Living Like A Local in New Orleans – Road Trip 2016

We were winding down my send-off by friends with our New Orleans girls trip. Sunday was going to be a lazy day with no schedules. Rindy and I got rolling about noon and walked over to Maison on Frenchmen Street for a Jazz Brunch. On the way over, we stopped to listen to a man practicing his bagpipes in Washington Square. It have been threatening to pour all morning with dark skies, rolling thunder and a lightning show but surprisingly little rain. We took our chances, unwilling to give up any more of the day to the chance of showers. The bagpipe’s melancholy sounds complemented the coming storm and we stopped to listen for awhile. Then hunger drove us on.

 

Rindy found a a flyer for the jazz brunch at Maison in the info packet left for us at our house. She’d been looking forward to a cajun breakfast. We got to Maison in time for food but too late for the featured band. Instead we got the Slick Skillet Seranaders, a bango/kazoo player who sang lead with another guy on a bass fiddle and a third alternating between at mandolin and a steel guitar. They specialized in jazz and swing from the 1930’s. From Braveheart to Rudy Vallee in under three blocks.

Back to the quarter for a little shopping and sane people watching. The night before, we’d had to cross Bourbon Street to get our uber ride because a Weed Wagon handing out freebies had blocked traffic and the drunks were swàrming. Our uber guy told us that the Weed Wagon usually sets up after midnight because the police have too much on their hands at that time to chase them off. On a Sunday afternoon, Decatur and Jackson Square were colorful instead of nauseating.

 

Creole Tomato Festival was going on. We been told the NOLA has a different festival every weekend. The weekend before had been a Bugaloo event. As a joke, we asked a shopkeeper when to come for the pothole party since rough roads were everywhere. She said, “Don’t laugh. Last spring, a sinkhole opened up close to Harrah’s. In May, someone organized a Sink-Hole de Mayo Festival and people wore orange traffic cones strapped to their heads.”

 

That night, we went back to Frenchmen Street one more time to pick up a caricature one of our group had commissioned from an artist at the Frenchmen Street Night Market. Maison beckoned us in to hear a little more music. It is easy to see how quickly you would form a community here away from the tourist crush. We shut it down early. Rindy and Judy would catch noon-time planes back to Houston and Austin. I wanted to be on the road to Alabama and Lookout Mountain by 8:30 on Monday morning.

 

 

 

We are getting to know our temporary neighborhood. The  Marigny is immediately downriver from the French Quarter but I still feel turned around and keep walking in the wrong direction. This area was once a creole plantation whose owner made “craps” (the dice game) popular. He was enormously wealthy and stylish. After the property was subdivided in 1806, it retained his mark by developing a distinctly European and cosmopolitan mix. We are staying close to Royal Street with a good mix of homes, restaurants, clubs and food stores. When we walked home around midnight last night, the area was quiet but active, much different from our experiences staying in the quarter or across Canal Street. This morning, Rindy walked a few blocks over to a 24/7 food store/deli and brought back all kinds of goodies for brunch – salami, cheeses, egg salad, pickles, fruit. People were walking dogs and babies, visiting with neighbors. Ubering home this afternoon, we passed an extended family holding a crawfish boil that extended on the sidewalk in front of approximately four homes. We haven’t seen a front or backyard on our walks so an inflatable water slide to keep the kids’ cool was in the parking area of a nearby warehouse.

 

Since we seeking to experience a new side of New Orleans, we decided to spend some time on Magazine Street instead of Jackson Square. Magazine Street has been finding its way over the last decade but it has arrived. Boutiques, specialty shops and antique emporiums crowded next to gas stations and foodstores with burglar bars on the doors. This isn’t Disneyland or Fredericksburg and there is graffiti visible every few blocks but the shopfronts and parks reflect how many years New Orleans has been around.

 

Since mid-morning, we’ve had heavy showers alternating with steam heat. Because of the schizophrenic weather, we took an Uber from the Marigny. LaToya, a brand new uber driver picked us up. We were her first fare even though she had been signed up with the service for months.

 

She dropped us in front of a hat store that specialized in matching your face shape and size with the right hat. We got a first-hand demonstration of the way the right hat makes the man or woman and finishes a look. It makes me wonder what happened that hats went away after the 60’s. Maybe hats did not accessorize well with granny dresses, love beads and Nehru jackets.

 

After Juan’s we did more shopping and were much more open to spending money which made the shop owners happy. A few blocks further down Magazine Street we stopped for wine at the Tasting Room and watched as a wedding party forming in the park across the street. Knowing how stressful a wedding can be, I have a theory that the more elaborate the wedding, the lower the chances that the marriage will last. This one looked awfully complicated so I do wish them luck.

 

We ubered back to the Marigny and our converted lodgings. Every uber driver has been a delight. This guy had just finished his pharmacy degree and wanted to know where we would suggest he move – Austin or Houston. All the hipsters we met on Magazine wanted to talk to Judy about Austin but this guy was immune to its lifestyle charms so Rindy and I pitched him on Houston’s medical opportunities. Score one for H-town. He was creole in every sense of the word, which we understood now that we had the education at the Laura plantation. He claimed European, Native American, and a little African in his bloodline. Our waiter at the wine room had just gotten here from Torino, Italy but looked like Bruce Springsteen until he opened his mouth. Our uber driver looked Italian until he spoke and had that distinctive NOLA accent that approximates the boss’s patois. Go figure.

 

Last night, we finally headed to the French Quarter for dinner at Tujaque’s, a restaurant since 1859. Rindy had eaten here some years ago so when we walked into a brightly lit, airy dining room, it didn’t match her memory. The waiter had been there since 1981 and said when the old owner died, the son took over and made everything white wood, taupe and mirrors. I wish we’d been there when it was dimly lit and dark paneled with drawings of the different stars and dignitaries who had eaten there through the years. The food was unchanged though. We shared a fried oyster wedge salad, gumbo, fried green tomato, shrimp remoulade and puppy drum.

 

On leaving Tujaque’s we stepped past the tourist who had fallen and couldn’t get up on the sidewalk. Both she and her companion where drunk but at least he was still standing and yelling, “Get up, Marie! Just get up!” The quarter at night was quickly loosing appeal.

 

We walked on to the Napoleon House on St. Louis where we got our dessert, brandy milk punches, but the crush was getting tiresome. The bartender told us that B Mac further down St. Louis was where the service people went to unwind. It was at B Mac’s we found a community.

 

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We met people who lived and worked in the quarter including love sick T who kept casting eyes at his former lover and Otis the dog and his person. Otis was a overweight, brown, houndy-type, as mixed up as the creoles with chow, beagle and whatever else. His person said she got Otis after she divorced and husband got custody of their shared dogs because he had the yard. It was lonely living by herself and the people at her restaurant job told her about a dog that was hanging around. At first she opened her house but not her heart to Otis. He seemed to feel the same. “For the first two weeks, we didn’t like each other,” she said. “I’d be walking down the quarter with Otis, and people would call out, ‘do you two like each other yet?’ Finally we both decided we’d do for each other. There was still a little reserve going on between them but Otis was certainly loved by the off duty waiters and bartenders who made B Mac their second home. Otis would bark a greeting as different ones came in and he’d get a good scratch in return.

 

 

 

 

Judy had put together an eclectic playlist for us with Joe Ely, Morphine, Brooks and Dunn, NXCESS, Bruce the boss, The Gourds. As a music moron, I’m lucky to have friends who curate great playlist for me. It’s not what you know, but who you know.

 

We exited I-10 just east of Lafayette and took LA-31 to St. Martinsville and New Iberia. St. Martinsville was considered the heart and birthplace of cajun culture. It was where the first Acadians from Nova Scotia landed after France was defeated in by the British in the Seven Years War. Later it was where New Orleans creoles escaped when epidemics threatened the Crescent City. St. Martinsville became known as a cultural mecca,  a “Petit Paris”.  It is the third oldest city in Louisiana and I’m so glad Rindy directed me off the road at this exit.

 

From LA-31, we took Highway 90 east to avoid Baton Rouge and I-10 and check out the creole plantation, called the Laura. I’d read Laura Locoul Gore’s memoirs based on a friend’s love of the Laura Plantation. Having visited other plantations and seen “Gone with the Wind”, we expected the Laura to be a sumptuous home. This was a working plantation where the family lived and worked from April through December for the planting and harvest. Their bedrooms doubled as offices and up to ten people (with house slaves) slept in the small bed chambers. From December through March, they had a well- appointed home in New Orleans and celebrated Christmas, New Years and Mardi Gras in style. That is where the family flaunted their great wealth. Laura’s father, Emile Locoul, was a new breed of man who was questioning the humanity of keeping slaves which alarmed his mother, Elizabeth and caused her to plot with his sister Aimee. If he didn’t have an heir, according to creole law, Elizabeth and Aimee could sell the plantation and move to France, away from the never-ending work of a sugar mill farmer. Laura’s birth foiled their plans and felt their fury from the time she was young. She eventually sold the plantation and moved to St. Louis, marrying a Presbyterian, a cardinal sin for Catholic creoles. Ultimately, Laura lived almost 102 years. She was born when Lincoln was president and died when Kennedy held