A Frolic of My Own

Jazz, Books, Food, and the Writing Life

Blogging from New Orleans, La

27 January 2006

I apologize to my three regular readers for the long silence. No good excuses, I just got out of the habit of blogging.

I’m back in New Orleans, teaching at Tulane but no longer reviewing restaurants. I hope to pick up some freelance work.

The city is even stranger than it used to be. I promise to report on its oddities.

Posted by Todd at 11:24 am | No Comments

Last Friday, I laced up my work boots and headed over to Willie Mae’s Scotch House, which got more than 4 feet of water, to lend a hand. I’d been back in New Orleans a week, but since returning this was my first daylight trip into the zone of devastation.

I drove down Claiborne, which parallels St. Charles, Magazine and the river. The area was empty, except for the roads. Trucks driving to work sites clogged Claiborne, and because of the lack of traffic lights at some of the wide intersection we had to pause for three temporary stop signs before rolling forward.

Willie Mae’s Scotch House is in the Seventh Ward, a couple of blocks from Dookie Chase and the Lafitte housing project. A few houses in the neighborhood were occupied, some with recently arrived workers and some with tenacious residents, but not a single business was open for blocks.

The restaurant is in a converted shotgun that dates back to the late 19th century. Over a few weekends, a crew of volunteers organized by the Southern Foodways Alliance managed to undo decades of haphazard maintenance and additions, stripping the structure down to the studs.

I teach Fridays, so after hours of tearing down plaster I drove back Uptown and taught a few classes in my grimy work clothes.

I missed out on lunch. That was disappointing, because John Besh of Restaurant August had done the cooking. In the mid-afternoon, however, Besh returned with coffee and king cake. Besh was wearing chefs’ whites and his manager had a well-tailored black suit. They set up a table covered with a white tablecloth just behind the three-foot pile of debris we had spent the day building.

Later that day, I met some of the out-of-town volunteers for fried seafood at Casamento’s, and then I joined them for music at Rock ‘n’ Bowl. A ten-piece male vocal group from Zambia opened for the Wild Magnolia Indians, who danced in their feathered headdresses and tossed beads and tambourines into the crowd.

It was just a normal day in New Orleans.

Posted by Todd at 3:38 am | No Comments