Nola

The Dramahound’s been busy, as I’m sure you have. Travel, holidays, decorating for the season, music, finished a short play, started a new play, etc. But for Thanksgiving, my boyfriend and I were fortunate enough to spend a week in the French Quarter thanks to the generosity of two writer friends of ours who lent us their condo.

We didn’t see any theatre, but just walking the streets there is theatre enough. Tom and I decided that the best Bloody Marys were to be had at the Chartres House, where Tennessee Williams himself drank in its earlier incarnation. We saw the new Borders store on St. Charles Avenue, in the shell of Bultman’s Funeral Home. Not only was Jefferson Davis laid out there, but Williams set “Summer and Smoke” in its solarium. It was hard to visualize that in the mist of Borders displays, but we tried. We tried to get a drink at the Columns (where much of “Pretty Baby” was shot), but they are still on reduced, post-Katrina hours.

We also saw more of Bourbon Street at night; I think the photo’s self-explanatory. We met some very nice dogs. There was an English bulldog puppy that was ready to come home with Tom. There was lots of walking, and thereby window shopping. I loved this guy’s stone head- he seemed to me a total Roman with attitude. Photos by Tom Bovo.

Do You Know What It Means…

I hesitate to make any sweeping judgments about New Orleans (other than the fact that Café du Monde makes the best café au lait on earth) because I wasn’t there before Katrina and Rita. I’d always imagined New Orleans dripping in Spanish moss, and I didn’t see any of that. I asked to my sister and her husband about what they saw when they went there to work for Habit for Humanity over a year ago. Tourist guides promised long lines, but the only place we had to wait was at Preservation Hall, and we were the only Americans in line. It was all Europeans and Japanese.

One of the things that shocked me was the fact that the St. Charles Avenue streetcar still wasn’t restored to its entire route, and broke down when we were on it, much to the annoyance of the regular commuters. I also read in the Times-Picayune that 2/3 of the city’s population had been evacuated. Imagine 2/3 of New York being evacuated- you can’t can you?

Then a day or two before we came home, I started reading a third travel book (having completed Fodor’s and Frommer’s) that Tom had that was published by Frommer’s (I like them or Let’s Go best, usually), which is part of John Wiley, called “The Unofficial Guide to New Orleans.” It was really interesting, but I’m kind of glad I hadn’t read it before we got there. That way I had my first five days of dazed, New Orleans-drunk at the beginning.

The following is not to say I don’t want to go back- I certainly do. I doubt there’s anywhere else like it. But there were (obviously) parts of stories that you don’t tell the tourists. Like that fact that two of the Mardi Gras krewes, Comus and Momus, haven’t marched since the early 90s because they wouldn’t, and still won’t, integrate their parades. I read that and my chin hit my chest.

“The Unofficial Guide” also told us where Tennessee Williams lived- in a boarding house that’s now the Court of Two Lions, and the building near the cathedral where he wrote “A Streetcar Named Desire.” We also found Elysian Fields, which was a few blocks from where we were staying. Faulkner and Louis Armstrong, not that there’s anything wrong with those two, are the two artists mentioned the most. And with no help from a book we had lunch in a courtyard where Williams supposedly used to drink, the Chartres Café, and LaFitte’s Blacksmith Shop Bar, where he was a regular. We had dinner at the Tujague’s bar, where the bartender gave William Sydney Porter the idea for his pseudonym, O.Henry.

These photos are by Tom Bovo, of Preservation Hall and the Delta Queen steamboat.