City of my soul
My girls trip collided with the annual Tennessee Williams literary festival held and so Tennessee became the theme that tied everything together – from discovering New Orleans from his eyes, to watching his inner life dramatized for better or worse – Tennessee bought a house on Dumaine that he said he wanted to die in as I say I was to die here at the LaLa. Turns out he choked on a prescription pill bottle cap in a hotel instead. And now one Dr. Lutz owns the house and some rental property nearby where Steve rented an apartment when we first separated. As always with New Orleans, the only bow you can really wrap around is the one of interconnectedness.
Tennessee arrived in New Orleans a straight laced, buttoned up, Episcopalian from St. Louis, by the end of two months he was riding towards California on the back of a motorbike in a pair of shorts and flip flops holding onto a clarinist he had met. But he had already discovered that New Orleans was the city of his soul and it was here he spent and wrote and lived most of his life – through the agony and ecstasy of a gay writer’s life in a time that was a changing.
When Marlon Brando yells for Stella in his primal rage, the passion he is channeling comes straight from Williams, who polished his voice in the streets of the Quarter.