partnership with state and local governments around America.

FEMA needs to be empowered to do the things it was created to do. It needs to come somewhere, like New Orleans, with all of its force immediately, without red tape, without bureaucracy, act immediately with common sense and leadership, and save lives. Forget about the property. We can rebuild the property. It's got to be able to come in and save lives.

We need strong leadership at the top of America right now in order to accomplish this and to -- reconstructing FEMA.

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Broussard, let me ask--I want to ask--should...

MR. BROUSSARD: You know, just some quick examples...

MR. RUSSERT: Hold on. Hold on, sir. Shouldn't the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of New Orleans bear some responsibility? Couldn't they have been much more forceful, much more effective and much more organized in evacuating the area?

MR. BROUSSARD: Sir, they were told like me, every single day, "The cavalry's coming," on a federal level, "The cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming, the cavalry's coming." I have just begun to hear the hoofs of the cavalry. The cavalry's still not here yet, but I've begun to hear the hoofs, and we're almost a week out.

Let me give you just three quick examples. We had Wal-Mart deliver three trucks of water, trailer trucks of water. FEMA turned them back. They said we didn't need them. This was a week ago.

FEMA--we had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said, "Come get the fuel right away." When we got there with our trucks, they got a word. "FEMA says don't give you the fuel."

Yesterday--yesterday--FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards on our line and says, "No one is getting near these lines." Sheriff Harry Lee said that if America--American government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn't be in this crisis.

But I want to thank Governor Blanco for all she's done and all her leadership. She sent in the National Guard. I just repaired a breach on my side of the 17th Street canal that the secretary didn't foresee, a 300-foot breach. I just completed it yesterday with convoys of National Guard and local parish workers and levee board people. It took us two and a half days working 24/7. I just closed it.

MR. RUSSERT: All right.

MR. BROUSSARD: I'm telling you most importantly I want to thank my public employees...

MR. RUSSERT: All right.

MR. BROUSSARD: ...that have worked 24/7. They're burned out, the doctors, the nurses.

And I want to give you one last story and I'll shut up and let you tell me whatever you want to tell me. The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management, he's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, "Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?" And he said, "Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday." And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night.

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. President...

MR. BROUSSARD: Nobody's coming to get us. Nobody's coming to get us. The secretary has promised. Everybody's promised. They've had press conferences. I'm sick of the press conferences. For God sakes, shut up and send us somebody.

MR. RUSSERT: Just take a pause, Mr. President. While you gather yourself in your very emotional times, I understand, let me go to Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi.

This is a clip of that interview

* * *

"We had tons of good times (at Saint Rita's), and we had one bad time. We had everything one day, and the next day it was gone," Saint Rita's owners, Sal and Mabel Mangano told reporters.

The Manganos were charged, indicted and acquitted. At the national level no charges have been brought against anyone.
-------------
Copyright, 2009, Leonard Earl Johnson
For more Yours Truly in a Swamp go to www . L E J . org

Below the Level of the Sea, Part One / September 2009

Yours Truly in a Swamp
September 2009

Photo Credit: Melanie Pleash

Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

Below The Level of The Sea

Part One

by

Leonard Earl Johnson

* * *

Katrina and Rita are the names of two giant hurricanes that arrived in that order, in 2005. They ate coastal Louisiana. Then they spit it out gutted and changed forever.

"The great New Orleans hurricane of ought-five," L. A. Norma dubbed Katrina even before it crossed Florida and spun out into the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Rita came three weeks later, and blew towns like Cameron and Pecan Island off the map. Rita took her landfall two hundred miles west of New Orleans, near Lake Charles. New Orleans people usually don’t know it, but Rita was the bigger storm. Big enough to lift the entire Gulf of Mexico and blow out New Orleans first feeble efforts at closing Katrina-breached levees.

L. A. Norma evacuated early with friends bound for Shreveport. "At the first gathering of weather forecasters," she now beams.

"After those storms flooded and re-flooded New Orleans, I blinked twice and flew off to Los Angeles. My children live there. You might say, I got a three month evac-u-cation on the wind."

* * *

Elected to stay

What, me worry? Did we not have the government team of Nagin, Blanco and Bush watching over us?

By the time I saw coastal politicians on every television channel warning against staying, it was almost too late to leave. The whole City had shut down. Nearly everyone with private cars had left.

Mayor Nagin said to the approximately ninety-thousand of us still in Town: "Write your social security numbers on your arms with indelible ink."

Sagacious talking-heads came on between the politicians speaking of ten-thousand body bags "rumored" to be stockpiled by The City.

Yikes! Frantic phone calls. Someone at the airport said, "Last plane done gone." Amtrak and Greyhound’s reservation numbers said services in-and-out of New Orleans were suspended till further notice.

Saturday's sun broke over a blue and beautiful day. Winds were calm. We rode Featherbike to Union Station and found it boarded up. We saw no one on the way to the station. On the ride back to Squalor Heights a lone police car passed heading Uptown along Tulane Avenue. At Canal and Basin four young tourists from Chicago asked, "Which way to Storyville?" We asked if they knew about the storm.

"We came down to see it," they chimed, "on the last train from Chicago!"

They were second-year Northwestern University film students. They booked rooms at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, "Right next to the Superdome," where they clearly expected to be safe. "The mayor and his staff are staying there."

We never heard how the students weathered The Storm, but the Hyatt was severely damaged and four years later has yet to reopen.

In the aftermath, Mayor Ray Nagin was re-elected to office. Governor Kathleen Blanco was not. President George W. Bush left the White House and moved into, not "the" big house in Texas, but a huge house in Dallas.

"Where he will doubtless shelter future storm victims," Norma says. She also says, "Governor Blanco was replaced with the G. O. P.'s 'Governor Lapdog Millionaire' helicoptering like a president to religious rallies."

* * *

Back at Squalor Heights, phone calls offered shelter in Meridian and Memphis and San Francisco and Chicago and Washington and more. We told them all, "No, we are staying. Squalor Heights sits on the highest ground around and survived many storms before this one. Besides, if it gets too bad we will go to the Superdome."

Katrina took landfall on Monday, August twenty-nine, fifteen miles east of The City. Landfall is the arrival on land of the storm’s eye wall. A lot of storm comes ashore ahead of the eye.

* * *

Landfall was exactly seven days after my sixty-second birthday, and a last ten-cent martini lunch.

Ten-cent martini lunches are events organized erratically by fifteen or more ne’er-do-well writer bums who gather for high flying lunches-on-a-dime, at Bacco, in the French Quarter. The lunches are normal prices. The dime is for endless martinis, a libation that has filled many a writer’s inkwell. Before The Storm they happened often. Afterwards not so much. There was one recently. More on it later.

The last ten-cent martini lunch before The Storm was great fun. We gathered at the bar, then filled a long table in a domed dining room with Tuscan-mellow lighting (or was it the martinis?). We drank, ate, drank more, and sang songs we knew and didn’t. What a party! There was not a thought given to the coming Storm. We partied as though the Gods would not mind our hubris. Alas, they did.

Lunch disbanded with plans to regroup on Saturday at the Spotted Cat, on rue Frenchmen. Washboard Charley was playing.

Friday we phoned Dave Parker, a tattooed scribe studying at the University of New Orleans. "Is the Spotted Cat still on?"

"We’re in Baton Rouge," he said, "and won’t be in Town."

"What are you doing there?" we asked.

"Escaping the storm. Haven’t you heard, Katrina’s headed to New Orleans as a category five."

We had not heard. We had stopped listening after Katrina crossed southern Florida, went into the Gulf and turned back towards northern Florida.

The television came into focus and the mayor began to speak. "If you are going to stay, take an indelible magic marker. . ."

* * *
Copyright, 2009, Leonard Earl Johnson
* * *

Be Safe This Hurricane Season

Get a Frank Parsley original magnet of LEJ's fat face to scare off hurricane vermin from your refrigerator.

"It'll keep bugs out'a your ice-box, next time, sugar!"
~ L. A. Norma

Send a self - addressed & stamped envelope along with $5, $10 for both images.
Mail to:

Leonard Earl Johnson

Box 202

302 Jefferson St.

Lafayette, LA 70501

August 2009 / The Wars of August

Yours Truly in a Swamp
August 2009

Photo Credit: Frank Parsley
Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

The Wars of August
by
Leonard Earl Johnson

* * *

"Or trade it for something by James Lee Burke," L. A. Norma said to a young woman named K. O. We were all standing on the marble-like floor of New Orleans' Union Station, on Loyola Avenue, awaiting the call of our train, The City of New Orleans.

Norma exhaled a plume of Camel cigarette smoke at the woman. A large elderly security guard got up from his olive green metal desk and started towards her with a yellow plastic bucket held firmly in front of him.

Norma went on, "The Best thing about Bloomsday parties is that none dare climb out too far on any limb of understanding ULYSSES."


The security guard asked Norma to put her cigarette in the yellow bucket. It contained sand, and around its outside said, "Humeland Secority," in handmade Magic Marker printing. The "O" was left open at the top and the "U" was closed, but the message was clear enough.


Norma looked at him sternly and forced the offending cigarette from her teeth's grip with the tip of her tongue, while hardly missing a syllable of her lecture to K. O.


We were on our way to the exhibition, The Glory of Baroque Dresden, in Jackson, Mississippi. K. O. and her boyfriend, O. K., were on their way home to Memphis. We had met the night before, at O'Flaherty's annual celebration of James Joyce's obtuse novel. The bar had been very crowded -- it being the centennial Bloomsday -- and on our waiter's invitation the two smiled warmly and took chairs at our table.


K. O. sported purple hair, one gold nose ring, and two glass chandelier earrings made of tiny red and green crystal crosses. Her fellow traveler was similarly colored and pierced, with six gold earrings in his right ear and one in the left. They shared a secreted bottle of Courvoisier and told us they had come to Town a few days before to read, "two short poems," they had written for the occasion.


"Mercifully they got drunk on the train down and lost all eighteen pages," Norma said under her breath.

* * *

"The City of New Orleans, an adventure in slow motion," O. K. said, as we boarded the train. Behind us the security guard paraded across the marble-like floor on his way back to his metal desk. A trail of cigarette smoke spread out behind him like contrails over prairie.


Our train slipped passed the Superdome, gathered steam and rocked over marsh and swamp. Then it climbed up the ancient continental shelf and pulled into Jackson, on time. There a quick transaction with the Conductor secured a bedroom and extended our tickets on to Memphis.


We stayed on the train so as to laugh longer with our new friends and their bottles of old French brandy. We ordered iced-water, and tipped the Train Assistant to not tell anyone we were smoking Norma's cigarettes in our cozy little cabin. At ten o'clock, we reached Memphis. O. K. and K. O. dropped us at the Sheraton-Peabody, on Union Avenue, in quiet well-behaved downtown Memphis.


"The Bluff City," Norma said, "corporate headquarters of Elvis Presley, Sun Records, Harrahs Casino, Cornerstone Cellars, and the world famous Peabody Hotel's Marching Ducks."


Norma recited her list while walking in deep carpeting to elevators that led up to our rooms. There we slept a few hours before catching a cab, and the six-fifty "City" back to Jackson.

The hotel kitchen was closed when we arrived and still closed when we left. Same for the famous ducks. They would not appear again until eleven. We could not wait.

Amtrak #59, The City of New Orleans, southbound, arrived on time. We climbed aboard and right back into bed, leaving a wake-up call for "just-before Jackson."

* * *

For a second time in as many days, we arrived in Jackson on time and once again extended our stay on the train.

"We are far too tired for the glory of either Jackson or Dresden," Norma told our waiter. We did get up and order lunch in the diner. Over iced-water laced with brandy, we watched Jackson slip away behind us.

After that we slept all the way back to New Orleans tended by, "The sons of Pullman porters and the sons of engineers . . . aboard their father's magic carpet made of steel . . ." (From the song, RIDING ON THE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS, by Steve Goodman.)

* * *

At home the next morning, Norma called very early to say, "The New Orleans Museum of Art is running a Hotard bus up to Jackson," for the sole purpose of the Dresden exhibition. "For the price of eighty-nine dollars we can get two meals, the bus ride and the exhibition."

"That's less than our bar bill alone on The City of New Orleans!" she exclaimed.

I agreed, leaning my forehead on the desk next to the telephone. I thought I could smell her cigarette smoke. I did hear her phone click off as I fell asleep.

Copyright, 2009, Leonard Earl Johnson
------------------------

This story first appeared in Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans, July of 2004, under the title "From Bloomsday to Dresden," and in a slightly altered form in the anthology, LOUISIANA IN WORDS (Pelican Publishing),
-------------------------

* * *

Be Safe This Hurricane Season

Get a magnetized image of LEJ's fat face to scare off hurricane vermin from your refrigerator.

"It'll keep bugs out'a your ice-box, next time, sugar!"
~ L. A. Norma

Send a self - addressed & stamped envelope along with $5, $10 for both images.

Mail to:

Leonard Earl Johnson

Box 202

302 Jefferson St.

Lafayette, LA 70501

July 2009 / A Few Months Before The Storm

Yours Truly in a Swamp
July 2009

Photo Credits: Frank Parsley
Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

A Few Months Before The Storm
by
Leonard Earl Johnson

* * *

Outside Brennan's, a few months before The Storm, two black limousines stretched along the curb with open doors and uncorked Champagne. A liveried driver stood near by.

Inside each limo, little wooden boxes held napkins and Carnival trinkets. On the port side, a leather bench seat reached from front to back. "A person could live here," L. A. Norma observed.

On the starboard side, an ice bucket held more Champagne and beside it crystal flutes were fastened by the stem to polished wooden racks.

Handsomely dressed New Yorkers passing on the sidewalk stopped and said they thought we looked like we might be "somebody."

"We might . . ." we started saying, adjusting our black, gray and blue Shibori silk scarf so as to flank our lapels and nicely frame our crystal flute. This ancient Japanese technique of dyeing silk is practiced in New Orleans by the fabric artist Valerie Wozniak. Her results are to 1960s tie-dyeing what Louisiana coffee is to American coffee with skimmed milk. Such silk creates opulent effects and illusions of importance when lifting Champagne to one's grateful lips.

So it would have been, had not L. A. Norma interrupted with, "We might, were we not undeniably us." She laughed, snorted and coughed through a fog of Camel Cigarette smoke. An ash fell in her Champagne flute almost as our host replaced it.

The New Yorkers looked even more convinced we were "somebody" and whispered to a crowd gathering behind them.

Lifting crystal and stepping in and out of stretch limos can make anyone look rather like somebody. We had just left Brennan's annual Saint Patrick's Day Luncheon for scribes and other Blarney spreaders.

What had we eaten at Brennan's, the New Yorkers asked. "The most redolent grillades and grits, turtle soup from Heaven, and wine from God's own vineyard," we declared.

Given the day, we should have had corned beef and cabbage, but none did. None, that is, but Margarita Bergen, Faubourg Marigny's bonne vivant realtor, party-going columnist for Les Amis de Marigny, and traveler home from the Sea.

"It was marvelous," Margarita said of her corned beef. She beamed at the New Yorkers and winked. The man who first spoke looked at the woman by his side and blushed.

Local legend holds that Bergen once attended twenty-seven parties, soirees, auctions, and events in a single weekend. Adjusting her green hat and lavishing "darlings" at the end of each sentence, she giggled, "It was a three-day weekend, darlings."

Not to be upstaged, Norma grabbed the moment by asking our admirers if they had heard the joke about the JFK assassination theorist waiting at The Pearly Gate. She crushed her Camel Cigarette on the curb and said, "At The Pearly Gates, Saint Peter asked the newly deceased if he would like any questions answered before entering Paradise. This is my chance thought the conspiracy theorist and screamed out, 'Who shot John F. Kennedy?' Saint Peter calmly said, 'Why, Lee Harvey Oswald.' The man slapped his forehead and said, 'My God, this goes higher than I thought!' "

The New Yorkers laughed out loud, thanked us and trotted off down the street with their newly formed flock of fellow travelers.

At our table inside Brennan's, former TIMES/PICAYUNE gossip columnist Betty Guillaud -- the woman credited with coining the phrase, "The City Care Forgot" -- pushed back her mink and worked the room's new, old and not forgotten faces.

Someone told the story of David Duke marching one year in a French Quarter Easter parade. Guillaud wagged her finger and said, "No David Duke." We all laughed, but no one reached for their eraser.

L. A. Norma smirked, "Not by name anyway."

Lazone Randolph, lifetime Brennan's employee and former Sous Chef, has been appointed Executive Chef, promoter Bonnie Warren announced to the scribes. Randolph stepped forward to opulent applause, and Irish Coffee was served with a dollop of green-and-white whipped cream. "To steady the writer-cramped hand," Norma told an Internet columnist who was licking her glass.

Thus libat-ed and limo-ed, we pulled away from Brennan's and purred up The River to the ample arms of waiting warehouse magnate and finely-fitted Irishman, Kevin Kelly, owner of Houmas House and pleasure plantation.

Mint Juleps revived us from our taxing journey, and the platonic cookery of Chef Jeremy Langrois refreshed us. Lamb marinated in CC's Coffee was our main course. The soups were two, a sweet tangy squash, and the best leek-and-potato ever tasted.

Marda Burton, co-author, with Kenneth Holditch, of GALATOIRE'S, BIOGRAPHY OF A BISTRO, proclaimed her short-crust sheathed salad greens the best salad known.

Photographer and food writer Kevin R. Roberts turned the conversation to the issue of tipping -- something not expected this day from our overfed gathering. He is against it. On all days. Everywhere. Preferring instead, "A buck added to the bill here and there," and paid as salary to the noble servers of the culinary trade.

Ill-timed drumming, perhaps, in the face of the many attentive servers moving enough silver about our table to satisfy General "Spoons" Butler himself.

"Lucky he didn't get a frog in his creme brulee," L. A. Norma said, from the back of our limousine, as we drifted into the arms of Morpheus and floated back to New Orleans, The City that care -- if not tipping -- forgot.

In the French Quarter, our limousine full of satiated scribes-with-spent-pockets raked together four dollars and forty-five cents to meagerly tip the driver. On the way out we took the last bottle of Champagne.

Thank God the New Yorkers were not there to see it!

This story first appeared in Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans, April of 2005, under the title "Opulence Ever Opulence" and in a slightly altered form.
-------------------------
Copyright, 2009, Leonard Earl Johnson

* * *

Be Safe This Hurricane Season

Get a magnetized image of LEJ's fat face to scare off hurricane vermin from your refrigerator.

"It'll keep bugs out'a your ice-box, next time, sugar!"
~ L. A. Norma

Send a self - addressed & stamped envelope along with $5, $10 for both images.

Mail to:

Leonard Earl Johnson

Box 202

302 Jefferson St.

Lafayette, LA 70501

June 1, 2009 / Texas to New Orleans on the Big Choo-Choo

Yours Truly in a Swamp
June 2009

Photo Credits: Frank Parsley
Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans
Texas to New Orleans on the Big Choo-Choo
by

Leonard Earl Johnson

* * *

Texas bluebonnets danced at our feet at the Lillian Farms Bed & Breakfast, in the Brazos River country of Texas. We were just down the road from where Texas was founded. Where Sam Houston and Stephen Fuller Austin sat with other Fathers of the Lone Star State -- without a woman's quill in the ink pot -- signing the Secession documents that thumbed the new nation's nose at Mother Mexico.

Now handsome ladies greet the morn from a landscape of cultivated wild flowers and tamed longhorns. Yes, privileged American traveler, there really is a Lillian Farms. And, yes, Louisiana, there really is a Texas!

* * *

Moist air licked at our ankles when we stepped off Amtrak, back in The Land of Dreamy Dreams. Back in Spring morphing into Summer. Back in New Orleans in time for the new hurricane season.

Sweet olive and Confederate jasmine perfumed the air around the train station. And magnolia trees hurriedly gave up their Summer fragrance. Allen Toussaint's "Southern Nights" played on someones portable radio, and Southern dowagers danced in our head.

"Heady as the Royal Street Pharmacy's perfume counter on a Friday evening," Norma said to the young man from Los Angeles she had cajoled into carrying our bags.

We met coming out of Houston, at sunrise, in the restaurant-car of the Sunset Limited streaming towards New Orleans. We were seated together at a table with a little bouquet of red carnations placed before the car's picture window -- a proscenium for the morning oil fields.

Our handsome table mate said he was on his way to his girlfriend's commencement at Tulane University. They had both been freshmen, in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit.

"Ellen DeGeneres is to be the speaker," he told us. "She is a huge television star and a New Orleans native."

After The Storm he had transferred to the University of California, at Los Angeles. His girlfriend stayed at Tulane, where she is now a part of the historic Hurricane-Katrina graduation class of 2009.

"My God, has it been four years already?" Norma said, as she tipped her coffee cup: "To you, and all the children Bush's FEMA forgot."

At New Orleans Union Station the four years boarded-up entrance way to The City sported gleaming new plate glass doors, with electric eyes. And taxi drivers jumped out from behind the wheel to open their car doors.

"Yes mam, you may smoke," our driver told Norma. "That is, if you open the window and don't tell the governor."

* * *

In Texas, we saw the skyscraper home of AIG, the con insurance operation, looming over Houston and America's economy. The American flag flew above it at half mast.

We also found the new home of Kaboom Books, formerly located across Barracks Street from Cabrini Park, "the dog park," in the French Quarter.

Following Katrina, Kaboom owner, John Dillman, relocated to two locations in Houston, 3116 Houston Avenue, and 733 Studewood.

Dillman, a man noted for great knowledge of books and little patience for fools, made the move, "With optimism and regret, and with no plans of going back."

After Katrina, Dillman bought our library at Squalor Heights. It was not a large library but it was ours, and it was mostly undamaged by The Storm. (It was sold for reasons survivors everywhere will understand -- to lighten our load.) Included in our collection was the heady title, MOSES AND MONOTHEISM, by Sigmund Freud. We first read it in college, when doing time for the Illinois Board of Higher Education. It told us of three iconic philosophers coming out of the East and forming the collective monotheistic God-stories loved by Jews, Christians and Muslims. We had bought this edition from Dillman many years before The Storm.

Following September Eleventh, a discussion about religion with L. A. Norma sent us looking for this book to clarify some salient point only vaguely remembered. We did not know the title, or the author, we told Dillman. "It was about one-God and by, or about, Freud."

With no more description than that, Dillman, said: "I have two copies. One is five dollars and one is three."

We bought the five-dollar specimen. The other one had a torn page. When we found it again, in the new Kaboom of Houston, we bought it back. We were carrying it with us back to New Orleans, for no particular reason. Norma gave it to the young man from Los Angeles as a graduation gift.

* * *

Later at Squalor Heights, we watched Ellen DeGeneres on television speaking to Tulane's Katrina Class. Sitting by her side was the jovial University President, Scott Cowen. Everyone laughed when she told them the job market is huge and, "Now you know the right question to ask in that first job interview, like: 'Is it above Sea level?'"

God bless us all, and be a New Orleanian wherever you go.

Lillian Farms Bed & Breakfast

Ellen DeGeneres address to Tulane's Katrina Class of '09

LEJ's refrigerator magnets

Pete Seeger, New Orleans and Lafayette, May 2009

Yours Truly in a Swamp

May 2009

Pete Seeger's photographs were made in 1983
Photo credits: Leonard Earl Johnson

Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

Pete Seeger,

In New Orleans and Lafayette

by

Leonard Earl Johnson

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Pete Seeger appeared the first week of the 2009 New Orleans Jazz Fest, and turned ninety the next week.

He opened on the Acura Stage with Midnight Special, a song made famous by Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter, of Mooringsport, and the Louisiana State Prison at Angola.

After his performance, Seeger told a story about an invitation to sing at "a little music festival in Lafayette," back in the time of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

HUAC was a political witch-hunting committee. Seeger was offended at being forced to appear and testified to the tune of his accompanying Constitutional right to think anything he wanted without telling them what those thoughts might be. This was in the middle 1950s, when he was a very popular figure in the American folk music revival. He was a famous artist with famous principles.

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For every season

A few generations later, Seeger lost his signature instrument, a long-neck banjo he had designed and built in 1945. It was made to accommodate his long arms and vast voice and set a new standard for banjos that came to be known as The Pete Seeger Banjo.

The lost banjo was found near Seeger's upstate New York home, in the case he'd painted with his name and phone number. It had fallen from the roof of his car and was sitting poetically alongside a state roadway. The young man who found and returned it told reporters that he did not know who Seeger was.

Some years before that, Pete and his wife, Toshi were in New Orleans for an earlier Jazz Fest, and staying in the Faubourg Marigny home of the late Shirley Jensen, on the corner of Frenchmen and Dauphine. It was my good fortune to interview and photograph him and his long-neck twelve-string guitar.

Afterwards, we walked back to my apartment, Squalor Heights, to hear Sweet Emma Barrett records. Seeger loved her cover of Jelly Roll Blues (Available through George H. Buck Records, "Sweet Emma Barrett and Her New Orleans Music," GHB-141). Later he wrote about it in the magazine, Sing Out.

That day, on our way to Squalor Heights, Seeger wore a Medieval looking pointed cap with a long peacock feather that dipped and bobbed behind us as we stepped across Faubourg Marigny curbs and stoops. I vainly wondered if anyone seeing us would recognize we were walking in the company of the great Pete Seeger.

* * *

In New York City, that following Fall, a New York University student on a downtown subway listened to our gush about Seeger, whom we had met for lunch on Fifty Seventh Street. The student was showing out-of-towner me where to get off in the East Village, and listened politely to our boasts of touching greatness, then said, "I do not know who Pete Seeger is."

One thing Seeger is is political, in the true style of a troubadour. His early days were spent roaming with Woody Guthrie, whose own guitar famously boasted his hand painted slogan: "This machine kills fascists." Guthrie wrote and sang significant songs, like This Land Is Your Land. Both men were union supporters and likely candidates to someday lock horns with reactionary Congressmen.

In the 1940-50s, Seeger's popular folk-revival group, The Weavers, had enormous Billboard hits, like On Top of Old Smoky, and the perennial Gulf Coast favorite, Shrimp Boats Are A Coming. He is said by many -- though not by him -- to have written the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome.

"All that I did was change 'will' to 'shall', " he told us, that first Jazz Fest day in New Orleans.

* * *

Back in Washington, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee charged him with contempt of congress for not telling them his thoughts. An odd situation, given that Seeger was a man who spent his entire life telling the whole world what he thought.

A resulting smear campaign led Seeger to being banned from American music clubs and media outlets. They feared the smear might smudge them, and their clubs and media outlets would themselves be pushed off the stage.

He made his living during those days doing small gigs at mostly upstate New York camps for mostly New York City children. At our lunch, years later in Manhattan, we were stopped in every block for now middle-aged handshakes from grateful camp kids.

Seeger's television ban was not lifted until his 1967 appearance on the brave Smothers Brothers Comedy Show.

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The Lafayette Story

Pete Seeger: "It was 1955, The House Committee on Un-American Activities had questioned me about my political beliefs, and I said, 'It's America, I have a right to think anything I want, but I don't have to discuss it unless I want to.'

"They said, 'That's not sufficient.'

"I had been asked to come down (to Lafayette) and sing some songs at a little festival. They (festival organizers) said, 'Mr. Seeger, this evening we're going to have a little party, so you can hear some of our local music.'

"Well, at the door, they said, 'Pete Seeger, meet Congressman Edwin E. Willis'."

(Edwin Edwards Willis was the Louisiana Democrat, from nearby Arnaudville, who served as chair of the Un-American Activities Committee, 1963-69.)

"Well, he did a double-take, and I did, too. "They said, 'Let's get some singing going,' and Willis glowered in the corner.

"Later, he (Willis) said, 'Mr. Seeger, it's a small world. How did you get here?'

"I said, 'Well, I was invited.'

"He said, 'Who invited you?'

"I said, 'The Chamber of Commerce.'

"Willis was not amused, or appeased. He said, 'Well, you're not welcome.'

"I went on to California. I didn't want to make trouble for anybody."

Copyright, 2009, Leonard Earl Johnson

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Be Safe This Hurricane Season

Get an ice-box magnet of LEJ's fat face to scare off hurricane vermin from your refrigerator.

"It'll keep bugs out'a your ice-box next time!"
~ L. A. Norma

Send a self - addressed & stamped envelope along with $5, $10 for both images.

Mail to:

Leonard Earl Johnson

Box 202

302 Jefferson St.

Lafayette, LA 70501