| Current location: | home |
| Current music: | stillness |
Adopted town
Well, I made it home safe from New Orleans, though I'm very, very tired (to the extent of having completely forgotten about a committment I had for tonight). I had lunch with my friend, who took me on a driving tour of the Ninth Ward: I suspect I was too numbed with stress from other sources to do more than mentally log what I saw. Green grass. Long weeds. In some places a flight of concrete steps, or one leaf of a wrought-iron yard-gate. Foundations knocked crooked. In other places, trailers next to houses that are being repaired: through the house doors you can see the incomprehensible ruin that a flood leaves. My friend told me during the first clean-up, mostly what was found were zillions of those little 45-rpm "singles" (as the pre-CD, pre-iPod generation called vinyl one-song storage devices), and aluminum Mardi Gras dubloons. (Vinyl and aluminum are light, and would sink and settle last as the water went down). The treasured collections of everybody's parents and grandparents.
Victoria and I walked around the Quarter (since I had panels to be on at the Festival, I was fairly limited in my time); outside Brennan's there was a phenomenal band setting up on the street (complete with a small piano on a hand-truck). Go onto YouTube and look for the clips of the G-String Quartet: klezmer-flavored, gypsy-flavored music, beautifully done; people sat on the curb, and on the concrete steps of the Department of Justice (or whatever that building is across from Brennan's). A trio of tribal dancers happened along in the middle of the performance and danced; there was a small amount of general dancing in the street as well. (My quads hurt for the rest of the night). Every now and then you'd have to get out of the way of a car.
This was down on Royal Street. A block up, on Bourbon, it was the end of Spring Break and hot and cold running drunks. The hotel we were at was half a block from Bourbon, and you could hear the ruckus most of the night, though never enough to keep me awake. The weather was that strange, warm, blowy storm-feeling weather you get most of the year in New Orleans, with clouds thick in the mornings, rain to one degree or another sometimes in the afternoon. We sat on the steps by the River and watched the boats go by, or had wonderful dinners in small courtyards whose walls go up like the sides of a well. The Tennessee Williams Festival itself was fun, with some of the panels held in the old Orleans Ballroom where the Quadroon Balls used to be held before the Civil War - went in with a friend who can sense psychic energy through her hands: an interesting experience. ("Oh, yeah, this place is occupied...")
But mostly what I am is tired.
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barbara_hambly) wrote,
