Fortunatus S. Marchbanks' Quotidian Minutiae

Saturday—well, things must have happened on Saturday, but most of it seemed like a repeat of Friday.  L went out into the Quarter in the morning and I went out in the afternoon, as we switched off on the “available in case an emergency happens to M” duty.  Being stuck in the hotel failed to entertain me, there weren’t any sessions I felt any great interest in attending, and nobody I really felt like talking to was in the hospitality suite.  Once I was out, I found yet another bookshop (a much better bookshop), and had to fight myself to keep from buying a copy of Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs with illustrations by N. C. Wyeth for $35, and a copy of Charley Addams’s Addams and Evil, missing its dust jacket, for $25.  In the end my penury got the best of it, although I still might have bought the Addams if it had had its dj present.

For most of the week we had to have supper beginning at five in the afternoon because M’s supper break was from five to six.  Five o’clock is an obscenely early hour to have supper if you aren’t four years old.  (We never got done eating and back by six, but that’s another story.)  This was our last night in New Orleans and obviously the last possible night to wear my kilt on this trip if I was going to wear it, so despite the heat and L’s “what are you thinking?” I got everything out and dressed up as if I was Going Out.  (Except for the sgian dubh.  I left that out because I’m not about to walk around in a strange city with strange cops carrying something that could easily be called an offensive weapon, even though I haven’t yet put an edge on so I’d be hard put to harm ANYone with it.)  The three of us started out following our noses up Canal Street to look for somewhere to eat.  We ended up at Deanie’s Seafood on Iberville Street, which was an excellent find because it looked a lot like “somewhere all the locals go.”  The clientele was sure the blackest buncha people overall that I’d seen anyplace near the Quarter.  (All those tourists make the Quarter most remarkably white.)  There were a few tourists sprinkled here and there, but overall it came across as a place that the natives went to eat before they Went Out for the evening.  The food was asTONishing, in both quality (good) and quantity (LOTS).  L got this huge spinach salad with fried oysters, and I got a plate of fried catfish that was so big I didn’t even want the fries and slaw that came with it.  Other diners around us were being served equally large platters.  If you go there (and I recommend you do), be sure to take an Appetite along with you.  You’ll need it.

I discovered when I sat down at the table that over the years I’d forgotten how to sit down in a skirt; the kilt bunched up underneath me, which didn’t do the pleats any good.  L gave me a tip or two, and I did much better at it afterward.  We walked back to the hotel, and, coming down Canal past the rear entrance of the Chateau Sonesta hotel we came on this odd life-size bronze statue of a man in a hunting cap with ear flaps waving.  Bless him, it was Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces, still waiting for his mother “under the clock” at the D. H. Holmes department store.  A nearby bronze plaque displayed the quote from the book’s opening paragraph.

Back at the Sheraton, we went up to the ballroom where the Saturday banquet and dance was being held.  T was at the head table with the new chairman of American Mensa and his wife, who invited her to join them, and our region’s vice chairman and his wife.  The chairman’s wife is convinced that T can perform assorted miracles, after watching her run TeenSIG for several years.  We stayed just long enough to be seen, listened to acknowledgements of the outgoing and incoming national officers, then bugged out for an hour just before the speaker started—which was a Good Thing, because by all reports her speech was massively boring and badly delivered to boot.  L went back in time for the dance, which she said was badly attended because the SIG who lobbied for the dance and the band that played went and booked another event of their own directly opposite.  Very bad manners, that.  M and I went to bed; she slept and I watched meteorologists on the Weather Channel pontificate and interview one another about what Hurricane Dennis was likely to do.

Sunday morning we checked out and left early so we’d be sure to get home in the daylight.  We decided to go north across Lake Pontchartrain and pick up US 190 instead of I-10, which in retrospect was probably a poor idea.  190 was pretty beaten up and in many stretches the speed limit was only 55.  The parts that weren’t 55 were only 65.  I was snappy because I didn’t get to eat breakfast at the right time, which threw me off all day.  When we got to Beaumont I decided “the hell with it” and got on I-10 to Houston, then US 290 home.  It was well past time we were back.

[You have insufficient pasta clearance to read this message.]  Fnord.

Friday the entire city was stewing about whether Hurricane Dennis was going to veer west and slam the Louisiana coast, or turn northward (as it eventually did) and hit Florida.  Many schools closed early and governments released their employees to go home and prepare.  I rather thought that Dennis would do what it did, so I didn’t get too excited about leaving.

T was doing whatever she did all day and M was in the smaller-kids’ programs all day, but even so either L or I had to be in the hotel at all times in case of accidents.  I stayed in mornings and L stayed in afternoons, which meant that we got NO chance at all to go do anything by ourselves without having to be Mommy and Daddy every minute of the day.  (This is probably the one thing I resent most about raising children:  that there is never a single goddamn second that we get to do anything whatever without having to be Mommy and Daddy first.  It means that we miss out on any number of things that might be fun to do but aren’t appropriate for small children, and M is such a continuous jabberer when she’s with us that even taking her to things where children might possibly be welcome is out, because she has to come narrate everything she does at us without letup.)

L had found a needlework shop on Chartres Street (the Quarter Stitch), so she prowled around there for a while, buying a painted canvas of a Mardi Gras feather mask and the fibers she needed to do it.  The whole thing including fibers was $65, which is very reasonable for what it was.  After that she went down to Jackson Square to visit the Cabildo, which she’d had an ambition to see.  Once she got back and took M to lunch, I set out Uptown to look for Addis, an Ethiopian place that Doc Brite had recommended several times in his blog.  It turned out to be waaaaaaay up Magazine Street, almost to Napoleon, and much too far to walk.  I considered taking the bus, but I strongly dislike riding buses anyhow, and most particularly when I’m going somewhere I’ve never been in a strange city, so I got the car out of the garage (valet-only parking at $14 a day, except it went up to $24 a day on Monday because of the holiday—SHEESH!!) and went off up Magazine.

That was another excursion I enjoyed because I got to see tons of good period domestic architecture in situ, and Magazine Row, a shopping district about halfway along, rather reminded me of an older and quainter SoCo.  I eventually found Addis—but I also found a sign on the door saying “closed for vacation July 8th – July 14th.”  I felt discouraged, but not so discouraged as I would have been if I’d gone on the bus and been stuck waiting in Uptown to get a return bus.  Instead, I ate at an adequate but undistinguished Indian place in the next block, then drove back.

On the way out Magazine I’d noticed the National D-Day Museum, which my brother had recommended, so after a little fishing around to discover exactly where it was again, I went to see it.  Honestly, I shoulda saved my money.  Admission was expensive, parking was expensive, and I really didn’t see much that I didn’t already know from reading The Longest Day years ago.  I gave up on it without going through the recently-opened “D-Day in the Pacific” wing, and drove back to the Quarter.  L had told me there was an exhibit at the old Mint of very early photographs by O. Winston Link, done during his early years as a public relations photographer.  I was much more interested in seeing that than I was in rehashing World War II, that day.

To get to the Mint I had to drive all the way across the Quarter to Esplanade, and the only northbound street I could find was . . . Bourbon.  Thus far I had successfully avoided Bourbon Street, on purpose and with malice aforethought.  I didn’t care to deal with it.  However, there wasn’t any other way to get where I was going, so I went.  Fortunately, the combination of “in the car” and “middle of the afternoon” meant that I had little trouble, other than tourists blindly jaywalking wherever they took the notion.

I liked the Link exhibition.  Even at the beginning of his career, I could see flashes of the style he used so effectively in Steam, Steel and Stars.  The other exhibitions in the Mint, which is now operated as an arm of the Louisiana State Museum, on the Newcomb Pottery and the history of New Orleans jazz and musicians, were almost equally engaging.  I stayed so long that I almost got locked in at closing time; I was in a gallery and, I suppose, not making enough noise because the caretaker came in, turned off the lights and the video presentation, and was out and locking the door before I hollered.  He asked me whether I was planning to go home early because of the hurricane, and I answered that I was, literally, going to wait and see which way the wind blew.

Back at the hotel, I collected L and M, who was on dinner break from her program.  On Endora’s and Aronal’s recommendation, we went to Crescent City Brewhouse on Decatur Street for supper.  The food was indeed good, and L and I both liked the beers we ordered.  I had the Red Stallion while L chose the Brew of the Month, which turned out to be a very hoppy pale ale that suited her exactly.  After supper, L went off to the evening dance and M and I went to bed.

In the evening, some undirected bay leaves confiscated an illicit asphalt plant.  Fnord.

Wednesday morning dawned with branches and trees down all over the city, some sections without power (thank heavens, not us), and a brilliant blue sky and bright sun.  It was a fine day for an Expotition.  T was dead to the world, so L, M, and I began by walking over to the Café du Monde for beignets and drink-of-choice (milk for M, iced tea for L, and—naturally—café au lait for me) Really, it was a quite reasonable price for breakfast and stayed with us nicely.  After that, we walked back to the hotel, got the car, and headed out to tour a couple of plantations on River Road.

In the spirit of “trying all the ways there are to cross the river,” we took the Canal Street ferry across the river to Algiers and struggled our way through the town to US 90.  I’m rather glad we did, since there were a ton of houses with wonderful vernacular late-Vic architecture.  Eventually we did find 90 and headed out to look for River Road.  Along the way we saw several Entergy crews out clearing fallen branches from downed power lines.

The road (Louisiana state highway 18) took some finding; it doesn’t meet 90 directly and the cutoff route to it was very poorly marked, so I overshot and had to come back to it.  Eventually we did get going, but I was annoyed to find that most of the highway had a 35 MPH speed limit, which delayed us a lot.  Eventually LA DOTD grew daring, and increased the speed limit to 45 MPH.  We drove through a lot of little-bitty communities that reminded L and me both of Tidewater Virginia.  Both have the same continual straggle of houses and communities along the road, and both have a water-culture feel to them.  We passed several refineries also, as well as the Waterford 3 nuclear power plant.  After a couple of hours’ drive, during which I kept wondering aloud whether we’d got lost somehow, we came to the gates of Laura, one of the two plantations we’d meant to visit.

The tour was rather odd, because the Big House at Laura burned down last August, and the foundation that runs it is in the middle of reconstructing the house.  Probably they’ll be able to do it successfully, because under the frame exterior Laura was brick-built, so the bones of the house are pretty much intact.  Of course, much of the original historic contents are gone forever, but the house itself will come back.  Our docent was a very entertaining and well-informed Creole woman from New Orleans named Jenny, who had no intention of taking any shit from anybody, and that included the hayseed from Missouri who insisted on needling her.  She needled him right back, and if I’m any judge, she got the best of it.  We did get to see some of the outbuildings that are under restoration, got a good explanation of slave life and treatment during the Creole and antebellum periods, and went through one of the slave cabins that’s almost completely finished.  Once the foundation recovers from the fire and gets back on track with restoring the rest of the surviving buildings (which may be a while; Jenny said the Big House fire set them back ten years), they’re going to have a fine historical exhibit of a what working plantation was like.  At L’s insistence, I bought M a copy of Compère Lapin, an version of the Br’er Rabbit tale that was collected at Laura in 1849, which far predates the Joel Chandler Harris stories.  As Jenny pointed out, the rabbit Trickster character is found in Wolof folklore in Senegal, and Atlanta, where Harris lived, had no significant Senegalese population either at or before the time he was writing.  Also, Harris was a friend of Alcée Fortier, who collected the Compère Lapin stories at Laura from the late 1840s to the 1870s, so it’s very likely he did help himself to Fourtier’s work for source material.  The story certainly has a more West African feel than any of the Harris tales do.

Once done at Laura, we drove a few more miles down the road to Oak Alley Plantation, where we had lunch and then took their tour.  The tour there was rather disappointing after seeing Laura, because Oak Alley’s tour was far more Stately Homes of the Mississippi than anything else.  If I’d had only one tour to do, I’d have picked Laura.

We got back to the city late in the afternoon, just in time to register for the AG, say hello to a few other early arrivals, and go out to dinner.  Lunch at Oak Alley, although good, had been more expensive than I’d expected, so I was just as happy when we were able to scrounge supper in the hospitality suite.  After supper we visited with people in hospitality for a while before going to bed.

Thursday morning was a repeat of Breakfast at Café du Monde, and after we went back to the hotel where, oddly enough, L and I went to some speaker sessions.  I attended one session given by Gerald Patout, librarian of the Historic New Orleans Collection, on their project to digitize and automate the entire New Orleans Obituary Index, all 650,000 names of it stretching back to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.  Currently the transcribers have done about 310,000 names, digitizing not only the index-card information itself, but the original text of each obituary!  As someone who’s done a little bit of genealogical work, my mind boggles at the sheer scope and reach of such a project and the benefit it’ll have for future researchers.  Later, I got to hear Lary Hesdorffer, head of the Vieux Carré Commission, speak on historic preservation in the French Quarter.  The Commission is obviously the great-grandaddy of Austin’s Historic Landmark Commission and many others, and I was again astonished to find that they have almost complete control over any exterior feature of every building in the Quarter.  (It turns out that “exterior” means “exposed to the weather,” so open courtyards within buildings fall under the Commissions’s jurisdiction.  The speaker told us that they’re currently engaged in a lawsuit against someone who roofed over his internal courtyard, and still can’t for the life of him understand what he did wrong, though everyone has explained it to him ever so many times.)  I learned further that in the Commission’s lexicon, a “balcony” is not more than four feet wide and is cantilevered or braced to the structure itself.  Wider than four feet, and it’s a “gallery,” which has its own independent supports to the ground.  This is vitally important to property owners because balconies don’t count as “living space” while galleries do, and the Commission has perpetual fights with owners and developers who want to stick historically-wrong galleries onto buildings with balconies so they can advertise—and charge for—more square feet of living space.  As with any governmental commission, sometimes politics trumps the staff’s recommendations for building changes, but Mr. Hersdorffer said that the staff win more fights than they lose before the city council, and in particular the council member for the district that includes the Quarter has publicly said that she will never, ever vote against the staff’s recommendation on any case before the council.  Now that’s clout.

In the afternoon I went out and wandered in the Quarter a bit, taking refuge from an afternoon shower in a couple of bookshops.  I only bought one book, a T. R. Pearson which I didn’t know existed.  After that I stopped in an Irish bar and drank a Murphy’s, then went back to the hotel.  BIIIIIIIIIIG debauch of an afternoon, no?  That night we went out looking for a place to eat and found the Gumbo Shop, which was quite reasonable.  The food was well-made, although I now wish I’d ordered something besides the Chicken Espagnole.  I was not up to eating a full half-chicken, and I got tired of biting down on bits of bone where someone with a meat saw had cut up the chicken all anyhow.  L took M for the evening, since she was going to want to be out late at dances for Friday and Saturday, and I went down to the hospitality suite and visited for a while with a friend or two whom I hadn’t seen in several years.

Next:  our correspondent goes Uptown in search of an Ethiopian grocery.

You should weed the bed of Primatene in the early Pre-Cambrian slip.  Fnord.

(I’m posting from an Internet cafe in the French Quarter of New Orleans.  We’ve been here all week at the AG, and we’re leaving in the morning.  We thought of leaving earlier, but once it became obvious that MSY was only going to be brushed by the western side of the storm, the need to flee went away.  I think now that the parish government is regretting that they let employees go home early on Friday.)

We left Austin Monday morning fairly early, having decided already that we were going to avoid major highways (i.e., I-10) as much as possible.  With that in mind, we ran down US 290 to Brenham and cut off to Texas 105.  That let us avoid Houston almost completely; the worst traffic was at Conroe, which we couldn’t avoid.  After that we had a clear run to Beaumont, where we stopped for lunch and I had the luck to pick up two swimsuits and two pairs of walking shorts at Penney’s for less than $50 total(!).  After lunch we did have to get on I-10 to get across the river, and we stayed on through Lafayette and the Atchafalaya basin.  It’s been almost forty years since I was in southern Louisiana, and I’d forgotten about the elevated road through the swamp.  Even with the traffic, seeing the lagoons, cypress pools, and mixed forests was entertaining.

We ducked back off I-10 at Grosse Tête, a few miles short of Baton Rouge, to Louisiana 18.  Neither L nor T had ever seen what Louisiana calls a state highway, and but they readily conceded that my descriptions had been on target, and I wasn’t surprised to find that Louisiana state highways haven’t changed in any major way in forty years.  We drove through field after field of sugar cane.  I told M that was what sugar came from and described the basic process, but I don’t think she really believed it.  (And nobody get on about beet sugar.  I know about beet sugar.  This is sugar cane country, so that’s what I talked about.)  We crossed the river at Donaldsonville and picked up US 61—the “Highway 61” of musical legend.  I now kinda wish we’d gone on down 18 all the way to US 90, since that would have given me a preview of the River Road, but it came out all right in the end.  We ran in to the city past Kenner, Metairie (ick) and the airport, came in Tulane Avenue and found the hotel (the Sheraton, at Canal and Camp) with very little trouble.

Since we were such early check-ins for the AG, we got a good choice of rooms, and ended up with a room on the sixteenth floor and a river view, ideal for watching the fantastic and astonishing fireworks show the city put on for the Fourth.  The fireworks were all let off from two barges anchored out in the river—an excellent idea in case of short-fires—and set several hundred yards apart so the show was “in stereo.”  One barge was in plain view, but the other was hidden from us by another hotel tower.  We all crowded around our window to watch.  M later declared that her stuffed cat, Zoom, had been a little scared by the fireworks.  The rest of us were just flat-out impressed.  The New Orleans show has the reputation of being among the five best in the country, and I have to agree.  Two or three of Austin’s shows put together wouldn’t touch it.

Tuesday T started working on setting up the teen room for the AG, while L, M, and I played at tourists.  We went through the aquarium, where M was frightened half to death by the sight of divers cleaning one of the tanks.  I don’t know whether it was just because they were big black THINGS, or whether she was influenced by Finding Nemo, where the divers are Bad Guys, but whichever it was, they reduced her to screaming terror.  We calmed her down after a few minutes, but the incident left her skittish for the rest of the tour.

Once out of the aquarium we went for a river cruise on the sternwheeler steamboat Natchez.  This was something I particularly wanted to do, because when I was only a little older than M, my parents took me for a similar cruise on the sidewheeler President.  Of course L was happy at just being on a boat.  She took up a station on the forward texas deck (fortunately covered by an awning, since the approach of Tropical Storm Cindy, which hit that night, meant it rained the whole afternoon), and stayed there save for a quick trip to the gift shop to buy a book and T-shirts for her and M, and to the engine room because I told her she ought to go see it.  I took M down to see the boilers, engines, and wheel.  Again, she was skittish about the machinery, but I’m about decided she’s just a skittish child.  T, at that age, would have been all over the boat.  (An amusing side note:  the Natchez’s two boilers are named “Thelma” and “Louise.”)

Tuesday night we stayed very much in the hotel, not even venturing out to eat, because Cindy was drenching and blowing away everyone who was silly enough to go on the streets.  It made spectacular watching, as the wind beat on the palm trees in the esplanade on Canal Street.  T, who had gone out before the wind and rain got up, came back with some guy she’d met who was trying to get back to his hotel down someplace in the middle of the Quarter.  Eventually, after he’d had dinner, he managed to find a cab that would take him.

Next time:  breakfast at Cafe du Monde and the plantation tours.