Another video from New Orleans, Nov. 2005. They called it the Concert of Thanksgiving and I remember it as being the kind of day that made you grateful and hopeful down to your bones. I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it. On the banks of the Mississippi, we all got together — it felt like everyone in the city, though of course it couldn’t have been — and said, We can do this.
And they did.
In the video: the great Wanda Rouzan, the great Kermit Ruffins, and the greatest ol’ dancer I ever did see.
I’m sick at home today and going through old videos. Here’s one from St. Charles Ave. in New Orleans, November 2005, a couple months after Katrina (that’s a downed streetlight, looking like the rising moon). By day, the city was patrolled by National Guard humvees — by night, the streets were deserted. Curfew started at 10 pm, I believe.
But I’ve never met a curfew I didn’t want to break (and I always have an elaborate excuse worked up in my head, poor parents)….
We had SO much fun planning Julie’s bachelorette weekend in New Orleans.
It was, after all, the city where it all began.
Freshman year: me and Liz in a suite in the Urban Village (thanks to our similarly smart/gently meddling parents), Andrea and “the girls” in considerably less sweet digs in New Doris (a dorm that has since been condemned and torn down, may she rest in peace).
Liz and Andrea have been friends since second grade so they were the bridge that (gradually) united us with said girls — Katie, Kate, Lila, and Julie, who all lived together on the third floor, smoking butts and causing trouble.
Here’s a little secret about our two mini-groups: we didn’t really like each other at first.
Liz and me — we were snobby, just gonna come out and say it. We met these junior Kappa Sig boys right at the start of freshman year and they had cars and brought us to the Red Room and we thought we were the actual shit.
Spoiler alert: we were not the actual shit.
One time — and this fills me with shame to this day — Andrea’s busybody roommate overheard us talking shit about “the girls.” Something-something about how they weren’t sophisticated ‘cause they didn’t go to the Red Room.
Ol’ Busybody repeated what we said to them.
That did not help our relationship.
But time went on. In February of freshman year, most of us ended up joining the same sorority — Pi Phi. We all found ourselves on this pledge retreat from hell in the Louisiana backwoods (they didn’t even have booze). Some of our fellow pledges didn’t hate it. Actually, most of our fellow pledges didn’t hate it.
We hated it.
We knew we were kindred spirits.
One by one, we quit Pi Phi (some of us more memorably than others — ask me to tell you about that time with the mushrooms and the entire Pi Phi brass…).
By sophomore year, they were all living in a house on Magnolia, and we were fast friends (“fallen angels”), our earlier shit-talking long behind us.
The thing is, though, it’s taken the fullness of time — more than twelve years — for us to become the group we are.
Shane transferred from Berkeley and met Liz — and later me, Julie, and Katie — at the Arcade, the school magazine.
Andrea brought her awesome friend Jane from Architecture into the fold sometime around senior year.
We moved to New York, most of us, and made the typical mistakes with men, money, tube tops, you name it.
Three of us are married — two soon to be — and now four of us have dogs.
One of us is pregnant! (And we’ll always tell the little girl that she was down with us, too, in New Orleans, for Aunt Julie’s bachelorette.)
I can say honestly that I had no idea that those women (those girls) I found so intimidating-yet-intriguing would turn out to be what they are:
Sisters.
When we led Julie on a surprise scavenger hunt around all our old stomping grounds — Magnolia, Tulane’s changed-yet-totally-the-same campus, the Pi Phi house, the Boot store (where the ladies behind the counter actually recognized us!), Jacque-Imo’s, St. Joe’s, Guy’s Po-Boys, the Where Y’at office, the levee, and, of course, Ms. Mae’s to play “Honky-Tonk Woman” on the jukebox and dance on chairs — we weren’t just indulging in a little tipsy nostalgia.
We were marking the places where our foundation was formed.
We may not agree on everything — we don’t necessarily vote for the same people or make the same life-choices — but we agree on what matters.
I love you girls with all my heart, and Julie, I cannot wait to continue the celebration in the North Fork!
(Despite what you might have thought, I suspect your wedding WILL top your bachelorette. Barely.)
Local Woman Has Best Friends Ever!
My best buds* and I are off to our happy place. I won’t post much here ‘til I get back but you can follow the [redacted bachelorette shenanigans] on Instagram if you like: @noraleah.
* Minus you, Jane. Ugh … whatever. Enjoy MOROCCO. I mean, I guess. [overly dramatic eyeroll]
I don’t know about you but I always get a kick out of seeing what my blog-friends pack for trips. So without further ado, it’s time for … Packing With Nora: Julie’s Bachelorette in New Orleans! edition.
Thursday evening flight: Equipment anchor-print blouse (eBay), Rachel Zoe polka-dot jacket, Gap jeans, Love Quotes scarf, orange J. Crew wedges, Reed Krakoff handbag.
Friday 25-cent martini lunch (!!) at Commander’s Palace and [redacted bachelorette shenanigans]: Mango dress, Theodora & Callum scarf, knockoff Prada sunglasses, real Prada sandals (love u eBay).
Saturday daytime [more redacted bachelorette shenanigans]: not pictured. Sneaky sneaky.
Saturday night time [even more redacted bachelorette shenanigans]: VPL dress, modified J.Crew tweed cardigan-jacket (it used to have a peplum), Prabal Gurung for Target heels, Stella McCartney handbag (you guessed it … eBay).
Sunday, St. Patrick’s Day: option A.) Zara dress, Love Quotes scarf, or option B.) J. Crew chambray dress, DVF scarf (eBay, again).
Monday morning 6 am flight: SUNGLASSES. COFFEE. And a grey Everlane t-shirt that covers my po-boy belly.
PS: Shoutout to my weekender, which carries all the above in style.
PPS: Past editions of Packing with Nora.
Spring done sprung.
A perfect contrast to the iron fence I posted earlier today … and the city me and my best girls (and one best boy) will be in one week from today!
We’ve got so many fun surprises planned for Julie’s bachelorette — and there’s the Irish Channel parade! One of my favorite New Orleans traditions. It’s St. Patrick’s Day the way only New Orleans would do it. In addition to the usual beads, people on floats hand out all the ingredients for an Irish stew … and I do mean all. Here’s a lady carrying her haul home in 2006.
Good thing Brett and Meghan are visiting this weekend and we have lots on the agenda or I’d feel like time was inching by.
Which reminds me — did you hear about the study that indicates that the anticipation of a vacation boosts happiness more than the vacation itself? I totally hear that. Nothing like having something to look forward to, right?
Jon Lee Anderson, a postscript for Hugo Chavez
“What is left, instead, after Chávez? A gaping hole for the millions of Venezuelans and other Latin Americans, mostly poor, who viewed him as a hero and a patron, someone who “cared” for them in a way that no political leader in Latin America in recent memory ever had. For them, now, there will be a despair and an anxiety that there really will be no one else like him to come along, not with as big a heart and as radical a spirit, for the foreseeable future. And they are probably right.” (via newyorker)
Funny story about Chavez. When I was living in New Orleans after Katrina, I was volunteering for an organization called Common Ground and hostessing at a hookah bar to make rent — but really, I was playing out a strange, predictable, thankfully non-sexual relationship with a man my friend Liz dubbed “the Charismatic Leader.” (This was back when I dated enough that we could make a sport of nicknaming the boys. Remind me to tell you about Enron someday.)
The Charismatic Leader was one of the founders of the organization — well-spoken, unwashed, anti-government. Very post-med school Che. He drew me back to New Orleans (I was then living in Dublin) with visions of a rebuilt Lower Ninth. This was years before Brad Fucking Pitt got in the game; months before the city would even consider the question of clean-up in that neighborhood. His vision is now something of a reality — but that makes it no less revolutionary at the time.
A few months into 2006, though, and the Charismatic Leader started getting paranoid. While white Common Ground volunteers poured in from across the nation and slept in tents — proto-Occupiers — he had several secretive flop houses … and, I suspect, a girlfriend in every one. As I said, nothing sexual or even romantic happened between us — but we were attracted to each other, and our relationship played out on the Moneypenny end of the spectrum.
What that meant was, when I wasn’t calling up friendly lawyers to make sure they’d bail our proto-Occupiers out of jail should they be arrested while illegally cleaning a flooded public school, I was doing his weird personal bidding.
Changing his locks.
Categorizing his library.
Writing reports on human rights violations in Angola (he hoped to go there after New Orleans).
And researching under-the-radar ways to travel to Caracas.
For you see — as he told me in a smoky whisper at a Marigny coffee shop one afternoon — President Chavez had extended a top-secret invitation to him and a few other socialist-leaning New Orleans organizers. It was a helping hand and a fuck-you to Bush, not unlike that winter when Chavez donated heating oil to the American poor. They would get together and talk about hoodrat things. Overthrowing the American government. Ending structural racism. Rebooting the ol’ class warfare. You know.
I was impressed. Also, amused.
I mean at this point we already called him Charismatic Leader.
How much more Charismatic Leader could he get??
Turns out, a lot more.
While I’m pretty sure he never made it to Caracas — though I suppose I wouldn’t know — he DID get one of his girlfriends pregnant. (I mean that is sooooo Charismatic Leader.)
And they DID open that school on-time for the next school year — one of the only in the 9th Ward to do so.
The last time I saw him he was tan and resplendent, a young and handsome father, a successful revolutionary sitting behind a desk in a working school….
Which is why it came as such a shock in early 2009 to find his name in the New York Times.
Turns out our Charismatic Leader was also a snitch
a scumbag
a sociopath
(all words that auto-fill when you google his name)
An FBI informant.
A man who maybe-possibly talked a couple naive revolutionary wannabes into planning to pipe bomb the Republican National Convention. And then testified against them for the FB-fucking-I.
Told ya he was charismatic.
(I’ve always assumed he did it because they had something on him and he had a baby to protect. I haven’t lost respect.)
It’s funny that I’m now reminded of all this by a New Yorker tumblr post.
When I was there, when I was in the middle of it, when I was in the front seat of his pickup, smoking his Reds and gazing at a Lower 9th house stripped neatly of its facade, a half-dozen suits hanging, improbably, in a closet and a doily atop a TV, when the Charismatic Leader was just a guy named Brandon and National Guard Humvees patrolled every street, even the rich, white ones — even then I dreamed of writing this all down in no less a publication than the New Yorker. Even then I could sense that this story would reach deep and wide.
And it does.
So.
Funny story about Chavez.
(Source: newyorker.com)
Mardi Gras Gumbo Cupcakes, Filled with Andouille Sausage (via laughingsquid)
Absolute insanity by the Cupcake Project and I love it — especially this explanation:
Some gumbo has okra, some doesn’t. I made my gumbo cupcakes sans okra. I may be the only cupcake baker on the planet who opted against using okra in a cupcake recipe because she already has a recipe for okra cupcakes.
PS: For the record, my gumbo always has okra. But no tomatoes, out of respect for Mandie’s grandma.
I keep thinking, But why is the Super Bowl in NOLA? Wasn’t it just in NOLA?
And then I realize that sophomore year was ELEVEN years ago. Jeez….
Anyway.
It was Feb. 3, 2002.
Super Gras Mardi Bowl.
A perfect storm, as Jane put it.
And it was one of the best weekends of my Tulane life.
This Volvo full of crazy Pats fans/stoners drove down and stayed with my friends. They didn’t have tickets to the game or anything. (Most people didn’t.) It was the first time the Pats had been in the Super Bowl in years and people just wanted to be near the action. (Hard to believe now but they were the underdogs. They weren’t totally insufferable!)
The French Quarter was on FIRE with Pats fans all weekend long (and you KNOW they know how to drink).
Two of my friends — huge Pats fans — scored tickets to the game. The rest of us watched it wherever we watched it.
I remember coming home to my roommate, Liz, and our friend Kate, who were both rooting for the Rams, I guess.
There was this call in the second half — I can’t remember the details, but basically, the umpire came down in favor of the Pats.
Liz and Kate were livid.
It was a conspiracy!
A conspiracy to unite the country behind THE PATRIOTS after 9/11!
Now, I’m always down for a little conspiracy theory, especially where Bush is concerned, but that just seemed dumb to me. We got in a straight-up fight about it. (They rightfully accused me of only defending the Pats because I was dating a Boston boy. That IS pretty annoying behavior.)
We couldn’t talk about it for YEARS.
Actually, I regret even bringing it up now.
I’m sure they’re gnashing their teeth just reading this.
Backing away slowly….
…
Point is:
Good The GREATEST times.
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