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Tin was in the newspaper today with his trumpet and his game face.

I ditched spin class at the last minute and Tin and I rode the bike to the French Quarter to see the Panorama Jazz Band, which is a klezmer band. I brought Tin’s trumpet and he loved getting down to the Trombone Hora. Gotta love it. A Jewish man was so enamored with Tin he kept taking his photo and wanted to pick Tin up and get in the photo with him – I warned him that picking him up would provoke a toddler tantrum but he didn’t heed my word. Finally, he asked if he could give Tin a dollar and I said sure. And after some thought, he decided on a quarter – gotta love the genes. Tin loved the quarter and stuck it in his pocket. The man said to keep it because one day he would look back and say that was the first time Tin got paid for making music. Meanwhile, a photographer for the Times Picayune had been trying to get Tin to stand still with his trumpet to get a good shot.

Later we rode our bike to a friend’s house for her daughter’s birthday party, we walked in and there were balloons everywhere and Tin just jumped right in. She said her mother in Argentina had been looking at photos of Tin on Facebook and told her the story about Louis Armstrong and how a Jewish couple had taken him in and bought his first cornet. The Karnofsky Project came about from that relationship and now raises money to provide underprivileged children with a musical instrument.

Evan Christopher’s Clarinet Road: 2nd Annual International Jam Session.

Monday, April 11 starting at 8pm. Chickie Wah Wah (2828 Canal St.) $10

Clarinetist Evan Christopher leads a band of New Orleans jazz masters including drummer Shannon Powell, guitarist Don Vappie, and bassis Kerry Lewis. Musicians from around the world are invited to to bring instruments to join this celebration of New Orleans jazz. As an added bonus, the great vocalist Topsy Chapman will likely stop by for a few tunes.

So as much as I am want to bitch about San Francisco and California sometimes you know how beautiful it is there and the cornucopia of all that awaits you. It’s just not home and that is what made it difficult to reside there. But when I moved back to New Orleans I continued to see my hair stylist there because I feared getting a New Orleans haircut. So when I found Scott Reynaud at Jupiter here, I was so happy to be getting a California style here in the Big Easy. The funny part about this is Scott is country boy from Louisiana so his transcendence as a stylist comes from two things – talent and the knowledge gained from going elsewhere to augment his education and continue learning.

Similarly, last night we went for a late bite to Mondo, Susan Spicer’s newish Lakeview restaurant and sat at the bar and had a beet carpaccio salad with a pizza. DELICIOUS – it reminded me of the food in San Francisco – original and fresh and tasty as hell without being overwrought and without having a context of locale which most New Orleans restaurants cannot escape from – and yes, I am a localvore but I also like a continental dish served up now and then.

And yesterday I handed out flyers with someone I never met before but liked right away – straight from the NorthEast he and his wife relocated here to New Orleans – why? because they love it – and he started a construction company called Green Coast Enterprises constructing sustainable dwellings because much as we were living in a recycled world down here because we reused and reused wonderfully old materials to keep our houses together, we hadn’t really started exploring new ways to keep old things sustainable much in the way California has led the way on progressive building for years. So here again another example of just like San Francisco.

Now let’s us pause and say there is NO PLACE LIKE HOME.

We did a little festing yesterday, but today, we have music class and then an adult birthday party and tomorrow a kiddie birthday party and so I don’t know just how much festing the little man and I will get done this weekend. We may take the bike over and check it out as T prefers to be crowd-less. This morning as I came upstairs to check something out on my computer, the doorbell rang – which is a huge issue in the LaLa as it means elephants trumpeting up in my office and Oliver Morgan singing WHO SHOT THE LALA throughout the main part of the house. So much for tiny Tin getting his sleep – he went to bed at 11:30 last night having been too wound playing with his new babysitter.

My Boston friend reminded me of the Happiness Project, which I haven’t checked out in a while and the message today is scent, smell, the luxuriousness of being overtaken by an intoxicating waft of heaven. I’ve been watching the butterflies cruise the airwaves in the backyard from the vantage point of my new writing table and yet, it’s the smell from the mock orange tree that bowled me over the other day. Heaven on Earth.

After hanging door flyers for the Re-Bridge project, we all met back at Swirl and then T and I went over to the Fair Grinds to watch another film sponsored by the New Orleans Afrikan Film Fest, this one The Prodigal Sons, which was really so good that I wish it had a wider distribution so that you could see it too. There is a trailer on the NOA Fest site.

It made me think about a lot of things the first is which the compassion this filmmaker had towards her very disturbed brother. And it made me think of my family to say the least and how birth order matters. I was flipping through our family album once again thinking of tackling the digitization of it (albeit scanner isn’t working correctly) and I noticed how quickly I came around after my sister was born. 14 months later. Just as she was getting used to all the attention I came along. We were almost Irish twins. Similarly this family adopted a boy and 11 months later had a boy and the adopted child always felt like he was robbed of his chance.

He also felt abandoned and wanted so desperately to know his family and I thought of my Tin and how I hope that he grows up with a fine sense of himself and does not feel abandoned or bewildered by the twists and turns his life has taken and might take. We spoke with the filmmaker afterwards, an attractive woman who was a handsome man before she transitioned. I told her that I applauded the compassion she showed her brother and she said she was glad that came across. I said I had an equally disturbing relationship with my sibling but I felt it better to exit than stay around and take the abuse.

She said well my mother was also compassionate. And I said well so was I, but isn’t that the role of the mother to want all her children to be healthy and happy and that isn’t so much the role of a sibling.

This was a powerful story, well told and not the least of which has a compelling twist when the adopted son learns he is the grandchild of Orson Wells and Rita Hayworth. If you find it on Netflix – which I don’t know if it would be there – watch it. It’s a tale to be told about living with mental illness in the family.

One thing that happened to the boy was a head injury which the filmmaker said fossilized all of the negative in him, and I thought similarly that it was after the accident that my sibling began to hold onto all that was negative and wrong in the world and had let go of all the light. So sad. But the story this filmmaker tells is one of continuous redemption and how the family cannot remain stuck in the past but it must continually be reinvented as all the members change. Powerful message.

Okay what do you say to the largest free music festival in the South and it’s in New Orleans? I say, yay! Meanwhile the weather is enchanting if not leaning towards skillet hot. Yesterday late afternoon Tin and I biked to the French Quarter to pick up my Jazz Fest Brass Pass and we passed a building that had been on fire since early morning on Rampart Street. When we got to the Quarter it was chock a block full of tourist and locals there for the free music.

Today we went for a short lunch-time visit to see the brass band and of course, Tin had to whip out the trumpet to play with them. An admirer brought him a glazed donut after he finished his jambalaya lunch and it was love at first bite and a lot of booty shaking afterwards.

Michael Montlack

The Hummus Sexual