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French Quarter Fest
My horoscope said to get out of my head and into the society around me so I did, mostly because I was going to anyway.
The mid-April French Quarter Fest is the only major local event I hold in high regard, although Mardi Gras and Jazzfest are full of potential as well. It's the mildest of the oppressively hot spring and summertime festivals, and it was occasionally cloudy at this year's fest, so that kept the temp down as well. It was a week full of taking advice as I had been reading the last of my Thrift City hardbacks, Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, which is the one that, unfavorably reviewed, led him towards ruin, and death. I connected with all the Hemingway's and Fitzgerald's from that last batch, which is a good thing. I can hardly complain of intellectual impoverishment. Sometimes you can't read and that is a guaranteed hard time. But Fitzgerald's Doctor Diver told me I had to take care of the mundane issues, the little things, or I would suffer emotionally, even into insanity. So I dealt with the plumber; he wanted the last of my money. I paid him a partial and held out for final inspection which we scheduled for noon on Friday, the first day of the fest. I took off from my now steady employment and met him and the inspector, who found it all as it should be and said, "so you want a release on the (gas) meter?" I nodded, dumbfounded. I had two days previous, also on Doctor Diver's advice, had the mechanical inspector out. He busted me on several issues, apologized, and left me with a fair amount of work which I have yet to start. But I felt good. I had dealt with the most pressing mundane issues that were holding me hostage. I was strong. I was ready to socialize.
I bought Friday's delicious thinly filleted fried catfish dinner w/ cajun potato salad, green beens with almonds, and that jalapeno tarter sauce, at the Canal/Carrollton Robert's. Got a twenty ounce bottle of Bass to go with it, and drove over to the side of Armstrong Park, where I brought the yellow beast to rest and walked up St. Philip, crossing Rampart, and headed right to Dumaine where I took the left toward the river. Right on Chartres to St. Peter and a few feet to the left I'm in Jackson Square with the Pontalbas and the Cabildo and St. Louis Cathedral and the enviable wrought iron. I knelt on the grass behind the crape myrtle tree in front of one of the many stages set up over many blocks of the Quarter. I chowed heartily, drank it all down, and discreetly loaded and fired the one hitter. Me and my kit bag and humanity. I was waiting with little expectation for this band Jus Fah Nah to start. And when they did start, with just the one guitar player belting out a very respectable, if somewhat subdued, electrified Star Spangled Banner, I was blown away, completely right with God. In that first hour I fell very unseriously in love with one white woman and one black woman, both of whom danced with their girlfriends, or the girlfriends were just props so each could dance unself-consciously for the crowd, of which I was one.
I moved around some, saw the sights, and met no one but strangers. Eight bucks for the food and beer, plus the one hit and I was in that most attractive "foreign locale," slightly disoriented. How can you not like a place that offers such bargains?
On Saturday the Milano String Quartet played in a little room at the Le Petit Theatre on St. Peter which I heard while leaning against the doorframe, focusing between the music and players inside, and the action on the street. The violin player had a nice smile and like so many classical musicians had that slightly befuddled look, as if wondering why would people listen to them.
But Friday, the first night, is the only night when the festival truly has the advertised "festival for locals" feel, where the crowds on the main lawn by the river are large but not oppressively so. That's where Friday night I was pleasantly surprised by a newcomer named Irene Sage, who sings richly in the blues, jazz, rock vein, and is commanding in her presence and pleasantly comfortable with the fact of her overflowing sexuality. It made me think momentarily of the Maureen Dowd I had read in the most recent Times Picayune. The first with the new picture. I'd been wondering what she'd look like beyond that pixyish picture she's been running for years. Wow. The column called us men wimps for not being more like members of a little known primitive tribe who enjoy sex for it's honest pleasure without the power playing etc. We get the syndicated columnists here on a rotating basis and with a time lag so maybe this was Dowd's April Fools column. Either way, it was a little offputting being called a wimp by Maureen Dowd, but I've always liked her and the new picture is nice and her message is I think a good one for a Pulitzer caliber journalist to be espousing, so all in all, I'm for it, and Irene Sage seems to be singing the same message right at that minute and that's when I see her there across the way looking so exactly right I can't help smiling towards her with all this abundant admiration. She looks back and finds me smiling, unmistakably at her, from a fair distance away, and smiles in sincere appreciation, and I'm immediately catapulted into puppy dog mode, where's my leash? But even though I've been told its like riding a bicycle--which come to think of it I also have not done in a long while--I am totally unprepared for liking anybody this much at this point and place in time. So I'm wasting the most valuable Dowd exhortation to not be a wimp. And watching myself do it. Right back into my own head, which is wherefrom I was intending to get away this evening. When I watched her and her girlfriend leave I was sad, and then immediately glad, when they came back.
I think it was Sunday--I kept coming back hoping I would have better courage but I didn't see her again so the point became moot--and I was back in Jackson Square listening to Trombone Shorty, a local kid, who has only recently been coached off the street and is playing on stages with a young band of inexperienced but very talented jazz musicians, and he was doing the circular breathing bit, which is a good one, playing a more or less sustained note for sixty or seventy seconds. But he has the look, Shorty does. So quintessentially the New Orleans inner-city teenager, he represents so many, and will soon, one would hope, leave them all far behind. Don't look back, Shorty. That's my exhortation.
I checked out John Sinclair on the Where 'yat stage, a small setup, on Bourbon, or Royal Street. He recites his poetry about black bluesmen in white society while a band of black and white musicians play the blues. I want to like John Sinclair but his icon status is somewhat disproportionate to his talent as far as I can tell, but I should add that I'm a mostly ignorant judge about poetry. He hosts a radio show an hour or so a day or a week on WWOZ which is in Armstrong Park near where I park the truck, this in the heart of Treme, a neighborhood which just barely includes the Dumaine house a mile to the north, and also a few blocks to the north includes Kermit Ruffin's club on this same street, St. Philip, and he I only mention because he was also background music to the Friday night object of my admiration. And let me say finally, you...you...you...uh...really look nice. I'll have to come up with something better than that.