5 YEARS, STILL NO MAILBOXES

It took me until the last night in New Orleans to finally get that post card written.  Properly stained with hot sauce and Abita beer, the image of a crayfish boil and Mardi Gras beads was stamped and ready.  Heading towards the hotel from Café du Monde, I was confounded by the lack of mailboxes in the French Quarter.  One would expect that the area with the highest concentration of tourists would have a few around for exactly this purpose.  The front desk clerk informed me, “No mailboxes since Katrina.”

What a simple thing.  What a simple gigantic thing.  My mind wandered back to those devastating days at the end of the summer of 2005.  To streams of bodies, people on rooftops, the Superdome.  The chaos, the corruption, the catastrophe.  The failure of everything from the levees, to the local authorities, to the feds.  FEMA trailers.  And here we were, in a post jazz fest haze with powdered sugar on our shorts, just like every other damned tourist. 

But were we damned?  Musicians, club owners, proprietors of all stripes thanked us for our help.  Thanked us for our money, for returning, for rebuilding, and for not letting their city die.

The Gentilly Stage

When you go to New Orleans for the Jazz & Heritage Festival, you can’t hide who are.  Shorts reveal alabaster legs.  Portable chairs and jaunty hats reveal your destination.  Open your mouth to a taxi driver or bartender and “ain’t from here” falls right out.  T-shirts from previous festivals reveal dedication.  Dedication to music, dedication to food, dedication to a place unlike any other.  Even in the hurricane (the kind you drink) soaked French Quarter, you can feel the pulse of a city with its own unique quantum signature.

Routes to and from the festival varied with the taxi drivers, some stuck to the main thoroughfares, while others took shortcuts through less redeveloped neighborhoods.  There were still plenty of houses boarded up, marked with high water rings and spray painted with X codes.  Remnants of the storm weren’t always readily visible, but they were there, even as the drunk girl  from Kansas, sitting on her mother’s lap, endlessly rambling about how this was her first time in New Orleans, tried to distract. 

But in May, the real distraction was in the Gulf of Mexico.  A city still on its knees, kicked once again by a disaster made worse by man’s inability to contain it.  During the course of a single conversation, I heard how a man weathered the storm, rebuilt his house (17 feet of water), and whose livelihood now hangs in the balance.

With my Midwest roots and New England address, I can’t for a moment pretend to know what means to be from New Orleans.  Chances are I’ll never march in an authentic second line, or take up residence in Bywater, but I could feel the pull that seduces so many into seeking its rarefied air, to imagine oneself immersed in a place so mythic, it almost doesn’t seem real.  New Orleans stays with you long after the coffee trudged home from Café du Monde has been consumed.

And as the world once again watches it recover from a disaster of biblical proportions, my faith is bolstered by a non-scientific, statistically insignificant random sampling of taxi drivers, bar patrons, and local artists who, underneath their differences, all had the same message, “this is home.” 

Allen Toussaint sings "The City of New Orleans" at JazzFest 2010. 

WHAT'S LEFT TO SAY ABOUT ELLA?

Nothing.  And yet, everything.  NPR is running an occasional series called “50 Great Voices,” and today Ms. Fitzgerald was highlighted.  (link to story below)

Just yesterday I was having lunch with two dear friends, one of whom I hadn’t seen in more than 15 years (John).  The other?  Well, the other’s been a pal for over 20.  He’s my culture guy, my music bud, my movie partner (Ron).  Many years ago, the three of us worked together at what many call the country’s flagship PBS station.  We converged at a perfect time in our lives.  I was just out of school and Ron and John had a couple of years on me, but not so many that we couldn’t relate.  Ron is a music savant.  John is a musician.  I was into typical late ‘80s alt pop, but wanted to expand my horizons.  Along come these two.  John, at the time, was also the choral conductor at nearby Church, and his knowledge of classical, jazz and show tunes far exceeded anybody in my small post college world.  And Ron, Ron never stopped listening to new music.  He was a shark.  Never wanting to become a fogey who only listened to what he listened to as a teenager, he made it his mission to stay current.  These were my teachers.

Prior to graduation, my only experience of jazz and swing came from the summer I worked at Banana Republic.  Before they became the Gap for grownups, BR billed itself as “travel & safari clothing.”  Their in-store soundtracks were a lesson in WWII and post war music history.

Yesterday’s conversation inevitably turned to music, and I, still, all these years later, felt like the rookie at the table.  We started to reminisce, and it was John who pointed out that together, we saw some of the greats - Sarah Vaughn, Betty Carter and Carmen McRae - culminating in a trip to Tanglewood to see Ella.  We thought we were lucky then.  But yesterday, over dim sum, able to unearth and share these moments all these years later, we knew it.

Listen to Susan Stamberg’s excellent profile on Ella here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125170386