Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.
\nTennessee Williams<\/p>\n
This was one of the first years since returning from California in 2005 that I did not attend the Tennessee Williams Festival. The reason – dinero no hay. I let lapse my MOMA, NOMA, Ogden, City Park, Pitot House, and everything else membership because charity begins at home when you are starting over. <\/p>\n
I was reading that Tennessee died in 1983 and frequently haunted Marti’s. Fancy that. I was in Atlanta and returned to New Orleans in 1980 and lived in the Quarter and frequently haunted Marti’s and the Chopping Block. <\/p>\n
Those days are vivid in my mind, I was with my first love, Ken McElroy, and my brother, my sister’s beau and Ken owned the Vieux Carre Motor Lodge and the Burgundy Inn. I was the front desk person during the day. We frequently hosted theater groups playing the Saenger. I weighed 118 lbs, wore my hair long, drove a brown and tan Gremlin with a V8 engine, and smoked and drank and danced my life away like there was no tomorrow. <\/p>\n
I was also a fag hag when I wasn’t with Ken and had another friend who had worked at the Playboy Club who used to sunbathe nude with me in my postage stamp back yard. <\/p>\n
Was I aware he was around the corner, at the bar next to me? Most likely not, I was in love and painted a king size sheet that I hung from the wall of the parking lot on Rampart and Barracks that said, “KEN I LOVE YOU UNCONDITIONALLY” because I was listening to Donna Summer’s Unconditional Love<\/em> one night and felt inspired. <\/p>\n The first woman who ever made a pass at me was in the Chopping Block one afternoon. The first time I knew what it felt like to be cheated on was Ken taking home a woman he had met that same afternoon on the barstool next to me. <\/p>\n I lived an entire lifetime in the four years I called that one small patch of Quarter home eating Jazz Alley burgers from the Golden Star and drinking ice cold root beer from the vending machine. A tall dark man held me up at knife point and took my purse that contained my $200 Dunhill lighter in the parking lot of the hotel. Often, I’d go home only to shower and then go to work – looking fresh as a daisy – oh youth. <\/p>\n Easily, I might have become a character in one of Tennessee’s stories. Or maybe I was. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Death is one moment, and life is so many of them. Tennessee Williams This was one of the first years since returning from California in 2005 that I did not attend the Tennessee Williams Festival. The reason – dinero no hay. I let lapse my MOMA, NOMA, Ogden, City Park, Pitot House, and everything else membership because charity begins at home when you are starting over. I was reading that Tennessee died in 1983 and… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[77,925,396],"class_list":["post-15273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-french-quarter","tag-tennessee-williams","tag-tennessee-williams-festival"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1kHSD-3Yl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15273"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15280,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15273\/revisions\/15280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}