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.) 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

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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

* * *

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

Eric Hoffer Remembered, 1902-83 / April 1, 2009

Yours Truly in a Swamp

Eric Hoffer, 1902-1983, Remembered

Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

April,

National Poetry Month,

2009

by

Leonard Earl Johnson

* * *

We met Eric Hoffer, in San Francisco, a few years after President Kennedy's 1963 murder, in Dallas.

By then, America was up to its eyeballs in the Vietnam War, and the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) was a new construction site on Mission Street. We, America's youth, were in open defiance of our elders -- who were, after all, trying to kill us. And San Francisco had become the sex-drugs-rock'n-roll Mecca of our fabled times

* * *

The Sixties were full of fables. Eric Hoffer was a living one. A Son of immigrants, he was a longshoreman who wrote books. These were days when poets walked among us.

He was a self-educated, hard-headed realist. He wrote as a way of experiencing Life. We liked him for that, not his support of the war.

More than once, we found him sitting on the waterfront, at the foot of Market Street, talking about Schopenhauer and America's China trade. His audience would be another longshoreman or some beguiled tourist.

His tenth book was titled, THE TRUE BELIEVER. It was enormously popular and praised by college professors, whom we also suspected of being in the conspiracy to kill us.

TRUE BELIEVER was promoted by no lesser "true believers" than Lyndon B. Johnson and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike passed out copies of the book to his buddies. When Hoffer heard about this, he said, "It proved to me that this is the kind of book any child can read."

Hoffer was already a minor celebrity in literary circles when LBJ found him. One of television's first talking heads, the gentlemanly Eric Sevareid, had him on a CBS-TV special. It aired in prime-time for an amazing two and a half hours. They talked about the war in Vietnam and hardhat politics. Hoffer commented that he thought well of Lyndon Johnson and his escalating war.

Johnson, smarting over draft-age youths dancing in San Francisco when they should be making war, did not let his tv-set cool before he booked Hoffer into the White House. It was to be a five minute photo shoot, but it stretched into an hour long jaw-and-gum-flap session.

Reporters leaned in close to hear Hoffer, the NY born German-American Jew, and LBJ, the Texas-American President, finding out they shared a ten gallon hat full of good ideas.

Alas, the world came to see it differently.

In 1982, Ronald Reagan (also, not a friend of youthful dancing) presented Hoffer with the Presidential Medal of Honor, no small achievement for two would-be Union men.

Hoffer died the next year, at age 80.

* * *

We saw it all, on college television sets, in Carbondale, Illinois. The vertical hold button on ours was tricky. After a while, the college booted us out and San Francisco welcomed us in.

In San Francisco, Hoffer ate his breakfast in a Polk Street joint where we came to cook and philosophize with the geezers. Our ages were roughly 70 and 25.

He mused that his visit with "the man," LBJ, in "the house," the White House, might have put his soul in exploitation.

Probably it had, we reckoned. It was a time of exploitation.

"Dance lithely," he said, "they all are."

To our knowledge, he never retracted his support for the war in Vietnam, even after it had clearly failed.

He said of his publicly announced retirement from wharf and newspaper column, that (as a youth), "I knew when to catch a train, but it is harder to know when to get off."

We now approach Hoffer's years of then, and we just got off the train at New Orleans. It was what our ticket said. Hey, Eric, you self-reliant old cuss, you think we are the ones who put us here?

Copyright, 2009, Leonard Earl Johnson

photo credit: Frank Parsley

* * *

the elder LEJ

For more of LEJ's Yours Truly in a Swamp go to
w w w . L E J . o r g

To Order

LEJ.org ice-box magnets

March 2009, On The Way to Texas, Part Two

Yours Truly in a Swamp,

On to Texas!
Where are They Now?
Part Two

Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

March, 2009

by

Leonard Earl Johnson

Bousillage, Oui!

The pleasures of a fireplace on a cold day can make a Louisiana cold-snap almost worthwhile. Add a bottle of red wine and a bowl of dark gumbo, and Houston can wait, cher!

(Photocredit: Frank Parsley)

We lingered in Acadiana,"to pass a good time," as the locals say. One of those good times we passed was on a cold afternoon in Vermillion Parish, near the old oysterman's town of Abbeville. We ate, drank and relaxed before the warming hearth of preservationist Wade Lege's restored bousillage cottage.

In ancient myth, fire was thought a God. Early Cajuns and Creoles must have felt much the same about bousillage.

"Bousillage was a kind of sacrament," Lege' says, "a savior from storms and climate."

Louisiana's European settlers built colombage structures, with fill-between-post, for insulation and strength. Not to mention the weight to stand up to hurricane winds. The fill most utilized in Acadiana was bousillage, a mixture of mud and retted Spanish moss turned into something akin to Native People's wattle and daub. These globs were hung wet from baton, "pieux barreauxs," latticework wedged between the posts. After drying, these walls were plastered over, sometimes with mud and shells crushed in water to make a whitewash. This might be covered on the outside with flush boards. On the insides the walls would have a chair rail board to keep chairs from hitting and scraping out the mud. Several such buildings still stand. Lege' has one, and is gathering more.

In New Orleans, builders used bricks and stones harvested from ship's ballast, more often than bousillage."Briquette entre
poteaux," brick-between-post, became The City way. Alas, such materials were not as available on the far side of the great Atchafalia Basin.

Lege' dates his cottage to the second, "perhaps the first," wave of French immigration via Nova Scotia. It was built by a family of sugar planters, the last descendant of which lived in the house until the late 1990s. Lege' moved it from Scott, in Lafayette Parish, on August 29, 2006, the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. It now sits on a savanna with a broad overhead sky and old dreams blowing up from Bayou Vermilion.

(photocredit: Wade Lege')

Cri de Coeur!

A few decades ago, misguided New Orleans restorationists removed the flush boards and plaster from their cottages, to expose their eye-pleasing post-and-brick patterns.

Unfortunately those old bricks, with soft textures exposed, quickly eroded from wind, rain and the trailing fingertips of tourists.

Today, Lege' lives in his cottage, and works in his family's construction business, and gathers Acadiana's historic "Cultural Material."
(Photocredit: Frank Parsley)
Outside sits a separated kitchen under construction. It has yet to see a stove, or a meal, but it displays its handsome mud walls through an unglazed window frame.

There are other outbuildings awaiting reconstruction. Including a first-wave French corn crib -- "magasin de mais," blown down last year, north of Lafayette, by Hurricane Gustav. The dissembled peg-and-hole pieces were hand-hewn from giant cypress trees. The former owner gave the pieces to Lege' and he moved them to his prairie.

Lege', an Abbeville native, lived in New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina. "I visit often, and I'm glad to see it coming back."

Will he ever return to New Orleans?

Lege' says, "I can never fully leave New Orleans, or Acadiana. Someday I hope to have a playhouse there."

* * *

Headed to Texas

We joined photographer, Frank Parsley, for the next leg of our journey. He is photographer of all but one of the images used with this story, and creator of the LEJ.org icebox magnets that L. A. Norma claims, "Would scare the bugs out of your refrigerator after the next hurricane."

His Mother and late Father opened Parsley Studio, in Houston Heights, in 1942. "Been there all my life," Parsley grins. The studio is still in business. "All my family work there doing great school, wedding, and prom photography. The kind of photography that made me reach out to Ruthie the Duck Lady."

Parsley was well known in pre-Katrina New Orleans for his production of icebox magnets and greeting cards with polite images of Saint Louis Cathedral and Cafe Du Monde. He was also known for the sort of erotic Mardi Gras images that make blue noses run, and red noses run back for more. He is shown here in a self portrait with the late French Quarter free spirit, Ruthie the Duck Lady.

"I never actually lived in New Orleans, but the bulk of my business was there," he says, as he turns onto I-10, headed West.

"I still have several outlets in New Orleans. I call on them monthly. Well, less now. They all sold very well till The Storm. Most are doing well again. But it's been a rough past three years.

"I'd set a refrigerator door on an easel, on Bourbon Street, outside Alternatives gift store. Tourists would buy magnets and visit. On big weekends that is a busy spot. Great for drinking a beer, talking with friends, and people-watching. New Orleans was so laid back."

Parsley is a good salesman. The kind strangers want to talk to. "Often the people I had photographed on the street during Carnival would come around to see their magnet. The Monday following a big weekend was always my best day. Tourists would pass by, on their last stroll around the Quarter, and buy souvenirs. They slip easily in your pocket.

"I've been coming to New Orleans since I was sixteen. It is a second hometown.

"The first two years after Katrina, my New Orleans sales were flat. It is picking up. Since I lived in Houston, I was not eligible for any Road Home money, though I sure lost my business on August twenty-ninth, just like everybody else."

Today, Parsley smiles a lot. "Inside here," he says, patting his breast pocket, "is the largest order, ever, from Cafe Du Monde. 'Recovery,' there is my road home!"

* * *

(Photocredit: Frank Parsley)

Jennings & the Ziegler Art Museum

Jennings is a wealthy western Louisiana oil town, in Jefferson Davis Parish, near the Texas border. It is flat, and it knows rice fields as well as oil fields. Some shimmer in the sun, as we drive along Interstate-10.

We are near the site of the first oil strike in Louisiana and the first oil spill. It is, also, home to a well endowed art museum called The Ziegler Art Museum.

"Old masters in the oil patch," L. A. Norma observes, as we turn off the Interstate."

"God knows the sights on I-10 are not worth taking a picture of.

"Am I right, Parsley?" she asks, blasting a cloud of Camel Cigarette smoke out the car window, in the direction of a McDonald's.

Parsley nods, and drives us down a street lined with large oil-patch houses. All vintage Western Louisiana / Texas architecture. Except one. It is a 1960s modern structure. We turn the car around to look at it a second time.

Norma said, "Must not be any zoning in Jennings."

It turned out to be the Ziegler Art Museum.

Norma repeated her zoning joke to a polite woman sorting gold and silver Christmas ornaments piled on top of a long mahogany table. She seemed not insulted by our rude arrival, and apologized for "needing to finish this Christmas stuff."

She clicked on the lights in the main gallery while explaining, "The other gallery rooms are closed. We had a dinner, and have to clean and put things back in order."

We spent a wonderful hour and, on leaving, our hostess pointed out pictures of the Ziegler family on the wall near the front door. "This was the first oil strike in Louisiana," she said, pointing to an image outside of town. "You know all that flap about oil spoiling the environment? There's stuff growing on those sites, today."

Turns out early oil production involved pumping crude oil out of the wells and into ponds where it sat till a truck sucked it up and hauled it away. "Today, they grow rice there."

She recommended we sample the local food crop at a place back near the Interstate. It was not too good.

"Food taste like oil, here?" Norma asked a waitress who smiled and recommended the jambalaya.
------------

Copyright, 2009, Leonard Earl Johnson

For more of LEJ's Yours Truly in a Swamp go to
w w w . L E J . o r g

Click here

for Ruthie the Duck Lady's story.

February 2009 / On The Way to Texas, Part One

Yours Truly in a Swamp

On The Way to Texas,

Where are They Now

Part One

by

Leonard Earl Johnson

reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

February, 2009

Joan Baez at Grant Street, Lafayette,

December, 2008.
Photo credit:

Kent G. Hutslar

* * *

The day after Christmas, we attended a semi-impromptu appearance by American folk-singer, political activist, and icon of the Fabled Sixties, Joan Baez. It was at the Medicine Show-12, Grant Street Dancehall, in Lafayette, Louisiana, 13o miles northwest of New Orleans.

Lafayette is the hustling "Hub City" of French speaking Louisiana, in the Parish of Lafayette. It is where some 40,000 New Orleanians splashed down after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. It is a big parish with a population upwards of 200,000, and a hinterland nearly that large again. It is a kind of capital of Acadiana.

The area undulates on a bubble of oil, sugar and rice, and it is growing so fast no one is quite sure just how large it is. It booms, though more muted of late.

* * *

Acadiana is served by Interstate-10, Greyhound Bus, several airlines, and Amtrak's old Train Number One, the Sunset Limited. This is the mainline between New Orleans and Los Angeles. It follows, pretty much, the Old Spanish Trail.

Interstate-10 is often fast, but accidents on the Atchafalya Basin Bridge can bring traffic to a halt for hours, and to driving time add the cost of market-price gasoline.

Amtrak is sometimes faster, and always cheaper. The Sunset Limited, West, always leaves New Orleans on time. But, alas, America's once glorious passenger trains now give way to oncoming freight trains and are often delayed en route. Of course, during the Bush years, on-board services deteriorated from so-so to not-so-good. But if you enjoy train rides crossing mighty mouths of south Louisiana's many rivers and bayous, it can be a joy only lengthened by a delayed arrival. However, if you are the type who would vote again for Bush, you would likely not appreciate such extended joys.

Trains naturally attract a certain number of National Geographic readers, along with those who might not read anything. A perfect situation for bloviating over sugar cane fields, moss-strewn oaks, and cypress trees kicking their knees in the sun.

There is a restaurant-car, and the food is edible. Sometimes we pack our own and eat in the observation car. But we like the dinner, with its European seating and tourists eager to share our wisdom. (L. A. Norma loves telling them, while batting her well-trained eyes, "No, no, not The Mississippi! We will cross several places that, to untrained eyes, might look like The Mississippi, but they are not.")

At $17, with geezer discount and advance-reservation, this aptly named train is one of the last bargains of our floundering new millennium. The price is higher for young adults. Less for children.

* * *

"But you can smoke in your own automobile," L. A. Norma later exclaimed. Norma likes trains and sometimes takes this one all the way to Los Angeles. She does not like Amtrak's policy of No On Board Smoking. Periodic stops allow quick puffs standing on some station's platform. (Note: trains out of New Orleans do not stop for a smoke-break until Lafayette.)

* * *

We got the call about Joan Baez from Rene Roberts, a Louisiana music and art maven who teaches at the Acadiana Arts Council, and is a past member of Washington's Kennedy Center Board of Advisers. She said, "Joan Baez is sitting in for Zachary Richard, tonight, at Grant Street. Richard has laryngitis."

"Yippee," exclaimed Norma, "Grant Street is just across Jefferson Street from Lafayette's new train station!"

Zachary Richard is a Louisiana icon, with a purity in his voice similar to that which has marked Baez's long and soaring career. You may recall hearing his "Ave, Maris Stella," in a televised mass, celebrated by Lafayette Bishop Michael Jarrel, in 2005. This was the annual Mass commemorating the French-Canadian Diaspora to Acadiana.

In 2005, the Diaspora Mass was extended to include Hurricane Katrina's Diaspora. (Rita had not yet happened.) Louisiana's maligned governor, Kathleen Blanco, was present as Richard's a Capella voice soared up the clerestory, and tears from all over the state fell at her feet.

Richard and Baez are friends. Baez was in Lafayette using the recording studio of Dirk Powell, producer and musician, with whom she has been touring.

Baez began her career when she was in her teens. She was already famous -- in the heady days of the Fabled Sixties -- when she joined managers and stage with Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. The press of the day loved depicting the three of them as grandfather-overseeing-young-troublemaker troubadours and lovers. There was some truth to that.

"Protest singer," is the descriptive phrase used by Joseph Savioe, President of the University of Louisiana, at Lafayette.

"Ooh LA LA!" L. A. Norma stage whispered, as Savioe introduced Baez.

Lafayette photographer Kent Hutsler took a definitive photograph (above) of this sixty-eight year old women, still as beautiful as her songs, and charming as her voice. She opened with "Lily of the West."

The Medicine Show-12, like the eleven before it, was dedicated to the establishment of a music chair, at U. L. L., in the name of the late Lafayette physician and music lover, Tommy Comeaux. A few months ago, U. L. announced over one-million dollars had been raised and the chair is established.

Grant Street Dancehall is a nicely refitted railway warehouse. It is a large and famous venue that once thrived, then faltered, then closed, and then reopened, after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, with a performance by Jerry Lee Lewis. Most everyone you ever thought of in Cajun, Zydeco, or Creole music has played Grant Street. Along with Joan Baez.


We stood, in the back of the hall, on steps leading up to a section with huge sofas and well dressed young dates. A woman said to her friend, "She played at Woodstock, they say."

The times, indeed, they have changed. Imagine President Savoie giving such an introduction as tonight's, at Woodstock?

"I absolutely can not," Norma said, recalling the rain and mud of Woodstock.


Two history students talked to other friends about a recent class where their teacher told them about Lyndon B. Johnson's colorful admonition to his White House aides: "It is better to have them inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in."

BeauSoleil also graced the night. Along with greats like Sonny Landreth, Geno Delafose, and Lazy Lester, who did a perfect heart-stopping version of Hank Williams' Bayou State anthem, "Jambalaya."


Biaz sang "Farewell Angelina," with BeauSoleil front man Michael Doucet. But she brought down the house with her 1971 hit, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." And closed her set with an a Capella rendition of "Swing Low Sweet Chariot," dedicated to the late Doctor Tommy Comeaux.

* * *

"Was that Dixie song, last night, about the old New Orleans beer?" L. A. Norma asked, next morning, with a giggle, and a newly opened Abita Amber, which in Lafayette is considered imported beer. Next stop Houston, Texas.

Yours Truly in a Swamp / January 2009

LEJ's January column did not appear owing to LEJ being under the weather. L. A. Norma says he is probably hungover.