Tour Guide

Po Boy Views

By

Phil LaMancusa

The Tour Guide

Or

Herding Cats

            I’m into my third year as a tour guide, I lead New Orleans tours. I can’t sing, I aint pretty and my legs are thin; but folks laugh at my jokes and listen to my information, I know my stuff and have a great sense of humor. I have a license, carry a sign, wear an orange shirt; I work for a company named Destination Kitchen/MustDoNola, owned and operated by Julie Barreda-Cavigne, a chef and seasoning alchemist who is top drawer. We're rated number one by TripAdvisor. Monthly I text Wanda my available working dates and at month’s end after emailing hours worked to Rachel, money magically appears in my mail box. Winner winner chicken dinner.  

There are half a dozen of us guides and we do everything including food, history, cocktail, walking, Garden district and custom tours from two to two hundred people. Tours can be tailored or we have a pre-structured jaunts about town that cannot be beat. Tours range from two hours and up. The culinary tour is three hours and a walk of about two miles around the French Quarter with stops for eating, hydrating and rest facility stops for folks that need to facilitate their bodily functions, this is my forte (the tour not the bodily functions).

It’s kind of like doing a stand up performance that includes wit, history, education, facts and idiosyncrasies. This being New Orleans 300^th year in existence, guides have been quite active on the street. People are interested in learning more about our city and my tour-guiding has turned into active employment.

Each trip out I am given a number of people to lead, and I never know who my people are until I see them; they are of all ages from across the spectrum of the world’s societies--folks like you and me. I arrive fifteen minutes before the departure time and collect my flock. We meet at various places around the Quarter and I start by introducing myself as I size up my audience. I get all kinds; kids that give more attention to their electronic devices than to some old guy in an orange shirt; couples engaged in PDA (public displays of affection) ditto; students, older folks, women in tight clothing and men with powerful hangovers. There are also the eleven types of dietary restricted folks that we’re happy to accommodate: and just when you think that you’ve heard every aversion, someone will surprise you with yet ‘sensitivity’ (Mercury?).

I warn them of treacherous walking conditions, explaining the alluvial soil that we’ll be traversing, ready to trip the unaware stroller. Watching someone trip and fall in the street is one of the scariest things that any tour guide can experience, losing people is another. Usually people are interesting and interested; the shy, the gregarious; BFFs, fast walkers, slow eaters, weak bladders or those most interested in another cocktail. We accommodate them all. I have a set schedule of places I need to be and when I need to be there, but by in large—hard as I might try--it rarely works out with precision. Occasionally there will be an overly impatient person, a couple who would rather talk to each other than listen to me, and/or the husband that can care less because it was his wife that made the reservation and he’s just along for the ride. There is also that person that wants to make sure that they get their monies worth, the one who wants to eat right away because they didn’t stop for breakfast; also guys who need to sneak a smoke or those lingering for selfies or photo ops. These are my children and I love each and every one of them. “Are we there yet?”

            Our purveyors, the food and drink outlets where we stop are gems of perfection and patience, we are blessed with being able to show off the best of our local foods and locations and my tourists always leave the tour knowing more about the city than can be gleaned from just a map.

I start by telling my group my name (and getting theirs) where I come from (and where they are visiting from) and explain my credentials and a word about our company and about Julie. I tell them that we will be on a three hour tour, but I have thirty hours of information and how I’ll be talking about food, culture, food, history, food, architecture, food, legends and facts (and food). And off we go.

You can be sure that no one on the excursion knows where we’re going; I take them up streets, down alleys, around in circles and back tracking. I could be kidnapping the whole bunch and they’d never blink an eye; once they start following you, they’ll go anywhere; I suspect that if we stopped for an espresso, I could walk them to Abita Springs, especially if there was beer on the other end.

On any given tour I walk about five miles to, from, and on. I could go on forever. After I’ve exhausted our time together, I still have only let them glimpse the tip of the iceberg that is New Orleans. Probably what will make me a great tour guide (instead of just a very good one) is my love of this place that I have chosen to make and call my home. The addiction that I have for all things New Orleans, all of the stuff that makes living here so much more preferable to other places, as well as all the things that I love not to love about her. The funniest thing that I love about New Orleans is how we all know what’s misfunctional about it, and with each election we pin our hopes on being able to change things; New Orleans laughs back at us, what fools we mortals be. Onward; “Let me tell you about our food and culcha! C’mon, ya gonna love it!”

Furder Fahdah

Po Boy Views

By

Phil LaMancusa

Further Father

Or

Lessons Learned

            Okay, here I am, going to write about fathers and Father’s Day and all the joys that a positive male role model can have on a fertile and impressionable child and/or children; I apologize if I disappoint and I hope to have another happy American ending for a column I’m asked to write to uplift, impress and inspire those of you that celebrate this auspicious day in our calendar. I may fall short in that endeavor.

            My father grew up in a volatile immigrant family and was strange from the time that he was young. He went into the armed forces during the second war and came back as crazy as an outhouse rat. He came back not only jumpy, lethargic, violent and psychically wall eyed; he came back without a respect for the common social mores of his times of which at that time were precious few. He was reactive and unreliable.

            Consider this; in times of worldly conflict, you take a million or so seventeen to twenty year olds, give them guns, send them out to kill other people, inform them that they may die as well and then expect them to come back sane and stable? Not a f**king chance; consider them lucky if they come back with all their body parts. My father came home damaged.

            I was a lad of three when I pissed him off sitting in my high chair and with my hands locked underneath the feeding tray he began to beat me. When my mother intervened, he beat her. Only after he and his brother knocked over a pawn shop and my mother wrote down evidence, threatened to have him jailed if he didn’t leave the city and us alone forever, did he disappear from my life. My mother had very bad taste in husbands and I could write a book on that one.

            I grew up without a father and the memory of that beating faded. My mother remarried another immigrant unable to relate to a pack of street rat kids, and I was raised with a man in the house but not a father. I was taught that empathy was for sissies; kindness is weakness         

Eventually I grew and had children of my own and I knew nothing about being a father except that physical violence against anything smaller or weaker than I am is categorically wrong and unacceptable. No instruction booklets or elective courses were available for me; nobody teaches you how to be a father and I failed. Times have not changed that much for grown males in today’s society and there are, a number of fathers today that labor under these same influences and lack of moral compasses when they deal with the fruit of their own loins. Happy Father’s Day.

            There is a dichotomy in fathers these days: those who have learned the lessons of the counterproductive actions that a father can have on their children and possibly whose fathers have learned and passed that evolution of behavior to them; or, on the other hand, there are still fathers that have a ‘deliver beatings, raise your kids tough to be able to deal in a tough dog eat dog world and take no sh*t from anyone’ and are raising their children to pass on that mentality of me/them/mine by any means bully as a hero tough guy smart talking badsass ghetto cred don’t give a f**k attitude misogynist role model to look up to. Seed banks; bread winners; Alpha males. Welcome to the world Sparky.

            Are you a father? Have you ever been a father? Do you see yourself as a future father? You had better have your act together because not only is it a full time job, but, you don’t get time off to be a weakling. To be successful you have to be mentor, clergy, older brother, psychiatrist, guru, friend, confidant and gentle disciplinarian all at the same time. Patient, understanding, guiding and a person to look up to at all times. There is no one now that can hold you and tell you that everything will be alright; you are now the person that must hold. It’s a wake up, get up, suit up, show up and never give up on yourself or your kids kind of job.

            I have daughters. I see them, their husband, their kids, my grandchildren; and I see the adults struggle to be a stable force while dealing with their own and their kids’ challenges; I’m proud of the job they are doing. I’m proud of their single grandmothers who bring logic and love to the growing beings that know nothing of what is going on in their world and who need the consul of someone they look up to.

            It is sobering to be a father; there are no breaks; there’s no time off. There’s a nightmare in the middle of the night to console; the embarrassment of a bed wetting; the dealing with that bully at school; the emerging hormones of a preteen; the heartbreak of young love and attraction that can all be devastating to a newbie on this physical plane. It’s a heroic position to uphold.

            So here’s to you and your fathers out there on Father’s Day. Men of my generation were taught not to be in touch with their feelings and emotions; here’s hoping that your father ignored that teaching. Reach out, rub their balding head, stroke their fragile ego, tell them you love the way they burn things on that outdoor grill that they use once a year. And while you’re up, get them a beer.