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I have something going on every night until April 19th. That’s gnarly. And again it’s that time in New Orleans where there are so many competing events that it is head spinning. A friend sent this about NOMA’s Art in Bloom:

it’s like the designer/builders of the rose bowl parade floats took LSD and hooked up with edward scissorhands.. it is so awesome. and they stick the exhibits all over the museum so its like a treasure hunt. it starts thursday and goes thru sunday. i hope you all go.

There is the Ecole Classique Fete, the Sound Cafe Music event on Sunday, a yard sale at the Botanical Garden, the Freret Street Festival. Make it stop!

The daily schedules have just been posted – good grief – so much music, so little time.

The Cubes are the Rosetta Stone of New Orleans art and culture, the secret language of music and dancing.” – Chris Rose

Tuesday – went to yoga and Michele talked about how everything we experience we do through the lens of our own experience and so when someone reacts a certain way that they are doing it through a completely different lens and that we need to take that into consideration to possible understand let alone communicate with all the various personalities that come our way. Came home to a Facebook post by a friend who said: Administruation (n.) hormone induced lack of tolerance for total lack of co-workers’ competence. Usually requires taking a deep breath, waiting an hour, and rereading draft of email before pressing send. “Delay of email due to administruation.”

Thursday: went to yoga and Catherine was talking about getting in touch with our prana or vital force and how you know how it is when you wake up on a day where you are about to take a trip or go somewhere that you are excited about and you wake just giddy and excited, but then on other days you can barely get out of bed. Wouldn’t it be great to start your days with that sort of life’s force? I woke this morning at 6 and got out of bed at 7:30 – late late late – but I couldn’t face the day, it felt like Monday or it felt like I had already done too much and what I had to do was get up, run with Loca, work, do yoga, blah blah blah. Tomorrow, when I first open my eyes I’m going to look for my prana.

If one more person uses the word “bespoke” I’m going to puke. Enough.

Tin can improvise with a drumstick like nothing else – it rarely plays drums, it is a trombone mostly, or quickly becomes a clarinet, and it has even been a tuba and a guitar. God bless imagination. I read somewhere that Trombone Shorty used to parade around with his neighbor kids and they used a Big Wheel as a tuba and cardboard boxes as horns.

It just goes to reinforce the message that kids need very little, their minds will provide them with most of what they need.

When Tin was a baby people bought him Baby Mozart type DVDs and I couldn’t stand them and instead gave him a DVD of Louis Armstrong & his All-Stars in ’59. Last night, we video’d Tin watching the DVD last night as it has become a family favorite pass-time. T asked Tin if he was channelling Louis and I thought who better to be a mentor/hero to a musical toddler.

From the liner: Louis’ performance, aired on television in Belgium, catches the always entertaining Armstrong at a peak at this point in his career, as he suffered his first heart attack just over a month later and took it a little easier for the remainder of his performing career. Joined by trombonist Trummy Young, clarinetist Peanuts Hucko, pianist Billy Kyle, bassist Mort Herbert, and drummer Danny Barcelona, the cornetist delivers a familiar set list including his theme song, “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” pop favorites, his current hits, and classic jazz. Young provides a great foil for the leader, especially in their vocal duet of “Now You Has Jazz” and with their instrumental swordplay in a rousing “Tiger Rag.” Barcelona is featured in “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” resulting in a brief reprise of the tune after the enthusiastic audience response. Singer Velma Middleton is added for the hilarious duet with Armstrong of “St. Louis Blues” and “Ko-Ko-Mo (I Love You So).” The camera work and sound quality (using only a single stage microphone and another overhead) are excellent; there are a few tape glitches and occasional brief audio flaws, though they are easy to overlook. The tireless effort in remastering this long hidden video and Rob Bowman’s detailed liner notes add to the value of this essential Louis Armstrong DVD. ~ Ken Dryden, Rovi

A colleague of mine was telling me that China has been invaded so many times by so many people and yet each conquerer was incapable of changing the culture. The culture of a people cannot be extinguished, it will fight subversion and fight outright assimilation. I think New Orleans proved that in spades when the diaspora of the Federal Flood brought a taste of New Orleans to locales near and far, and when we reconvened here in our rightful home. Someone sent this video about New Orleans in the 50s and 60s, when I was a kid, and it made me well up just thinking back to the memories. Will I now be one of those older people who say, “It was much simpler then.”

Throughout the entire Tennessee Williams Festival that I am now sad is over, one person or another quoted Flannery O’Connor’s character:

“She would of been a good woman,” said The Misfit, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

A long time ago and four therapists ago I learned that I had been raised in a high pitch because of a rage-a-holic father and an alcoholic mother, betwixt the two, the kids were always riled up. Then you step out into the world and you try to cope with the mundane-ness of daily life and you just are not equipped to handle it so you invent scenarios, cause drama, and basically find yourself always swinging from one branch to the next because you are deeply programmed to do that.

Then comes a woman who you know has crossed your path for a reason and you meet her only once in New York and she pulls you aside and says to you the greatest periods of growth happen when you let go – NOT when you are holding on, NOT when you are grabbing hold of, BUT when you have let go. And this will haunt you for many years until one day as the gulf breeze is blowing the Queen palms outside the office door open to your terrace do you realize this is true.

And you realize you don’t need someone to shoot you so you can feel authentic, you are for the first time in nearly 52 years on this planet able to be.

A young guy was telling me about his dating adventures and I told him I don’t have many to talk about as I never dated, I married. I told him when I was young it was a hiccup away from the 60s and dating was all about sex, drugs and rock n roll. He said almost patronizingly, the times haven’t changed. Really? Well I told him they do change, not the times, but age does change you. A guy told me he’d rather play golf than have sex any day and I don’t necessarily agree with him as I’m not a fan of golf, but I heard him.

Recently, a friend told me it’s just not worth all the trouble, which reminded me of what another friend had said a while back when she told me, “What? I’m going to hook up and then I get on top, they get on top, and what?” That friend has been in the throes of a love affair for the past two years, so something spurred her to look beyond the dry (no age pun intended) mechanics of the act.

The thing that is remarkable about being post 50, and finding your libido left out the same door as your wrinkle-free face, is you don’t miss it much. Yeah, you’re sad that an old friend is no longer hanging around, but you realize that friend talked too much, nagged too much, led you astray too much and basically took up too much room in your life.

Just to set the record straight, sex is still good and meaningful after 50, it is just that it no longer rules and that ain’t bad. It reminds me of the character in Philip Roth’s novel, Exit Ghost, which I haven’t read but had read the NYT review of (another thing that is annoying about having no time and getting older, reading more reviews than books – you’d think it would be the opposite).

Nathan returns to New York to visit a doctor, and finds himself being tempted, against his better judgment, back into the maelstrom of life. He agrees to swap homes for a year with two young writers, Jamie and her husband, Billy, who live in a small Upper West Side apartment. And he finds himself suddenly smitten with Jamie and hoping, against all odds, that this vibrant, 30-year-old, happily married woman will leave her husband for him — a famously self-absorbed 71-year-old writer, who, after prostate surgery, is both impotent and incontinent.

The other night I went to a neighborhood meeting that addressed the rash of burglaries on Moss and Carrollton. The burglar is described as an older black man with dreds working with a young black man (the composite photo of which is now taped to my front door) along with a possible woman accomplice. One of the neighbors said after everyone was swept up into a huffy fury, “I saw a young black man running on the bayou with a hoodie.” Oh dear, I thought, here we go.

The captain said we can’t stop a man in a hoodie, I was on the bayou this morning and saw a couple of people running with a hoodie. That would be racial profiling.

This morning, the main burglar in question was spotted by T on Carrollton, basically checking out houses. Now it could have been an older black man with dreds and a big backpack simply admiring the architecture at 8:20 am, but let’s just say it wasn’t. So I called 911 and reported him as a suspicious character. Meanwhile, I got a call that a friend’s alarm was going off who happens to live right where the guy was seen so I called and it was nothing but it got an officer calling me back and forth several times.

He said he was concerned about stopping someone unless he caught them in the act because he is a white cop and he didn’t want to be stopping a black man just walking down the street. I said, I know, but he fits the description of the guy breaking in. He said, I don’t want to be racial profiling. I said, I don’t want to either.

He called me back afterwards and said that he was still in the neighborhood and hadn’t spotted the guy but he wanted to apologize because he said he didn’t want to come across as if he was not going to look for him and yet he didn’t want to come across as if he was looking for any black man walking down the street. I said, I hear you, years ago when they first put up ATM machines, a friend drove up to hers and a black young man was hanging out in front of it and she got back in her car and left. She said I didn’t want to be scared of a young black man by an ATM machine, but I was. I told him I’m a white mother with a black son and I certainly don’t want him profiled and I wish our houses weren’t being robbed and I certainly wish it wasn’t a black man doing it in predominantly white residences, but it is what it is.

I don’t know, the next thing you know we might find out the black burglar is gay too. Or worse, Jewish.