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After I left the Saints & Sinners panel discussion yesterday, I walked across the street to the Arcadian Books store on Orleans and bought a book of historic jazz photos. Tin, of course, loves it. Today when I returned from spinning having felt some sort of transcendence in working my body through the ongoing fatigue I’ve been feeling, I drove up to find a friend and her mother and the dogs and T and T2 all ready to do a walkabout and so we did. We headed to City Park and spent some time in the sun. This is quite extraordinary as it is the end of May and we were willing to be in the sun, meaning that it is a gorgeous day here, on the cool side.

Our friends stayed for lunch and we sat down to cold chicken, asparagus in brown butter, white beans with sage and olive oil, a salad of tomatoes, artichoke hearts and avocado and a little rosé. The sun was sparkling on the bayou, Liuzapaloola was in full swing down the street to benefit the owner with his medical bills, Steam Fest was underway in Audubon Park, and I was seeking the solace of home. In the backyard, the gem magnolia is blooming, the Vitex is full of purples spires, the native azalea is blooming a second time, and even the small orchids are blooming with the fortnight lilies. I found my repose on the screen porch with my New York Times and the whole house gone to nap.

Last night, a friend ragged my joie de vivre saying she reads my blog but disagrees sometimes with my effusiveness about New Orleans. “It’s so great to live here!” she mocked, “is there any place better?” she rolled her eyes [well, no] – she harpooned me, “there are other places, this place isn’t always so great.” Oh, really now? Do tell?

Could I live in another city and raise Tin like I’m raising him? I asked her. Would we be going to hear music at the Fairgrounds, drumming circles in Fortier Park, going to a Toy Art Show, having musicians guide Tin’s musical career? Shall I go on?

Here in Rachel’s World, New Orleans’ Ground Zero, I feel nothing but blessed to be part of the airspace I breathe, the earth’s gravity fixes me here, I feel the pulse of the mightier than thou water that surrounds me, and I dream of no other home than right chere at the LaLa.

I told my friend to start her own blog, the one that says, “it ain’t so great here as Rachel tells you” but she was having none of it, preferring instead to critique my die hard glow.

I remember reading Herb Cain every day I lived in San Francisco – he made me love that city even more than the visual actualization of it – and I have written before about passing him on Columbus Avenue as I turned up Kearney and seeing the twinkle in his eyes and how it made me smile, then blush. I wrote in my journal that night about passing an older gentlemen whose eyes generated life itself. He wrote the next day in his column that a pretty girl smiled at him. And so he passed me the torch, I think. I came home to write about this city that haunted (haunts) me, and he forever lives in the hearts of all those who are haunted by San Francisco.

One of his famous quotes (with his iconic ellipsis included of course), is “One day if I do go to heaven… I’ll look around and say, ‘It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.'”

And I would substitute New Orleans in that sentence any day.

Tin’s nanny, Margarete Beeson curated her first big show in New Orleans at the Candle Factory last night, the Toy Art Show, and oh my was it fun! Sure there was plenty of doll art, but there was also a shadow puppet show doing A to Z of mythological creatures, a lighted hooping act, a marching band called Noisician Coalition playing some weird funky stuff that took Tin a while to get his groove on, but then he got on stage to perform with them, an abbreviated T rex appearance, fun fun fun was had by all.

A fellow blogger asked me to cover one of the panels at the 2011 Saints & Sinners Literary Festival and thereby introduced me to it, as it always followed too close on the heels of the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival and Jazz Fest to pique my interest. But having gone yesterday for only one panel to whet my appetite, I’m sorry that it has taken me this long to notice it. And I was even sorrier that enough folks weren’t there to listen to these writers who are writing the life of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, or just plain Other.

I went wanting to see Michael Montlack who had intrigued me with a poem that bemoaned a womanless world (this after my being on the Geaux Gay podcast at It’sNewOrleans where my cohort admitted to preferring a womanless world much to my chagrin), and so I was not disappointed when this handsome, stylish man in brown plaid pants (anyone who wears plaid pants goes up a notch in my book) took the stage, but it was also good to hear Sally Bellerose and other voices from this universe.

I came home with a Lesbian Erotica collection and Montlack’s Cool Limbo and before we went out last night, I read to T and a friend The Hummus Sexual, which I posted here a while back and both were duly impressed.

To all you New Orleans revelers who trip the light fantastic with live music, there is more this city has to offer – poetry, literature, and art – now go out and support your other festivals.

I received a $50 gift certificate to iTunes as a thank you for Jazz Fest hosting – do you know how awesome that is when I made a pact not to buy any new music this year and it was almost breaking me!

I received a boar’s head skeleton from a friend who found it in the swamps – I’m a boar according to the Chinese horoscope – so it’s perfect.

I received a jeweled elephant from Tete in Croatia to add to my collection.

I received a diamond elephant charm from a friend to add to my rearview mirror charm collection in the truck.

Via Tatjana’s father, I received a Ganesha statue from his trip to India many decades ago.

Is it me or am I just lucky?

Created by Margarete Beeson (Tin’s nanny!)

The Candle Factory

We’re 18 days away from the beginning of Hurricane Season here in New Orleans and today, we’re watching the floodwaters cresting and the opening of the Morganza Floodway to head off a catastrophe. Take a deep breath in, then let it out. And if it weren’t unnerving enough to sit down here at the approach of hurricane season and know that it could go either way, and to think that our plan for a weekend trip is to go to Memphis to visit my brother – isn’t that a great idea? Oh Lordy.

I just hope all those folks in Cajun country are kept out of harm’s way when the floodgates are opened although my neighbor tells me it will take down a lot of fishing camps that have been there forever.

We woke this morning to unseasonable cool weather – in the 70s – and supposed to remain this way all weekend. It’s so weird how when major weather events are happening it seems to cause simultaneous beauty – like the skies before a major storm, or the clouds the other day during the tornado warning, or crisp cool air with the flooding heading down here. Sort of like the dichotomy of how a friend said Osama bin Laden appeared almost beatific and yet full of such passionate hatred for us.

So in 2004 during Mardi Gras, I was walking around the streets singing Who Shot The LaLa over and over and a little boy kept telling me to quit singing that song. But obviously the song stuck in his head so in 2005 when I bought the house on Moss Street his dad drove him by to look at it and he pronounced it first Rachel’s Writing House and then later changed it to Rachel’s LaLa house. So when I completed the house in February 2007 after braving the impossible I installed in the front walkway the words LALA to mark the occasion. And so it stuck. I also had the doorbell chime changed to Who Shot The LaLa.

This is the LaLa.

In July of that same year, Oliver “Who Shot The LaLa” Morgan died, still exiled from New Orleans since the Federal Flood and I built a memorial on the front stairs complete with candle, obit and black roses.

But something has nagged me for years and it goes all the way back to when I was about 28 and in the Milan Lounge uptown in an epic fight with a friend over the lyrics to Who Shot The LaLa. The way the song goes, who shot the lala, I just don’t know, I know it was a .44. My friend insisted the song said “I know it was a phony pho,” which I said was RIDICULOUS.

The other day sitting on the front porch, Marcela said she had just found out Who Shot The LaLa is about a hot shot, which she said is tainted heroin. The Urban Dictionary says a hot shot is a poison that is injected and then you die. Since Oliver Morgan released the song in 1964 about Lawrence “Prince LaLa” Nelson who was killed in 1963 maybe he was messing around in a typical New Orleans fashion with words and calling a hot shot a phony pho.

But if you search for the lyrics to Who Shot The LaLa they all say it was a .44 but if you listen to the song and think about a hot shot and not a gun shot, you might hear a different song than the one you thought it was – so I’m not saying I concede on this argument 24 years later, but I am saying this new information gives me pause (and I wanna know).

The Cox Cable guys decided to come camp out at my house the last two days. Everyone wonders what is wrong with Rachel – her computer dies, her modem dies, her printer dies, her cellphone dies, her Blackberry dies, her camera dies, her email goes down, her web host goes MIA – it’s like I am in the digital world but the digital world is against me. Know what I mean? I really need to get out of the bad digital karma that has plagued me for over a year. So when the Cable guy supervisor came and told me we need to amplify, I just said figure it out. (love this new expression as a friend of mine said he had met a woman on Match.com, hooked up with her when he wasn’t expecting it, without a condom, she said, FIGURE IT OUT, so he did what any healthy boy would do, he ran to the convenience store lickety split).

I had a heart to heart with Joe, my yard guy, because he shows up willy nilly, and has taken to calling my name a la Marlon Brandon in a Streetcar Named Desire: RACHEL RACHEL RACHEEEEEEEEEEL up to my office right when I seem to be on the phone for work. I said look find a day that works for you, come on your own accord, call me the day before, I will have my truck moved out of the driveway and money on the table for you but don’t yell for me when I am in my office – it is very stressful. In other words, figure it out!

S0 dragging around after our post Jazz Fest blues, we’re all looking for some music. Lucky for us, we live in New Orleans, where it is a stone’s throw away (after all Bayou Boogaloo starts this coming weekend). Two friends who are musicians (one teaches kids drumming in schools) started a drumming circle that meets in Fortier Park on Thursdays at 6PM. We went yesterday before Tatjana returned from her trip and although Angie asked me to bring Tin even though she admitted he is too young, he jumped right in. How awesome is that?

How great to be young, gifted and black and best of all be in NEW ORLEANS!