The Sheila Variations

Vieux Carre

Mike Hendrix has a wonderful post up, describing a day in New Orleans. Please just go read the whole thing.

But I will pull out a few quotes.

I love how he writes.

I get up hungover sometime after noon and quickly run out of smokes, so I decide to go walking until I find a store to replenish the coffin nails and maybe grab a sandwich. I’m thinking Verti Mart on Royal, which is fortunately (or unfortunately) close to both Karen’s place and a place I have friends in called the R Bar. I figure if I run into anything on the way, I’ll stop there instead. Head pounding, I walk without success in my mission until I come to the R and have an internal debate with myself. See, if I go in, I’m liable to run into someone I know and get trapped there until 3 AM.

Hilarious. It's only noon, but he knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that it is not too early to get "trapped there until 3 am."

Needless to say, he does get trapped.

But my favorite section - which gave me chills - is his description of running into a junior-high marching band:

It’s some sort of junior-high marching band coming right down the middle of the street, stepping high, wide and handsome, elbowing rush-hour traffic out of the way using nothing but verve and attitude. They’re dressed in ordinary junior-high-kid clothes, rehearsing for one of next week’s Mardi Gras parades. The kids are almost all black, as is their director, who strides alongside them with a whistle around his neck, half-scowling as he checks those lines. Those lines are ragged, the kids are hardly in step at all, and they don’t give a damn. Truth to tell, neither does the director; they’re moving in their own way, and it’s exactly the way they ought to be moving. That sweet Dixieland jazz sound just trumps all consideration of orderliness in its relentless pursuit of joyous release.

Isn't that beautiful?

Go read the whole thing.

Posted by sheila