First day of Jazz Festival 2011: A primer

8th Annual Trip to New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festval

Jazz Fest, 2011!!!

I cannot, will not spend my time in New Orleans on my computer. This is, after all, first day of Jazz Festival. Meanwhile:

  

WEATHER EXTREMES 

AND NOLA

 

The city welcomed me yesterday from the land of EXTREME rain

(20 of 25 days in April) and EXTREME snow (120 inches this winter) 

to EXTREME perfection. 

High 60s, breezes, clear. No humidity, which is virtually 

unheard of in this tropical land 

where bugs are the size of macaws.

But of course that's the day before JF. 

Today is another day, aka the first day of JF, aka I have been to JF when it's 90 and dripping EXTREME humidity. I have been to 
JF when it is torrential EXTREME rain. I have tromped in theEXTREME mud to hear the EXTREMELY sublime 
Stevie Wonder. I am afraid to look at the weather for today.

WATER EXTREMES AND NOLA

I cannot help but think of Katrina, of course, as I am in my Mama's house as I write that was flooded with Mississippi River WATER and now has been renovated under the design hand of Sister Sue.

This time last year,  as I was arriving, the city was dealing with oil in the Gulf WATER. The spill had just happened.

Today, the city, heavily under the influence of PTSD, is kinda panicky, as is everybody up and down the Mississippi about the possibility of flood WATERS and very soon,partly because of rains and snows from Yankees. (See first topic) The state of Missouri has just decided to bust the levee along Missouri farmland so as to save a tiny town upstream called Cairo, in the neighboring state of Illinois, though not before one senator insulted the whole little town.Watch this politically incorrect statesman at work http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQjqjhHAip.

To his credit, the senator has since apologized.

       

EXTREME FOOD AND NOLA

 If you've never been to NOLA, if you are planning to 

come again, please mark on your to-do list "Reconcile Cafe" 

on Oretha C. Haley Blvd. (named after a great 

civil rights activist in NOLA) in a severely distressed 

section of the city. 

Not only can you get the best crawfish bisque ever here, 

the best  bread pudding with banana sauce (might rival mine), the best crawfish salad 

and shrimp on white beans. 

But it's non-profit. AND it's all for at-risk kids. The restaurant

draws in at-risk kids and teaches them about the restaurant business. 

I saw James Carville here. My first celebrity sighting, except for Charles.

Oh, AND the recipes are all on line. Doesn't get much better than this.

Everybody wins, including me who got to eat there yesterday.

And of course, MUSIC!!!!

 Here's how each day of JF goes: Drink Susan's
special green tea with mint. Jabber with Susan wayyy too much.
Look at the clock! Oh no!! Hurry!! Shower. Try on
50 sundresses and 50 different earrings to get it just right.
Pour over the Jazz Fest lineup, to include,
today: Keb 'Mo, Tab Benoit, Jeff Beck, Mumford and Sons,
Avett Brothers AND my sister's husband, Charles and dozens more of all kinds o
different music that is completely impossible to choose from!!! Slather
on the sunscreen. Park.

Laissez les bons temps rouler
with raspberry tea and mango ice and catfish menuire and
crawfish puff and seafood merliton and just when you
can't stand another minute, leave the fairgrounds, go to
the House of Blues for Trombone Shorty tonight. Feets,
don't fail me now.

Bye y'allllllllllll!!!!!!!!!!!!

So much music, so little time

It's Saturday and let's see, that must mean Jeff Beck, Cajun Beausoleil, extreme bassist Marcus Miller, more crawfish, more rose mint tea, more, more, more. New Orleans is the city of excess, if you're not careful. Last night, we saw the Gipsy Kings, who were hot, hot, hot, and we were up close cuz brother-in-law Charles got us on the VIP side stage. They blew us kisses the whole time, cuz we couldn't stop dancing, which means a lot of my pics are blurry. Note to self: Figure out how to take concert pix that aren't blurry despite dancing. So I'm off to the horsetrack again today (that's where they hold the festival.) The humidity is thick out there. The rain is promising to come. But I got me my umbrella and my plastic poncho. Yeah you rite.

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?

As I begin this post, midway through my annual 12-day pilgrimage to the NOLA Jazz Festival, I find it important to say: I love our little Cape Cod in the little town of Kent, Ohio, where I live now, where I spend the best days of my life with the best family I know. I love Ohio, and the intense changing of the seasons that is so much more apparent north of the Mason-Dixon line. I love my Kent community of diverse, amazing supportive and loving friends and my various therapists. (Think hairdresser as therapist; house-painter as therapist; carpenter as therapist; and my real I-can't-believe-this-woman-loves-me psychologist as therapist.)

I know all this. I believe all this. I want all this -- even as I also feel my heart beating in rhythm with the city of New Orleans, where my smart mama moved us from my native South Carolina via North Carolina when I was 17.

Ironically, I hated the city at first. A 1960s-educated, fear-based Catholic, I was spooked by the above-ground mausoleums and the sticky heat that lay over them. When we first moved, I'd spend hours in my bedroom listening to John Denver and staring up at our white apartment ceiling in the suburbs. I'd take three showers a day, trying to wash the humidity off. Then, somewhere along the way, I got past the mosquitoes as big as macaws and the heat that makes you feel like a streetcar is sitting on your chest. I discovered Jazz Fest and a broomstraw-thin Bonnie Raitt playing slide guitar like hot butter. I discovered Mardi Gras, and intensity tempered with penance: There’s nothing like being in the French Quarter at five minutes til midnight on Mardi Gras, then watching as the trash trucks roll onto the street like Army tanks when the clock strikes 12, pushing everybody home simply because it's Ash Wednesday. I discovered the creativity and verve of this city's diverse people, young women in lace dresses maneuvering bicycles along Toulouse Street, my own mother in her 40s in a tank top, second-lining in the street alongside a Jazz Funeral.

Like young people do, I left home for parts unknown in my 20s, returning only sporadically to New Orleans, usually with my growing family. I spent a Christmas or two there, and spring breaks on occasion.

And then Katrina came, totaling the home of my mother, who my three sisters and I were already grieving as she died four months before in a fire.

Katrina marked sorrow for me, just as it did for anybody who ever so much as visited this magic, tragic city.

Katrina also marked the deepening of my love affair and a vow to return to the City That Care Forgot every year, come fire or flood.

Every year I make good on this vow. I return at least once, some years twice, always for the International Jazz and Heritage Festival, an eclectic festival of food and music and culture, which BTW, should be renamed the Gospel-Reggae-Soul-World Music-Funk-Rhythm and Blues-Blues Festival.

I come, not to stare up at the ceiling, but to infuse my soul with the happy accordion of coonass Terrence Simien. I come to sashay to the the tight, jump-street music of my brother-in-law and his legendary brother, Deacon John, and the haunting, promising horn of 24-year-old Trombone Shorty, who grew up in the immortalized Treme neighborhood. I come to suck crawfish heads and eat collard greens and smothered chicken and mango ice. I come, as much as anything, to ride the city streets with my sister, she behind the wheel of her Buick with the duct-taped window, me behind the lens of my camera, recreating images of street scenes, colorful houses and live oaks, their arms draped with Spanish moss lofting on the breeze of New Orleans spring.

Ohio is the place where I will live happily ever after with the family I have created. It is my home now. But New Orleans is the place where I breathe most free. It may be the City That Care Forgot. It is the City of My Heart.