The Redstar Perspective

For every white boy (play that funky music!) we know and love but don’t necessarily want to take on to the dance floor…

Think of guarding a player in basketball.  Keep an eye on her torso/hips, moving as if they might suddenly cut away from you.  Follow their lead.  Keep your knees loose.  The rest of your body follows the lead of your (her) hips.

For the truly ambitious, the dancing form of the pick and roll - strike a pose! and spin out!

That’s right baby.  You got it.  You’re hot.  Just about ready to borrow my stepdad’s Panama Hat for the summer wedding circuit.  

Though not so fun when you realize what it is you’re watching…

I know I have been out of touch, and I feel very guilty that I am not providing break time for those of you w/office jobs… 

I am working on my last paper for the semester, and then should officially be done with the classwork portion of this program!  Wahoo!  21 years of sitting in class seems a bit excessive, no?  (Would I have been sitting in kindergarten?  Or running around, trying to kiss the boys?)

Anyway, I’m attaching a link that shows the flooding of New Orleans and the surrounding parishes on Aug 29th, the day Katrina made landfall in the area.  It’s pretty disturbing, and I think gives a sense of how much of a man-made catastrophe this truly is. 

Take a look. Pass it on.  I’ll be back on-line at some point. 

PS: Don’t forget to vote this saturday in the mayoral run-off!  Will Nagin be allowed to rebuild the Chocolate City of his (post-Katrina) dreams?  Or will Landrieu become the official face and flavor of the new Vanilla New Orleans?

Hit the yellow arrow reading NEXT after each screen finishes. 
  

 <http://www.nola.com/katrina/graphics/flashflood.swf>
http://www.nola.com/katrina/graphics/flashflood.swf

There’s a lot of spectacular amenities in my friend Denise’s apartment.  Our friend Yakka from Brandeis would probably argue it’s the flat screen tv with surround sound in the living room.  Others might think it’s the location, situated between the 72^nd & Broadway subway stop and Riverside Park.  Or her roof deck.  Or the wireless internet.  Or bath sheet bath towels.  Plush and white. (Or that Denise asks if you’d like a separate towel for your hair.) 

Maybe it’s the down comforter you sleep with on her pull out sofa.  Or the framed photos of you and your friends smiling at you as you wander through the years and down her hall to the bathroom.  It could even be her fantastic hair dryer that got me picked up on the subway during a visit last spring. (“Great hair,” said an older guy who got off in Flatiron with me, the same New Yorker in his hand.  “You really know how to fill out a pair of jeans,” he added.  This is not Denise’s doing; I have my plus-sized relatives on my dad’s size to thank for that.)

These are all excellent nominations.  But these are not the best things in Denise’s apartment.  You might miss what it is.  I forget about it each time, and thus discovering it anew each visit is part of what makes this amenity so fabulous.  I have terrible vision; I can’t see the length of my arm without my glasses or contact lenses.  Washing my face thus requires leaning way in over the bathroom sink to see what I’m doing.  But at Denise’s, when you open the medicine cabinet to get the face soap (Warning to all future hosts of this couch surfer: I love using my friends’ products), the inside of the door of the medicine cabinet is also a mirror.  This is f***ing genius.  The door swings out, and at eye level and right next to your face is another mirror.  I don’t need to shut the cabinet again to see the mirror, I don’t have to lean in at an awkward angle to see my face, I can just twist my head slightly to the right and wash my face.  The fact that this amenity is such a subtle detail in an overall wonderfully renovated apartment just adds to my fastidious Virgo bliss.  But this is what a visit to Denise’s apartment is all about.  It’s chill times with friends who know the value of good conversation over an after dinner drink and cigarette on their rooftop…(with Denise and her handsome, Argentinean husband I can as easily talk about relationships as Israeli politics or real estate development, when too often my conversations with women are about men, and my conversations with men are about work)…but in an artfully designed environment whose little attentions to detail like the medicine cabinet’s interior mirror reveal how much work went into creating this relaxing, inviting atmosphere.  I’ve never met anyone as skilled as Denise at working hard so she can play hard later.  She, on the other hand, admires my ability to produce in spurts, using the more conventional all-nighter or rager methods for work and play.  Yet, I find our approaches to life complementary.  As I squeeze city stopovers into my Boston-New Orleans circuit, my research that my cousin Kristen describes as my willingness to “sleep anywhere” reveals that Denise’s apartment is by far the best place to recover from a hangover in the Brandeis-NYU-Duke sofa network that extends from Boston to DC and beyond.

Last week, on May 1, 2006, my cousin had an emergency c-section 2 weeks before her due date.  Mom and baby - Katelyn Margaret - are both doing well, but it was a formative experience for the whole family.

My cousin and I were like sisters growing up - me the older, taller, protective but aloof one - she the younger, more vulnerable but with an equally obnoxious mouth that got her into a different set of scrapes than my own wisecracking did.  We took pretty good care of one another growing up, through our early 20s, and then I broke my back and stayed in New York and went to Africa and she married a nice guy from her office and moved to the ‘burbs where we grew up and through all this we drifted. 

But on the day of Kate’s birth, it was me who swooped in and insisted on getting Tracey in to see a doc and kept her company through the whole uncertain ordeal, and when we finally knew she was going to deliver in a few hours, her husband, parents and 2 sisters joined us at the hospital.  And she and I and our moms (sisters - my mom older, my aunt younger) are all a little struck by the serendipity of us somehow returning to our childhood roles to get her through this very adult experience.

The rest of the week was typical for our family - 8 of us in the recovery room to welcome Kate into the world (our other cousin Kristen arrived tout suite!), several uncles, aunts, cousins, and our 88 yr old grandmother crowding her hospital room for visits through the rest of the week, and it was really really hard to leave and get on a plane and fly to NO.  But here I sit on Willow Street, reluctant to leave due to a similar emotional attachment. 

I wrote a friend of mine last night that I envisioned “losing myself” down here, and I didn’t mean it in a negative way.  In many ways, I just want to give myself over to the intensity of being down here, and I feel like coming back and forth b/w Boston and NOLA makes that impossible. Lately, I have not been living down here too much; my trips in the last few weeks - due to wrapping up my semester - have been short.  Other than jazz fest, I have not been doing much here outside of working.  I feel disconnected somewhat even as I feel really emotionally attached to what we’re planning re: comm dev.   

It’s funny, unlike all the anxiety relationships cause me (a subject surprisingly absent from this blog), I like to be totally absorbed by my work.  I know I still need to strike a balance, but…for example, I burnt out on working in LM eventually, it was unavoidable, and I started to hate the small biz owners.  I was psyched to leave.  But it was amazing to work down there, w/a group of colleagues who were young and were friends and drinking buddies and I do really feel like we were in the trenches together when I look back on it.  And I love that I will always have that experience and I feel eternally bonded to these people.  I feel like I’m on the threshhold of a similar NOLA experience, but can’t quite get there cuz I keep leaving and have to switch gears.

That said, last week in Boston was equally intense and I was physically run down from it all.  I felt like I glimpsed the kind of time I’d like to reinvest in my family and being close to home.  I am worried about how to do this given I’m also decided I want to move here for awhile.  I hope I have some serious bonding time with the relatives/family this summer, white wine and Coronas on the various decks of my mom’s house, Tracey’s house, and my aunt’s house down the Cape.  Can’t wait. 

For now, flying into the (neutral ground? of) NY in a couple hours.  Seeing Brandeis best girlfriends Leah and Denise.  Again, can’t wait.  Staying w/Denise who has a phat apt.  Always feel like I’m in a hotel/B&B when I’m there.    Looking forward to a little R&R and sequestering myself to focus on a paper due monday.  This 30 year old is so over attending classes. 

22 days til hurricane season, 2006… 
I’m sitting at the now familiar Willow St dining room table…I need to turn the light on…dusk is upon us down here…Long day, everyday. 
Fascinating meetings today.  Am waiting for dust to settle in my head and important discussions at next meeting of my Boston-based Mutual Admiration Society (M.A.S., and you know who you are!) to talk it all through. 

Historic preservation and generally working with the city sounds like a headache no outsiders are prepared for.  Non-profits seem VERY confident they can pull off large, complex community development projects down here and leave organizational/neighborhood capacity behind, based on their past experience (one talked about the 13 years of community meetings he participated in in Mattapan to get UMass’s biotech lab built)…The bulk of the examples came from Boston, a city w/tremendous CDC capacity…I can only imagine Roxbury/Mattapan’s lowest moments are still a far cry from the politics of doing biz down here. 

A local person pointed out in one meeting the need to not “divorce race politics” from anything we’re trying to accomplish, and I know my boss and I at least have also tried to make that point, but at this point I’m not sure there is a way to communicate this reality to the predominantly-white-male-Northeastern donor leadership until they are living it in the NOLA trenches. … as I write those words, I think of my friend Steve’s anecdote about the community in LA that burned itself down (twice?) in rage and frustration…

It is a trip hearing the Boston accents and wacky anecdotes about Charlestown and housing lotteries and South End CDC’s as we struggle to wrap our heads around the work to be done down here.  A far cry from Yankee fan contempt in the days of NY, and a fabulous way to stay close to home while I roam around this foreign land known as New Orleans.
That said, it is really hard to keep moving back and forth b/w NOLA and Boston.  The intensity and complexity of life down here is really hard to keep stepping away from, from post-disaster, urban, cultural, racial, intellectual/new project development perspectives.  I could see myself losing myself down here.  So maybe it’s good for now to keep escaping north.  I feel like I’m going to wake up one day and three years will have passed.  I’m getting ahead of myself…

I have pages and pages of thoughts, but I don’t even know what they are yet…stay tuned…
 

I realize now that this title is extremely irreverent for the holy experience that is jazz fest.  (For more background on this feeling, please visit enjoy some uplifting, transformative music in the AIG Gospel tent.  And perhaps buy a homeowner’s policy for your half a million dollar + home.  Unless they’ve pulled out of the market here.  Then just go back to clapping and swaying…Amen to that!)

New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, 2006.  My first.  I got the last 2 days, Sat & Sun, May 6 & 7.  But I saw Lionel Ritchie, and how many of you can add that feather to your cap?  (”Welcome home, Ly-NEL,” an employee greeted him at Louie Armstrong International Airport, he told us.)  A woman I work with down here - an African-American former atty & transplant from CT - told me that jazz fest, more than Mardi Gras, was what I needed to experience to get a true taste of NOLA (if selecting b/w only these 2 cultural options).  I missed Fat Tuesday itself, but I see her point re: jazz fest.  Many attendees probably go from stage to stage sampling the music; sure, I did a little of that (most of the folks I didn’t know, though my local friend Jen did, but I did hear Doug E. Fresh, Special Ed and Big Daddy Kane; the Ohio Players; one of the Marsalis’s - I’m embarrassed I can’t remember which…one of the least famous ones; Paul Simon, The NO Klezmer All-stars, The Radiators, Bobby Lounge, Ly-NEL, and Jimmy Buffet.)  There were probably more, I can’t remember.  There are six or seven stages, set up all over the NO Fairgrounds, and crafts and art and shopping and drinking and EATING.  This is where I put my energies.  For every act I saw, there was an accompanying snack. 

There was Crawfish Miranda - a “cajun alfredo” pasta w/crawfish, then a little brass band at the Congo Square stage.  And a miller lite.

There was a soft shell crab po’boy, along with some jazz at the WWOZ jazz tent. 

There was a lime daquiri and some blues at the Southern Comfort blues stage.

There was some sort of blue crab salad or something, I inhaled it, when I got back on sunday before I headed over to Doug E. et al.

There was chicken and tasso over dirty rice, which is apparently some sort of chicken and ham mix but mostly was reddish and spicy and fabulous and also inhaled.

I had a root beer.  I haven’t had a root beer in years.

And then, a mini pecan pie.  Fit in my hand.  Just the most perfect l’il thing.

Isn’t it darling?

And after that I joined Jen and her boyfriend Jake for the last of Paul Simon. 

All through the weekend I jotted down little notes to share here today, but by now I can just remember how blissful I felt wandering around.  You buy a ticket, and this little condensed world of people and music and shopping and food is your oyster for 2 to 6 days.  It’s hot and outdoors and a mix of people and sounds and tastes and corporate sponsors and it’s all just too much.  The miller lite in the first five minutes of entering was because of the sensory overload.  I wanted to split off in every direction.  I couldn’t sit still - it was hard for me to imagine standing and listening to one stage for more than 5 minutes.  There were maps to consult and tents to explore and artists to see.  I ran into some people I work with and avoided others, including one woman who recently got extensions, which look extremely odd jutting off the back of her head when she’s just a petite little thing.  Sort of like my pecan pie.

The concert attendees were pretty white (other than for Big Daddy Kane, etc.).  I have no pre-storm comparison.  The Jimmy Buffett finish on Sat afternoon was the inspiration for the Miller Lite wasteland.  It was your standard white, suburban, many college aged crowd.  He finished w/Margharitaville (the inspiration for my List: Function Hall Anthems I Hate), and I yelled, “Sing Drunk White People!” as the crowd chanted along and awkward 22 yr old boys finally let their hair down after 9, 10 beers. 

At jazz fest, you find one another via flags people wave.  I’m by the Rebirth flag, the Gay Pride flag, the Israeli flag, the inflatable Miller Lite beer by the sponsor’s tent.  This was one of Jen’s personal favorites. 

 And then Jimmy finished, and the crowd cleared out, and land mines of spent miller lite cans littered the field. 

 As we walked out, we enjoyed the “fried, spicy” smell of the food stands, where you could get everything from sushi to fry bread.  Then I drove Jake’s school-bus sized Ford pick up downtown and he and Jen and I went to Adolfo’s - a tiny Italian place on Frenchmen outside the Quarter.  A guy dancing on the side of the road while we sat in traffic told me a girl driving a pick up truck was hot.  Yeah it is. 

It’s funny, I felt like w/all the choices at jazz fest, your true cultural preferences are revealed.  I wish I was a foodie, so I could do descriptive justice to all the snacks.  But I’m not.  I’m mostly just an occasional glutton who chooses to get most of her calories from cocktails, 2-piece-of-cake birthday parties, and too many potato chips at family gatherings.  And it’s clear that a lot of the music was lost on me.  In NOLA, there’s this station WWOZ, a non-profit, listener-supported, volunteer-operated, fabulous, cool radio station that broadcasts live from jazz fest.  All my sophisticated music conoisseur friends (and the wanna-be’s like my vapid Phd roommate) listen to.  And I play it if others are in the car with me.  But if alone, it’s all DIVA 92.3 (is the DIVA in YOU?), with Disco Inferno and No Scrubs and Since You’ve Been Gone and other pop/dance favorites that remind me of wedding receptions, being on the treadmill, or alone singing loudly in my own turqoise w/fin phat ride in Boston.  This DIVA at jazz fest, I was in HEAVEN during Lionel Ritchie, and the rest was just pretty cool.  (I was trying to imagine being there w/my music affionado friends and thinking how disappointed they’d be in me.  I’d be drinking Lime Daquiris all alone in the book tent.  Yes, I spent a lot of time in the book tent.)

So Fats Domino was supposed to close the festival.  But he got sick, and they bumped Ly-NEL up to the main stage.  And he got up there, and he didn’t mix words.  “I’m going to play every Commodores song I can remember, and then we’re going to blast through the 80s like it was a rocket ship!”  Mixed race though still mostly middle aged white crowd goes wild!  And he sang Lady (my Commodores fave), Running w/the Night, Penny Lover, Easy Like Sunday Morning, Sail On, Three Times a Lady, Dancing on the Ceiling, Hello, Brickhouse, some more piano ballads I’m sure I’m forgetting, and of course, All Night Long. I spent some portion of the concert madly texting w/my very jealous aunt and stepfather.  Too too good.  (I used to joke to my friend Yakka that I was born 20 years too late, and was really a 50 yr old black woman, due to my taste in music.  I have seen Tina Turner, paid $75 to attend a Donna Summer concert by myself, went on a NY harbor booze cruise w/Jammin 105.1 where my date and me were two twenty-something white kids in a sea of older black couples, and now Ly-NEL.  If I ever see Diana Ross, I can die happy.)

And then I rode my bike home, satiated and all aglow, to pull an all-nighter writing a report for Oxfam America on immigrant workers’ rights in the Gulf Coast.  I had a work dinner last night w/a bunch of people and the CEO of Catholic Charities told me I still had the jazz fest glow.  Though so far, everyone else I know who went missed Ly-NEL.

 I leave you with this image, taken during the final set of the night, Lionel Ritchie!  The local young black man dancing had a long conversation with an older white guy from Cleveland about how race doesn’t matter in New Orleans.  He may be the only person on the planet that thinks that.  Turns out he was raised in a white community and dates women of all ethnicities - he listed off a few.  The dude from Cleveland, he plays soccer w/Nigerians, and told me one of the best shows he’s seen was a Bruce Hornsby concert at the Cleveland Zoo where it rained on the crowd for 2 hours while they danced to Bruce playing on his 19 foot Steinway.  Once the music started, these older white women pulled into this young guy and his dad on to their blanket and it was nothing but sweet harmony for the rest of the night.

Oh what a feeling, when you’re dancing on the ceiling (or grooving on the side of the stage, as was Ray Nagin to Penny Lover).