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Ever hear the one that goes like this: Fatty and Skinny went to bed, fatty rolled over and skinny was dead? Well today we went to breakfast at Huevos and once again Tin ate four tamales, two poached eggs while I was struggling to keep up. Then I came home and was getting ready to hose down the back porch as we have company in this weekend and Joe was out in the back yard mowing the lawn. He said, “You sure have put on some weight.”

Thanks Joe.

So I paid him to hose down the porch and I went to the gym. It seems like it’s all work and no play for me these days as I can gain weight on a radish or even thinking of the image of a radish. While everyone else in the house seems to be able to shovel food down at lightning speed  with nary a pound to show.

Whatyagonnado?

On my way home from the gym I passed Joe on the Dumaine bridge and I rolled down the window still sweating from Boot Camp and said, “Hey, I lost five pounds.” He held up his fingers and said, “Two more to go.”

Thanks Joe.

There are two women who live across the bayou who are both 95 years old. Both of them walk every day. Both of them live alone. But that is where the similarity stops. One is active with the church and is constantly engaged in some church activity, bible class. I remember right after Katrina she told me the reason that we had been spared – those of us right on the bayou – is because of her, with a nod to the Virgin Mary, whose statue is in a grotto on Esplanade Avenue. She told me she went every day to give her thanks after the levees broke.

I was speaking to the other one recently because she is the one who is always filled with interesting tidbits about being born on the bayou and how it has changed over the years. It’s through my conversations with her that I see a picture of what the bayou looked like at the turn of the last century. So when I asked her if I could interview her, she laughed and said why would anyone be interested in me except for I might live to be 100. She was sporting a new aluminum cane with four legs that the bus driver for the school had given her (it wasn’t as stylish as the wooden cane she normally walked with but seemed more sturdy). She was also wearing a smock that was badly in need of washing and I thought about how the senses are what really confuse you when you’re older. She said, “My mother lived to 103, right next door.”

When I asked to interview the other, she had told me no, she was disinclined to talk to anyone as she had no use for history. She doesn’t want to even engage in small talk about history as she had just told someone from the church. “I’m not one to reminisce, I have no interest in history of any proportion,” she said.

Tin has been in the throes of Pirate-mania. Tata, our friend’s nanny in Zahara, gave him a pirate tee shirt and then we have been reading Pirates Don’t Change Diapers and suddenly it is nonstop pirate all the time around here. Below is Tin carrying around the now crumbled photograph of Tata who showed him how to baile flamenco – oh pa! and gave him galletas Maria to eat while we were in Spain. He has not let go of that photograph and he LOVES his pirate shirt.

We went to see The Kids Are All Right last night because T wanted to see it. I was watching it again from a sort of character point of view. I initially went to see the movie by myself and thought, wow this couple is Tatjana and me – I’m the Annette Bening character and Tatjana is the character Julianne Moore plays. But later a friend said she had seen the movie and loved it but she and her husband were convinced it was the opposite that I am the Julianne Moore character – causing me to suddenly wonder who the hell I am?

I have to say seeing the movie a second time was just as enjoyable as the first time. We saw it at the new Canal Place Theater, which has leather club chairs and little table tops almost like you are in a dinner theater. We were able to order food and drinks, we opted for a gin and tonic and truffled popcorn as we were headed to eat afterwards. It was just perfect. We then went over to Three Muses and walked in as an interesting band was playing – one guy on guitar singing and another on this drum concoction – they were singing those types of songs that reminded me of early folk – sort of that “Give me that old time religion” type lyric, which afterwards I learned most of their lyrics were original. It was all good fun.

Then we walked around Frenchman Street – on the corner a band gathered from nowhere it seemed – young boys playing big brass and making some good down home funky music. They drew a crowd who stopped to tap their feet and an elderly gentleman appeared from nowhere carrying a golf club and began to dance and direct traffic on the corner.

Early in the day I had seen a bumper sticker on a truck that said I AM NEW ORLEANS and as we milled around the crowds, we peeped into the DBA and the woman said you should go in this guy is an icon for  us here in New Orleans. I said, “I’m from New Orleans and I’ve never heard of him” and we kept walking, reading the line up at Snug for this month, then crossing over to the Spotted Cat, and finally we meandered back to the brass band on the corner.

Tell you the truth you can’t find a night like this just anywhere, New Orleans is evocative even when it is keeping it real, and well maybe there is no type of who I am, but maybe I might be happy just thinking of myself as New Orleans. Yeah, you right.

I’ve always been perplexed by people who take copious photographs of their cat and then want to show them. It’s so queer. And sure enough, here I find myself taking photographs of Blekica and wanting to share them.

And speaking of queer, on my way home from yoga, I saw two mobile homes pull off of the I-10 exit by the Quarter, with very attractive men in front – the gays are coming, the gays are coming (hide your tacky clothes).

Southern Decadence kicked off today with lots of activities around the French Quarter and beyond planned culminating in a parade on Sunday. This is the time of year when the city is flooded with beautiful young men. The history of Southern Decadence goes back to 1978 and while it is more known among the young gay men, truly it is like any other festival here in New Orleans where people wear costumes, pour out into the streets, listen to music and have a good time:

Since it was founded in 1781, New Orleans has marched to the beat of its own drum.  For two centuries, those in control of the Louisiana state government have tried in vain to impose their prejudices on a city that is French, Spanish, Creole, African, Catholic, pagan and very gay (in both senses of the word).  If nothing else, New Orleans knows how to throw a party, from the world-famous Mardi Gras to other, more specialized celebrations.

One of these celebrations began quite inauspiciously in August of 1972, by a group of friends living in a ramshackle cottage house at 2110 Barracks Street in the Treme section of New Orleans, just outside of the French Quarter. It was in desperate need of repair, and the rent was $100 per month.  At any given time the residents numbered anywhere from six to ten, and it was still sometimes difficult to come up with the rent.

The large bathroom became a natural gathering place in the house.  It had no shower, only a clawfoot tub, but it also had a sofa.  With from six to ten residents, and one bathtub, everyone became close friends.  While one soaked in the tub, another would recline on the couch and read A Streetcar Named Desire aloud. The Tennessee Williams play inspired the residents to fondly name the house “Belle Reve”?in honor of Blanche DuBois’ Mississippi plantation.

And so it was, on a sultry August afternoon in 1972, that this band of friends decided to plan an amusement.  According to author James T. Spears, writing in Rebels, Rubyfruit and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South, this “motley crew of outcasts” began Southern Decadence as a going away party for a friend named Michael Evers, and to shut up a new “Belle Reve” tenant (from New York) who kept complaining about the New Orleans heat.  As a riff on the “Belle Reve” theme, the group named the event a “Southern Decadence Party: Come As Your Favorite Southern Decadent,” requiring all participants to dress in costume as their favorite “decadent Southern” character.    According to Spears, “The party began late that Sunday afternoon, with the expectation that the next day (Labor Day) would allow for recovery. Forty or fifty people drank, smoked, and carried on near the big fig tree … even though Maureen (the New Yorker) still complained about the heat.” [You can read the rest on their website - http://www.southerndecadence.net/history.htm]

I was on my way to yoga and WWOZ’s DJ was about to play When The Saints Come Marching In and he said, “I’m gonna just sit here and keep playing music otherwise we’d all just be depressed.

Breaking news from the NYT:

Coast Guard Says Oil Rig Exploded in Gulf of Mexico, A.P. Reports

An offshore oil rig exploded on Thursday in the Gulf of Mexico, west of the site of the April blast that caused the massive oil spill, the Coast Guard told the Associated Press.

Coast Guard Petty Officer Casey Ranel said that the blast was reported by a commercial helicopter company on Thursday morning. Seven helicopters, two airplanes and four boats are en route to the site, about 80 miles south of Vermilion Bay along the central Louisiana coast.

A friend was telling me the other day that she went to work for her company because on a fluke she saw a sign on their headquarters that said they had won the Malcolm Baldridge National Award – she said, “I’m a goober who just thinks quality is so important particularly when running an organization.”

I was thinking about loving your job and being excited about the possibilities of future growth within an organization. That notion is starting to seem like an anachronism as I speak to people I have known for more than a decade about their working environment and their disillusionment.

I think we are in a malaise much in the way Jimmy Carter called it back in the late 70s – and recently I saw our economics compared to the 70s – a friend today said that chance favors those in motion, but I wanted to correct her and say motion is not what is rewarded, because the tap dancing manager is in motion, chance favors the prepared, but like most things in life these days even an age old adage begs the question: “how does one prepare for an uncertain future?” Chance?

I went to the park with Loca and Heidi this morning and my head was booming from this allergy or cold or whatever that I caught yesterday and can’t seem to shake. I ran into a fellow dog walker and she said to me that she had just found out yesterday she has been furloughed from her job (read: laid off). We walked together and talked and she told me that she would okay, she’s nearing retirement and had a little money from her mother’s inheritance. She asked how my mom was doing because we haven’t really spoken since late last year, only passing each other in the park recently. I said she died at the end of November and that I can’t even talk about it because I’ve been riding a new wave of grief as I’ve been dealing with her grave.

She said her mother had passed years ago and she still cries. “Both of my parents are gone. When my dad died it was hard, but my mother, well, I still can’t get over it. As a matter of fact,” she said as we were passing a monument marker in the park, “I still cry over MK (her dog). She used to always pee right there by that marker. And I swear the first year anniversary of her death I came to the park that morning and a little yellow flower was blooming in the very spot.”

Grief is a funny thing – there is no prescribed time to say “done, grief’s over” and sometimes you just have to surf the blue waves as they come knowing that life does go on, and time does help, and that flowers bloom in nitrogen heavy soil.