Objective reality

 

Po Boy Views

By

Phil LaMancusa

Objective Reality

Or

Negative Capability

        Sitting outside Old Road Coffee Shop on a not too frequent visit, waiting for Deb, smiling as a woman at the next table snaps a photograph of my car with the mannequin in the back seat. I’ve already avoided a morning drunk that just wants to “ask me a question”, Deb arrives and who should emerge from another car to get a cup but the former mayor; conversation ensues. Wellman the artist arrives, down on his luck as usual (pieces in the Smithsonian and the Ogden); I slip him a fin and he asks for a ride but we’re going the opposite way. Meg the barista comes out to grab a smoke and we ask after her pup and remark how much better her eye looks after that bee sting.

        All morning I’d been contemplating life, the universe and everything, including the camera traffic ticket I received in the mail (that’ll cost a day’s wages); everything recently encourages a WTF conundrum in my psyche and I wonder if, in fact, I AM living in the end of days. Life is orphic, mysterious, entrancing and beyond my understanding. It seemed simpler when I was younger and the older generation was making all the mistakes; we swore we would never make them, and in fact we believed that we could correct them: war; hunger; inequality; prejudice and a disregard for the future of the planet, and then a cup of coffee rings the ‘get a clue’ phone: I still don’t know what’s going on and there is nothing that I can do to change the mindset of the idiots that are continually f**king EVERYTHING up. Meet the enemy: they are us; no longer the warrior, the most I can hope for is Negative Capability.

As I see it (although the poet Keats said it better), Negative Capability is nothing more than admitting that it’s okay with not knowing or understanding what is going on but having the ability to function within those parameters nonetheless – welcome to -- life in New Orleans.

        Anyone living here will rightfully tell you that it takes a level of genius to actually enjoy New Orleans on a deeper than superficial level; to be able to dive deep and not worry about coming up for air, experiencing her like a lover that you want to wake up with and not just a tramp that you picked up in a bar on a weekend pass. More than merely falling in love, being willing to call yourself a New Orleanian is more like having egg on your face and not minding who sees it; wanting a third helping of Thanksgiving dinner; smiling as you take a pie in the kisser and/or taking a warm bubble bath with a martini, a snake and the radio perched on the side of the tub as your new BFF appears and wants to join you.

        Demographics are a gray and mysterious concept here. We call it the ‘Checkerboard System’: white folks living next door to black folks next to brown folk, yellow folk and white folks; we do know that the ‘haves’ live in a different area than the ‘have-nots’ and across the board, everyone pays too much rent. Some of us believe that there’s ‘different strokes for different folks’ and others opine that ‘there’s different ways on different days’ and it’s pretty much all right with all of us; savoir faire is everywhere.

        But New Orleans is not the world and just as I’m getting complacent in my New Orleans state of mind some yahoo decides to remind me of the fires, floods, tornados, hurricanes and earthquakes wrecking the earth; the riots around the globe that are proof of universal indignities that occur regularly; the wars that annihilate populations; the religious persecution, misogyny, intolerance, sickness, pollution and famine that are commonplace in the world we live in. If I hear another: “a gunman opened fire on a crowd in downtown killing…” It’s gonna drive me bats.

        The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse have come down with a case of Seven Deadly Sins and are taking them on a world tour, as a group, calling themselves The Objective Realities, spreading greed and power to the ruthless; the world is the audience and tickets are free. It’s a given that the weather is predicted to rain on your parade.

        Around my neighborhood there’re guys of all stripes that gather in parks, neutral grounds and sidewalks in the afternoon and evenings for libations and commiseration. There may be dominoes to be played; some horseshoes to be pitched; a game of Cornhole and some beverages in brown bags. Old R&B music is their soundtrack and they have a time every day, I’m sure, not listening to the cacophonies of worldwide gloom and doom-- maybe I should be more like them—but, as everyone knows, there’s no such thing as objective reality because all reality is subjective. Theirs is a subjective reality that I admire.

        I love New Orleans mostly because I can handle her dysfunction; I rejoice in her music; I’m sated by her cooking and I take comfort in the celebration of life that is a constant. We may be a lot of things here; and one morning at a coffee shop with my old lady, running into a photographer, a drunk, an ex-mayor and an artist gives me reason to feel a level of optimistic clarity. Back at it biaches; we can still change the world!

   

American Pie

 

Po Boy views

By

Phil LaMancusa

American Pie

Or

Beginner’s Luck

        Chutzpah: a Yiddish term for ‘audacity for good or for bad’ as in “Imagine the chutzpah he had to make that kind of journey.” For me that word describes anyone who would pack up their family and belongings leave a possible generational homeland and travel to a strange country (likely not even knowing the language and/or customs) for a better life. The words that come to mind are: immigrant, refugee, expatriate and, they come in two tiers: the first are the ones that come without knowing anything; they settle, take the bad with the good and are literally pioneers. The second are the ones that follow, those sent for: wives, family, betrothed or necessarily abandoned.

        There are also those that come indentured: Asians, Europeans and most notably Africans. They come; they’re brought; they’re sent for; they endure. I’m second generation American, so this seed has not fallen far from the tree; all four of my grandparents were not born here. They came for a better life, they came to escape poverty, violence and oppressive politics. One of my grandmothers was sent for as a child bride. They brought their stories, customs, food and languages; they had children and their children had children.

        The pioneer that crosses the plains in a covered wagon is not much different than the refugee who travels in the bowels of a tramp steamer, crosses from the Caribbean in an inflatable raft, or trudges through the southern dessert to Laredo, Texas. They ‘pays their money and they takes their chances’. They endure; they endure because they have to or they’ll perish. The generational endurance of the people that were kidnapped and enslaved is legendary and ongoing. The pioneers and the persecuted endure hardship, hunger, haranguing, hatred and exploitation; they’re cat-called with racial and ethnic slurs: Kikes, Rag Heads, Beaners, Greasers, Chinks, Slope heads, Spics and that N-word that we’re not allowed to say or print. My own people were called Micks, Krauts and Wops (Without Papers).

        Those that have been here for a few generations forget the fact their people once were immigrants and discourage this country from taking in ‘foreigners’ (many ‘foreigners’ want to come here); from places like Korea, Syria, Afghanistan, Haiti, Ethiopia, China, Nigeria, Cuba, Somalia and parts of Eastern Europe; the big one these days is Latinos from South and Central America and, of course, those pesky Mexicans. They all want a piece of the American Pie; a shot at redemption; a photo opportunity.

         We hear: “The nerve of these people! They’ll take our jobs, our women, our language and our way of life. Our last president called them “murderers and rapists”. Look out! They’re coming across the border from the Middle East, Asia, Guatemala, and hey, I hear that there are even some Canadians that want in; well not on my watch! I’ll build a wall, a physical, social and cultural wall. I’ll build an economic wall against hiring in any but the lowest forms of employment: fruit pickers, factory workers, domestic workers, sweat shop workers. What(?) we’ve already done that? Whew, good, I’m safe now. I can sleep easier knowing that if those tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free; the wretched refuse from those teaming shores, tries to get into Little Tommy’s play school or get a job in my local bank as anything but a janitor……”

         In 1868, Africans that were brought here as slaves were granted citizenship; June 2, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Indian Citizen Act which gave the people that had been here for millennium the right of American Citizenship; 1935, my grandparents became American citizens. Did that make their lives any easier? Ask them. The walls we built still stand.

        It tears our hearts to see ragged malnourished kids, maimed puppies or beaten horses. We cry for missing children, abandoned kittens, abused women or those trafficked for pleasure or gain. As long as they don’t move into our back yard. Tendency wants us to say: “I don’t want a homeless shelter built in my neighborhood. I don’t want anyone panhandling in front of that restaurant that I frequent. Make them all just go away. I’ll feel sorry from a distance; I’ll even donate. I know that we’re all brothers, but I don’t want my brother sleeping in that doorway, it’s gross to look at; what will the children think?”

        The secure have a tendency to get smug; not withstanding my White Privilege, my people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps (we say), not realizing that some of our ‘Brothers’ have no bootstraps with which to pull.  They’re sitting at the border waiting for a shot at asylum eating donated food and dirt.

        I say: let them all in; borders are imaginary lines in a global sandbox and it’s usually the biggest bully that gets the best corner. I say we adopt the world and let all those that have less share our abundances. Put them to work, give them educations, healthcare and fair housing (you know, stuff that we are not making available to all of our own citizens).

        The argument against that is “we’ll go into debt; our children will go into debt; our grandchildren will have to pay this off.” That is the argument that comes from the financially secure politicians that already have comprehensive healthcare, paid holiday vacations and free tuition for their children.

        If you adopted a person or even a critter and they needed care and assistance, wouldn’t you, out of love, go into debt? I would, and because of those types of Golden Rule values, I would pass that debt as well as that value to my children and my grandchildren. I would.

        After all, if we happen to accrue debt helping those less fortunate, by letting them in to the American Dreamland, wouldn’t we be passing that shared debt to their children and grandchildren? Think about that when you stop by that taco truck for a Carne Asada Burrito and ice cold Fanta; prepared by a future fellow citizen.   

       

          

 

Dead Restaurants

 

Po Boy View

By

Phil LaMancusa

A White Sport Coat

Or

A Pink Crustacean

            If the restaurant business isn’t dead, then it certainly is on life support, in the ICU, with a less than favorable prognosis. That’s right, you heard it voiced first here (out loud and clear), what you’ve been avoiding thinking about but known all along. Your future of dining out will consist of samples on the food aisles of Costco. And it’s our own damn fault.

            Food and Wine Magazine predicts that restaurants will be cutting hours of operation and days of service because basically we’ve driven our service workers crazy and burned them out by not giving them any reason to believe that they’re not being driven like sled dogs and taken advantage of on every level; in short, service workers have left the business. We allowed this to happen.

        There are a significant percentage of pre covid/pre hurricane restaurants that have bitten the big one and shut down; some of them were our favorites, some of them we hadn’t yet been to. All of them were someone’s livelihood and dream; now someone’s heartbreak.

        It’s long been known that the service industry is run on a placid servant/entitled customer basis; the whole tipping structure shows that if a server is not servant enough they will get punished by not getting rewarded with gratuity and conversely if they are proficient (and ‘servant enough’)at their service they will reap monetary largess.

        Also--considering the kitchen--the back of the house is run for the most part under a unique plantation like atmosphere and attitude. Workers are expected to accept being driven hard for low wages in a stressful, sometimes combative, environment without the benefit of basic health and welfare compensations.  Oh, there are some forward thinking managers and chefs that are caring and compassionate; however, there are far too many that are not, have not been and are not planning to. The classic kitchen philosophy is basically: in order to exceed you must excel; if you’re going to get ahead you first have to pay dues, do more, accept less, work at pleasing the person in charge, commiserate with your equals and demean those under you. Don’t make waves and you will get ahead--rinse and repeat. Are you familiar with the Bob Dylan song “Maggie’s Farm”? That’s the reality for most back of the house workers where the health plan has always been “don’t get sick”.

        So, what did we do to cause and exacerbate this state of gloom and doom? Well, we created a culture of entitlement and greed; we made it normal for service workers to feel like second class citizens and for us to consider folks working in service not to have a “real job” in an employment atmosphere that stresses the importance of profit at the expense of people.

        As we’ve done with much of blue collar work, we’ve pictured cooks and waiters having dead end jobs; while Chefs, owners, even managers are considered career individuals; but, dishwashers, porters, bussers and maids…well they must not be able to find other “meaningful work”. And that’s the attitude that we’ve shown them when we seek their service. And then guess what? The pandemic came, the businesses shut down, the workers lost their jobs, went on meager unemployment and then, Uncle Sam stepped in and gave everybody an extra six hundred bucks a week! In many cases that boon was more than what they were making by working!

        Surprise surprise; many service workers realizing that they really did not like their job situations said “screw it” and found other “meaningful” things to do with their time even when pay doubled, or, when pay doubled, Miss Thing found that she no longer needed to work two jobs and could spend more time with her family. Bye bye Miss American Pie.

        Owners and managers, feeling betrayed, are faced with supply shortages, mandates, shut downs, hurricanes, a raging pandemic and now, a cook that was always on call has decided that he likes working the Farmers Market selling the honey he gets from the bee hives that he bought (with that Gravy Train money) rather than cooking another thankless brunch shift; besides, he’s got a new baby to play with. He’s come to grips with his mortality.

        Okay, none of that is true; I made it all up. Everything is fine. It’s all a dream. It’s all a dream and you are Cinderella. The pandemic will not in the near future reach a million lives lost; we have wonderful infrastructure; gas prices have not risen; groceries will get less expensive; lawmakers will stop being partisan; I’m your fairy godmother and that mole on the back of your neck is nothing to worry about. No such thing as Global Warming.

        If you’re waiting for optimism here, all you’ll get is an apology. I am really sorry that the last two years have not only not been a piece of gateau; the fact is, for many of us, the last two years have been scary, bordering on our feeling like the person in Edvard Munch’s famous painting. The challenging thing is that it’s not looking like we’re on the Yellow Brick Road to recovery; just take the state of our service industry’s condition--it is the canary in the coal mine.

        So, we have to step up to the plate. It starts first by acknowledging that service work IS meaningful, essential and honorable; treating servers like senators, cooks like congressmen (and vice versa). It starts by being grateful, thankful and kind to all that is around you.

        Remember these things: restaurants are temples and need attendance; pay no attention to that man behind the curtain; and if you lose your party shoe at midnight, you’re not a princess (you’re probably drunk).  

       

         

 

 

 

The Need To Feed

 

Po Boy Views

By

Phil LaMancusa

The need to feed

Or

Tenement Symphony

 

There’s a place in New York City called Hudson Yards. It’s a new development described as a monstrosity; I was raised two blocks from it, in the projects, five kids, single mother and father figures through the years ( a story for another time). The point: a two bedroom space at The Yard (it’s called) starts at $20,000.00 a month; conversely, our rent was $50.00 a month and that translates to 400 months of our rent. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, how did this occur in my lifetime?

Back then, rent wasn’t an easy nut to crack, even with the stipend sent to us by the government, but we made due; kids got basic educations, wore clean clothes, hustled for money as soon as able and/or ran the streets. We showed up for dinner promptly at 5:30 every evening. Food was our currency and standing in our community: if you ate good—things were alright. Were we happy? We fought each other like tigers, we argued, bitched, cursed and picked on and were picked on in our turns; but each night we gathered at the table and exhibited our best manners, ate well prepared and served evening meals. Our best manners---or else.  Five-thirty--- or else.

My mother cooked at least three hundred fifty dinners a year, the other times as a treat we may have gone out for pizza, Chinese or Horn and Hardart automat (Google it). I was always hungry although I never missed a meal growing up. A hunger of the soul I’ve been told.

Mom being German/Irish, my father being Sicilian and her third husband being Greek made for some interesting meals; plus, the ladies in that building of 84 apartments on twenty-seventh street (who all seemed to know each other) were constantly swapping recipes, gossip, advice and letting each other in on what mischief eachother’s kids were up to. Food that’s now called ‘ethnic cuisine’ was just called ‘dinner’.

Apartment 10F was five rooms that housed seven of us with an elevator that did and sometimes didn’t operate. Riding in the elevator was an olfactory adventure, a positive one if no one had used it for a urinal. You got a whiff of everybody’s dinner being cooked from arroz con pollo to ham and cabbage, kasha varnishkes, meatballs and spaghetti. In the morning there was enough coffee being brewed in our building that you could get amped just breathing in; of course the same could be said for the second hand smoke and cancer.

Kids running and screaming, mothers yelling, fathers cursing and hormone fueled teens preening in a perpetual ghetto ballet.  Busses, trucks, the Greek hotdog man, delis selling bagels and crullers; the hurrying to work and school and the tango of shopping and procuring. The amount of laundry alone was almost suffocating and the never-ending bills, the interminable debts.

It was not simply a matter of going to one store for dinner or food. There was a fish market, butcher shop, green grocer, Jewish deli, Italian deli, bakery; the boogie of daily shopping to put food on the table at precisely 5:30. Make no mistake, we all had breakfast and lunches also and in the interim we had candy, soft drinks, potato chips, I used to steal from the green grocer because I was addicted to the sweet taste of a perfectly ripe tomato. There were penny candies that we could afford by scavenging for soda bottles and redeeming the deposits.

There was a knish man who came around on Saturdays, an Italian sweet shop that sold lemon ices, a delicatessen that made sandwiches from cold cuts that would save the ends of salami, ham, cheese etc for any kid who asked for them. We bought cups of coffee at stands before classes; waited for the ice cream man in the afternoon caught in the transition from childhood into adolescence; took small jobs for extra money and spent the earnings at lunch counters. 

Mom made side money as a waitress, Pop was a cook, that third husband ran a bar and grill. I started work in food service at twelve and continued on for fifty years; these days I have time on my hands so I’m looking to get back into a kitchen. Feeding people is who I am.

Most people aren’t aware of the inner workings of restaurants because most people haven’t worked in one. Most people only see this: arrive, sit, order, get served, eat, pay, tip, critique, leave. Badda bing badda boom. Workers are invisible, bend to your will and few customers care where they come from and, if anything, perhaps consider how simple their lives must be; you know, being unskilled and all, perchance they’re working their way through college, getting ready to get a real job; isn’t that sweet?

As Janis Ian says “pity please the ones who serve, they only get what they deserve”. Don’t envy the service worker, the work is hard, the environment is tough and the pay is sh*t. Hours are long, schedules are erratic and the ‘my way or the highway’ management style… par for the course. That waitress that you fussed at might only get $2.15 an hour and a schedule that screws any semblance of normalcy, so what. That dishwasher making minimum wage pulling his second job shift to make ends meet, tough noogies. That cook that didn’t graduate from high school but found a home on the range paying his bills with overtime sweat…and?

 68,000 service workers in New Orleans are keeping this city running, fed and watered. They aren’t paid well because what they do is not considered a “real job” Where do we come from? I’ll tell you. Up the street and light years away from Hudson Yards.  Our need to eat and your need to be fed. Truly, hungers of the souls. 

 

Gone Pecan

 

Po Boy Views

By

Phil LaMancusa

Small Potatoes

Or

Gone Pecan

        They sat together behind the counter of their small (but perfect, they claimed) shop in the French Quarter of New Orleans; they read and reread the letter. The letter was from a property management company informing them that their rent would more than double when/if they chose to renew their lease in ninety days. The raise in rent also included the ‘Triple Net’ clause of them assuming the responsibility of paying for real estate taxes, maintenance and insurance on the entire building while the shop occupied only the first floor and at that, only the front portion.

        They had taken a leap of faith to open the shop ten years earlier, factually, being one of the first new businesses to apply for a license while the city was still reeling from Hurricane Katrina. They had sweat equity in their city, and their business, and had worked to build inventory and income; however, not to the extent of taking this kind of financial hit. The first response was disbelief. “What did we do?”

        Their calls to the landlord went unanswered. “What CAN we do?” they asked neighboring small businesses, who, while expressing solidarity, had no answers. “We belong here; people come to see us; we’re that funky little shop that visitors expect to see here; we love our city, our town, our customers, and our customers love us! What the f*ck are we supposed to do?” It was like a body blow, a sidewinder, a sucker punch to the gut. They were helpless and heartbroken when it settled in that there was no compromise available to them; no eleventh-hour-save on the horizon.

        No one. The landlord blamed the management company; the management blamed the landlord and they both blamed current ‘Market Rates” for commercial property. Indeed, all around them, in the Quarter, Mom and Pop businesses were going under in the name of ‘Market Rates’ that judged a business by how much they could pay per square inch of their floor space and not their heart and loyalty to their city. Small single owner shops and eateries washed away like love letters on a sandy beach.

        Correspondence flowed in from customers to their landlord expressing the value of the shop and asking for some degree of mercy, and there was no mercy shown; no quarter given; no middle ground to be reached. When their friendship with the landlord turned to ice and the management company stopped being courteous; the deadline looming, they looked for a place to relocate. They were told “it is what it is”.

        They were to become yet another subject of conversation that started with “didn’t there used to be…” A conversation that they had had with returning visitors over their ten year tenure: “wasn’t there once a record store, Laundromat, hardware store, grocery, bookshop, a place to get a watch battery, use a computer, buy a stamp?” Mom and Pop restaurants were being taken over by corporations; the soul of the French Quarter was being sucked away in the name of Market Rates, being replaced by Disney-like gift shops and get-it-anywhere souvenirs. You could now get your feet massaged where the spice shop had been; you could now get a cemetery tour ticket where there used to be an ice cream shop. Tourist Information hawkers now took up space where neighbors once owned coffee shops; places where you could go for a cup, read your paper, laugh with friends, meet new people.

        They found a place closer to home with more space, easier rent with a friendly landlord but less customer traffic; they watched their old shop sit empty for almost a year and wondered again at the turn of events that put them where they were; the taking out of the bank loan to move; the lack of business; their loyal Quarter customers getting less willing to make the trip to the new space. For four years, the bills went up, the sales went down. When the lease for the ‘new place’ expired they realized that they had no more resources to meet the expenses to remain and they threw in the towel. “It had been a good run” they told each other “we made some good friends; but I’ll miss going to work every day, the shop was like our baby, I want to cry”.

        The ‘SALE’ sign went in the windows; first 10%; then 25%; HALF OFF! and finally ten cents on the dollar. In the end, much was donated. Shelving, rugs, wall pieces, cabinets and office equipment “take it, we won’t be needing it, consider it a souvenir. Sorry? Yeah, me too”.

        Oh, don’t worry about them, they’ll bounce back, you know, when one door closes, another door opens; it’s just another Going Out of Business sign on a place that you can’t remember the last time you shopped in. But for them, another door closing does not always mean that another opens; sometimes when your door closes, your walls cave in.

        A few years later, they’re still going by to feed the clowder of cats that they’ve committed themselves to; they have other jobs and a lot more free time as well as less financial strain. They count themselves fortunate that they closed before the pandemic crippled the local economy sending shockwaves to many more local businesses; ironically sparing ‘Market Rates’. The point being that property management (and real estate) companies stay profitable by setting, and inflating, these rates; that’s how they pay themselves, landlords naturally acquiesce. 

        Take from this what you will and consider that this is not an isolated story; but one to consider as an example of the answer to your question: “wasn’t that a place called The Coffee Pot?” Or “Wasn’t the bar we used to go to right there? Remember? I wonder what happened to them?”

        P.S. They’re still paying on that loan.

JazzFest 2022

 

Po Boy Views

By

Phil LaMancusa

We See You

Or

The Chosen Few

        Dear Readers,

        This year they tell us, yes, that we’re really gonna have a real, live and in person Jazz Fest. The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival 2022. Come one, come all, we’re having a Fest to beat all festivals! Let the tents go up; “let there be dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons and necking in the parlor!” (Groucho Marx).

        And you, yes you, the not-from-here folk, will walk into the Jazz Fest like you are walking on to a yacht. You’ve traveled miles, paid a premium, you’re here to take it in, to absorb; you deserve this. You’re saucy, you’re sassy, you’re sexy.  We smile.

You’re impressed that all this can go on in one place; you rock it up, rip it up, shake it up, ball it up; you get some fun, sun, mud, food, festivities and maybe some flirting, you feel fulfilled. Full. Filled.  And then you are outside the gates and lo, the party’s still going on! We go on smiling. Who are we? We live here.

        We don’t get here early and stay late, we’re here 24/7; like I told you: we live here. When you go back home and wish you could stay, we do. We’re the folks on the porches sipping a cold one watching you dance your way back to where you stay and are seen smiling. Still smiling. We’re the guys who wouldn’t live anywhere else. This is our spot, now is our time.

        We look forward to Jazz Fest all year, every year; we buy our tickets early, receive residential parking passes and get the local’s discount on Thursdays. We bitch about the parking, guard our driveways and wait in longer than average lines at the grocers, restaurants and public transportation for you to enjoy for a spell what we have full time. We even pick up the trash you leave, sell you a little something extra on the road and think y’all are cute as bugs. 

We queue up next to you, behind you with nothing but a small bag and a water bottle; too much baggage is counterproductive, I say. We’re on a budget, we only carry the cash we intend on spending (hell, no credit cards); we already have our posters, apparel and souvenirs from years past, if we want something else (from this year) we’ll bring extra money tomorrow and get it.

        I’m a hiccup away from the action. I’m fortunate enough to stay mid way between Liuzza’s by the Track and the Fair Grounds itself. I’ve been in this neighborhood for over a dozen years, have seen people come and go, I know the merchants, minors, mutts and miscreants, during Jazz fest I go the whole nine yards as well as the entire eight days. My friends come by and we stoop, there’s a brass band right outside our front gate, we’re on a first name basis with the policeman directing traffic; it doesn’t get much better that this.

        We’re also those folks taking tickets, slinging beer, directing traffic and emptying the cans of used Styrofoam containers (to go into our landfill) that once held your stuff from food and drink booths, we’re here at the first aid station, console your lost kids and set up and break down this whole affair so that all you have to do is come and enjoy.

        On the whole this is a pretty quiet neighborhood the rest of the year with friendly feral felines, a variety of birds, bees, beers, bubbas and broads; the young, the not so young, the very young. We have cook outs, second lines, crawfish boils and street festivals, get our kids off to school and our breadwinners off to bring home the bacon; you know, like people. We walk our dogs and pick up their poop just like you.

        Only, we may have a little more pep in our step, glide in our stride and a little extra gut in our strut. We smile a little easier, nod to strangers and neighbors alike; we’re not shy about talking to each other or you, there are no strangers here, only us strange folks that go about our lives and look forward to that time of year when we see the tents going up and the sounds of setting up that is music to our ears.

        Of course no bed of roses is complete without the thorns and by no means is this utopia, but we get along and look out for each other, you know, like neighbors. We celebrate each new addition to families (especially critters) and mourn our loses; we gossip, fret, complain and console; we shop locally, go to fish fry’s at the church and walk up to the bayou to chill on fine southern weather days.

        We’re also the ones who feel it the most deep when they threaten to, and then do, cancel Jazz Fest, which they did three times in the last two years! What did we do? Well, we held ‘Festing In Place’ celebrations; we decorated our houses; the radio re-broadcast old Fest shows for us on the days that would have been the live performances; we HAD a Jazz Fest in exile and we smiled.

                Am I looking forward to it? Did I buy my tickets in February? Am I planning my food forays? Is a bear Catholic and does the Pope…? Care will be left at the gate, my phone will be left at home, time will be suspended and I will live in and for the moment. Do I know who I’m going to see? Yes, I’m going to see you having the time of your life as I watch whom you’re watching; I’ll be objectively and subjectively having the time of my life. See you there!

        Signed, That Weird Smiling Guy (appropriate emoji here).