no, it's not short for katrina

The One Blog

2008-08-20T16:32:00.001-04:00

Dear readers:
Having come to the obvious conclusion that I don't have time to keep up two blogs, and having realized that I want to write about more than just theatre and post-K rebuilding, I have created a BRAND NEW BLOG that will encompass all of the above and then some. So please join me at http://trinanola.blogspot.com/ and I will hopefully reward you by posting much more frequently, since I'm no longer restricting myself to two topics.
See you there!

Your favorite Katrina survivor whose name is not short for Katrina,
Trina

another lengthy hiatus, with good excuses

2007-11-08T15:58:00.000-05:00

i know. i am the most pathetic excuse for a blogger ever. my friend erika has a day job and an infant and still manages to post with impressive frequency, sometimes more than once a day. and her blog is extremely entertaining, to the extent that it is the only blog that my husband reads regularly.

yes, husband, i got married a week and a half ago, which is reason #1 i've been AWOL. reason 2 is that on top of my full-time job, i am teaching two ballet classes at tulane this semester, which means i teach 4 times a week, and i have to actually grade them and give them written tests and stuff, which is quite time-consuming. and reason 3 is that my boss left to take another job so i have now been bumped up to director and am trying to figure out how to run my office. and reason 4 is that, bizarrely and horrifyingly, another dancer friend of mine-- this time my good friend sarah, who came with me on several of my trips to the hospital to visit joseph-- suffered a stroke and underwent brain surgery. and i just couldn't handle writing about yet another dancer friend having brain surgery. and it was just too surreal to see her in the hospital with tubes everywhere and a head full of stitches, just a couple months after the two of us saw joseph in the same state. but she is recovering really well-- she was at my wedding, and she looked fantastic. so now i can write about her because i know she is going to be okay. and thankfully, she has health insurance.

we are about 90% done with our renovations at this point. we actually have walls and ceilings and lights downstairs. no drywall; our experience hauling insanely heavy sacks of the soggy stuff led us to opt for something called, i think, beat board? beet board? eh, i don't know. at any rate, we also did a pretty major drainage project to fix some flow issues that were causing us to get some water in the basement (first floor) during heavy rains. we had one sort of standard downpour after the project was completed, and our new drainage worked quite well, and we were pleased.

then, the monday before our wedding, we had a not-so-standard downpour that lasted for about 24 hours and dumped 9 inches of rain uptown. and for the third time since katrina, our street flooded. and when the street reaches a certain level, there is simply no where else for the water to go but into our basement, so eventually we had about three inches down there.

sigh.

my next door neighbor commented on the unprecedented frequency of these flooding rains. she's been in her house for years and has never seen anything like it. climate change, anyone?

the ever-mercurial weather gods did give us a perfect weekend for our wedding-- sunny, a little cooler than usual but not too cold, just beautiful. and we honeymooned in st. lucia, where we did have some rain here and there, but we luckily managed to steer clear of hurricane noel.

and now we're back, and the temperature started dropping, so we tried to fire up the heat, only to discover that for the thirty-seventh time, we have low gas pressure because there is WATER IN THE GAS LINES AGAIN. i don't know if it's from the recent flooding or still the same katrina water that's being pushed around, but i am pissed. grrr.

but... our house is really starting to look so nice... chris's dad and his dad's girlfriend laurie, who owns a high-end window treatment business, did all of our upstairs windows as a wedding present, and they look amazing. and i can't even remember if i wrote about this yet but i finally bought the piano that i was supposed to buy for my 30th birthday two and a half years ago. and we have piles of wedding gifts, more than half of which we haven't even opened yet, and it's so weird to have all this nice stuff all of a sudden. it kind of freaks me out.

and the streetcars are finally running again on st. charles. only up to napoleon, but still.

so, time to call entergy again and get those gas lines pumped out.

tell me when i can breathe

2007-09-04T23:19:00.000-04:00

yes, it's that time of year when we all collectively hold our breath. the national hurricane center calls the peak hurricane season ASO, for august-september-october. so... we made it through august. could last year's luck possibly hold out? or will our house projects and wedding plans be sidelined by humberto, jerry or... karen?

only time will tell. so i won't be breathing for a while. hence the slightly blue pallor.

8/29

2007-08-29T15:23:00.001-04:00

i actually did not post on august 29, 2006; it was during one of my several-month hiatuses from this blog. but since i've been writing lately, i feel it would be remiss of me not to post at all today.

i'm just going to make a couple short lists of some of the good and bad things that have happened in my world over the past several months. i'll start with the bad things, so as not to end on a depressing note.

BAD OR NOT-SO-GOOD THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED RECENTLY
1. one of the few local politicians that any of us had any respect for let us all down.
2. crime continues to be a major concern. a friend of mine got shot in the head a couple months ago.
3. the streetcars are still not running on st. charles.
4. the saenger and mahalia jackson theatres are still not being repaired.
5. the jerkoff who lives two doors down from me has STILL not gutted his house.
6. my next-door neighbor, julie, got nothing from the road home, despite the fact that neighbors with very similar situations got decent-sized checks. she's still wading through the appeals process.

GOOD THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED RECENTLY
1. i finally bought a piano! woohoo!
2. we renovated the upstairs bathroom!
3. we finally have a curbside recycling service!
4. cote sud restaurant reopened!
5. my friend meredith is finally moving back into her house on octavia street this weekend!
6. i got my katrina-axed adjunct professor position back in the tulane dance department and i'm teaching two classes this fall!
7. hurricane dean decided to steer clear of NOLA! (this was of course not such a good thing for the yucatan peninsula.)

well, what do you know: the list of good things is longer than the list of bad things. let's hope that trend continues.

wasps

2007-08-28T10:33:00.000-04:00

i recently discovered an enormous wasp's nest up in the corner of our screened-in porch. chris bought some anti-wasp spray and ambushed the nest at dusk, as the can instructed. the next day i hosed off as much of the nest as i could, then took a giant sponge to the rest of it and scrubbed until the sponge disintegrated. i got most of it off, but not all.

well, a couple days later, i notice a wasp buzzing around the remains of the nest and it appears that it has been resurrected. it's like a wasp death star being rebuilt on our porch.

i am annoyed, since we have a list a mile long of stuff that needs to be done on and around the house. but i also can't help but feel somewhat sorry for the wasps, who are after all simply trying to do the same thing we are: rebuild their home after seeing it flooded by outside forces.

yesterday i helped set up for the tulane reading project keynote lecture, entitled "Linking Slushy Greenland to Swampy Louisiana: A Bumpy Ride into the Greenhouse Future?" every time i listen to a lecture or read a book or see a movie about climate change, it reinforces how small and insignificant we are in the larger scheme of things. our efforts to rebuild our home are no more meaningful or important than the efforts of the wasps, however complex our home may seem in comparison to their muddy little death star. which can be either depressing or liberating, depending on how you look at it.

uptown morons

2007-08-18T15:05:00.000-04:00

as i walked back to my car from ballet class this morning, i saw a yard sign: "NO CHARITY/LSU PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL AT DEPAUL." i came very close to banging on the sign owner's front door and smacking him or her upside the head.

anyone with any sort of grip on the reality of post-k NOLA knows that one of the biggest problems we're facing is the dearth of psychiatric services. if mental health care were more accessible, we'd hear less horror stories about the actions of people whose already fragile mental states have been totally cracked by the stresses of daily post-K life. from the respected times-pic photographer who led police on a wild chase and begged them to shoot him, to the typical-quarter-resident-turned-total-psychopath who killed and cooked his girlfriend, to this random construction worker who came to town a month ago and randomly slashed two strangers at a bar this week, there are clearly a large number of people who are in serious need of mental health care and aren't getting it.

but god forbid we should open up a psychiatric facility at an existing uptown mental health care center that might allow poor people to access its services. not in our backyard. depaul should obviously be reserved for the drug-addicted debutantes and suicidal soccer moms who at least know how to keep up appearances.

some of the well-heeled folks in the sliver by the river have managed to remain so blissfully ignorant, it's truly mind-boggling.

the only people for me are the mad ones

2007-08-16T16:37:00.000-04:00

well, now that i'm taking a little break from the stage to deal with the house and the wedding and other normal-human-being stuff, i figure i might as well fire up the old post-k blog.

i haven't written in so long because i really have been ridiculously busy, and i just haven't had time to deal with the house, and sometimes the things i wanted to write about in this blog were too depressing. so i've been writing in my more lighthearted theatre blog. but i'm going to give this one a go again.

there's a hurricane out in the atlantic right now, and it's heading for the gulf. the hurricane is named dean. coincidentally, this month marks the 50th anniversary of the publishing of jack kerouac's seminal book about sal paradise (kerouac) and dean moriarty (neal cassady). as david gates wrote in newsweek, dean/neal "was the con man, sociopath and holy fool who urged Kerouac to take to the road." wouldn't it be strangely appropriate if hurricane dean sent us all on the road once again?

here's hoping he doesn't.

you have to admit it's getting better, a little better all the time...

2007-03-19T13:29:00.000-04:00

so we finally had all the siding replaced (with hardy board) and now they're almost done painting. we chose a fairly perky shade of blue, and i was a little concerned that it would be too much, but i love it. i'm also glad i talked chris into painting the front of the house; he wanted to leave all the stucco white, which would have been 1. totally boring and 2. totally schizophrenic looking. so it's not totally done, and i still need to plant stuff in the front yard, but here it is so far:

yayyy happy blue house.

the weather this weekend was absolutely perfect- sunny, with temperatures in the high 60s-low 70s. perfect parade weather, so instead of trying to do anything productive on saturday, i went to the irish channel st. patrick's day parade, and it was lovely. i collected plastic flowers, kisses, beads, "kiss me i'm irish" buttons, frisbees, a stuffed doll, a couple pairs of shamrock-stamped underwear, a green garter, and various foodstuffs including cabbages, onions, carrots, potatoes, and a large and somewhat incongruous zucchini. i even managed to stop by all four parade parties that i was invited to. here's my friend lacey and i after the parade:

chris had to work, so he couldn't go to the parade, but that night we had our first post-katrina dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, coté sud. in my sequel to the twelve days of post-katrina xmas, i expressed my fervent hope that coté sud would finally reopen, but i was starting to despair that it was gone for good. we recently heard, though, that it was back, and on saturday night we called to see if the rumour was true. i was thrilled when ollivier, the owner, answered the phone. we waited around half an hour for a table, and the waitress was very apologetic about the wait, but half an hour was nothing after the year and a half that i've been waiting for it to reopen. there's a new front window with a pretty stained-glass detail to replace the smashed one, and some different lighting over the bar, but otherwise it's almost unchanged-- same menu, same wine list, same cozy ambiance with edith piaf playing quietly on the sound system. coté sud was always the place i wanted to go when i returned to NOLA after some time away, because it felt like coming home. so it really means a lot to me that they've finally reopened.

so, yes, it's getting better all the time. but my subconscious is still stormy. last night i dreamed that another tornado hit-- there was another minor one in houma last week-- and that our house was badly damaged. in my dream, i was a wreck. i don't know why my brain does this to me. i wish it would stop.

planting

2007-03-12T14:32:00.000-04:00

yep, it's been a while. two months, punctuated by a fairly traumatic brush with a tornado. yes, our house was okay, but i happened to be on the roads at 3 a.m. when that storm hit (long story), and driving through it and its aftermath was enough to thoroughly freak me out. the storm itself was terrifying, and when it passed i found myself driving through a post-katrina landscape of blackouts and emergency vehicles. our house had no power for 12 hours.

to be honest, i've been kind of depressed lately, and not just because the show that i'd been looking forward to for nearly a year was cancelled. we had an unusually long unbroken stretch of cold and yucky winter weather, and i don't handle that well; that's one of the reasons i live here, and not in my native new england. but now we've hit that all-too-brief period of perfectly lovely spring weather, and i can breathe again.

the up side to my show being cancelled is that i actually have some time to work on the house. this weekend i consulted with my next-door neighbor, julie, about landscaping our front yard, and made an initial trip to banting's nursery, which always makes me happy. i spent about 3 hours yesterday shoveling the giant piles of pine mulch that were left by the removal of the pine trees on the side of the house. i replanted my flower boxes and planted some herbs. julie and i agreed that it was time to give up on the poor stunted palm tree in the front yard, so i pulled it out.

meanwhile, we've had the siding replaced, and it looks great. they should be painting the house this week-- blue!-- and then i can make a second trip to banting's and buy new plants for the front yard: hibiscus, dwarf oleander, a butterfly iris.

we moved back into our house almost exactly a year ago. by contrast, i just met my neighbor three doors down; he & his wife still haven't moved back in, but are getting close. the microwave they'd just bought was recently stolen out of their house, and it turned out it was stolen by one of the foremen who was working on the place. the woman across story street from us, who bought the house across from julie after the storm, is apparently selling both places and moving to metairie. she bought the house across from julie for $150K, and after renovating it is now trying to sell it for $390K or something ridiculous like that.

anyway, azaleas are blooming and my outlook on life has improved quite a bit. and this afternoon chris & i are going to taste wedding cakes at flour power, a bakery that was one of the first businesses to reopen in hard-hit chalmette after the storm. yum.

strength in numbers

2007-01-11T17:23:00.000-05:00

the times-picayune predicted that "hundreds" of people would march on city hall today. instead, it was thousands. i wondered how many people would really turn out in the middle of a weekday, but i was amazed.

let's hope nagin, riley and jordan get the message.

anti-violence march tomorrow

2007-01-10T17:05:00.000-05:00

take an early lunch, call in sick, whatever you need to do, but be there.

The Anti-Violence March to City Hall
March for our loved ones.
March for our neighborhoods.
March for our City.

Thursday, January 11
11:00 am: Formation. Meet at the foot of Canal St. (by the World Trade Center)
11:30 am: Depart. March down Poydras to City Hall
12:00 am: Speak. Deliver our message to our government.

http://silenceisviolence.org/

a thought

2007-01-09T11:23:00.000-05:00

last night, while driving home from rehearsal at 12:30 a.m., totally exhausted and slightly delirious, i was musing about what kind of person it takes to stay devoted to a city that keeps breaking our hearts. of course, everyone in the city with half a brain has been musing about the same thing. as i drove down prytania, i suddenly drew an analogy between the situation and battered spouse syndrome. we live here despite the hurricanes, the poor school system, the poverty, and the crime because we are madly in love with all the good things about new orleans, the things we know we won't find anywhere else: the music, the food, the people, the culture, mardi gras. but every time someone like dinerral shavers or helen hill is murdered, it's a slap in the face, a blow to the jaw, a kick in the gut. the crime situation right now is bad enough that we're all battered and bruised, though the bruises and black eyes may not be visible to others. nevertheless, we cling even more desperately to the city we love, defending it to the outside world and insisting even more vehemently that we could never live anywhere else.

is this a pathology? are we deluding ourselves that we could never possibly be happy anywhere else? is there something twisted inside of us?

i hope not. but the similarities between loving new orleans and loving an abusive spouse are kind of creeping me out right now.

okay, i can take a little water, but this...

2007-01-05T12:19:00.000-05:00

it rained all night, but no flooding, and this morning it's sunny and warm.

last night i learned that my friend who was attacked in her apartment complex a couple months ago returned home two nights ago to be confronted by the same guy. this time, she kicked the shit out of him and managed to get back in her car and get away before he could do anything. but holy shit. apparently, when it rains, the complex often leaves the gates open to make it easier for residents to get in. oh, and thugs, too. my friend called the cops and they said they "didn't need any more information." are they actually going to make an effort to catch the guy? probably not. i am so fucking angry.

meanwhile, the parents of one of the toddlers at the day care center that my friends started were shot in their faubourg marigny home, in front of the child. the wife died, the husband survived. they were both very involved in community activism. this immediately makes me suspect that one of the people they'd helped out was on a crack binge and decided to hit them up for some cash-- much like the murder of jonathan lorino, son of tulane CFO tony lorino, back in 2002. jonathan had apparently helped out his irish channel neighbors from time to time with a few bucks when they needed it, and his generous habit ultimately backfired.

i'm just nauseous.

really... this is getting old...

2007-01-04T15:19:00.000-05:00

we're under a flash flood watch again. the day after i got back from MA, we had some minor flooding, too. honestly...

on the bright side, we did get the living room painted in time for new year's (thanks lloyd!!), and we had our first official post-katrina party in our house, which was quite nice. by the end of next week, the entire upstairs should be painted, and we can finally stop moving piles of crap from room to room. i can't wait.

and for the first time since katrina, we're going to have twice-weekly trash pickup. however, the new contract was supposed to start on the 1st, and it looked like our new pickup day was supposed to be tuesday, so we put our trash out monday night, but by this morning it still wasn't picked up. and we have a lot of trash, due to the party, the holidays, and the sugar-bowl-goers crashing at my tenant's place. i was afraid it would go floating around and clog the storm drains, so i recruited one of the sugar bowl boys to help me move it up to the porch. of course, it still hasn't started raining, and how much do you want to bet they picked up the trash today? sigh.

pop quiz

2006-12-21T17:17:00.000-05:00

this picture of my street was taken
1. during tropical storm cindy
2. during hurricane katrina
3. this morning

if you chose #3, you are correct. it rained all night, and in the morning it started raining really hard, and the next thing we knew, the street was flooded. it was pointless for me to try to get to work. however, the sheetrock guys were working upstairs, so i was pretty much stuck on the porch. i sat there playing my guitar and questioning my sanity. the basement often gets a little water in the rear of the house when it rains really hard, but this time the water covered the entire basement floor and reached a depth of four inches in spots. the college student living in the first-floor (i.e. basement) apartment catercorner to us got totally flooded. my neighbors and i stood on doorsteps with dazed expressions and chatted with each other across the dirty water.

but you know, the people who built these houses knew that this would happen. the ground floors in the two-story buildings were intended to be basements, not apartments. and the single-story buildings are built up high enough that 6 inches of water isn't a problem. still, as i watched a kitchen cabinet go floating down the length of my street, it was hard not to totally freak out and wonder if the water would continue to rise.

sometime after noon, the water finally went away, and so did the sheetrock guys, and i spent the rest of the day cleaning up sheetrock dust and plaster bits from every exposed surface. our friend lloyd is going to start painting the day after christmas. i'm trying not to get my hopes up too much, but it is a distinct possibility that i will return from massachusetts to find a freshly painted living room, and that i can finally hang artwork on the walls and have a living room that's conducive to living in. here's hoping.

all i want for christmas...

2006-12-19T16:15:00.000-05:00

i had a few things i really hoped to accomplish by christmas:
1. paint the living room
2. get a piano
3. get a christmas tree

so much for that.
1. we had to wait for them to finish reshoring the house, and now we're waiting for the sheetrock guy to come fix the cracks and the wall texture, and then we can paint. it might be done by new year's, if we're really lucky.
2. between working, performing in annie, rehearsing for world goes round, and christmas shopping, i have not exactly had time to shop for a piano.
3. we couldn't really get a tree and then paint around it. however, thanks to urban outfitters, i now have the perfect tree for this year:

(note paint sample in the background)

merry christmas, y'all.

a couple of top ten lists

2006-12-13T17:30:00.000-05:00

so yup, we went ahead and reelected good'ol dollar bill. as far as i can figure out, these are the top ten reasons why:
10. fear of change
9. ridiculously low voter turnout (16%!!) because people were too busy christmas shopping
8. freezer money for everyone!
7. the skeletons that karen carter has in her own closet
6. resentment and defiance of the federal goverment for its handling of katrina and its failure to successfully indict dollar bill after nearly two years of investigations
5. karen carter's support of gay rights issues, which might fly in orleans parish but not in jefferson parish, which makes up a sizeable chunk of our district
4. supporters of primary runner-up derrick shepherd, who are hoping dollar bill will be removed from office, giving shepherd another chance
3. more freezer money!
2. sheriff harry lee's smear campaign, in which he trashed karen carter for having the audacity to criticize west bank law enforcement officials for turning away NOLA evacuees at gunpoint
1. people being TOTAL FUCKING MORONS who cannot comprehend the fact that no matter how bad karen carter is, no matter whether or not the feds have a solid case against dollar bill, the last message we need to be sending to the nation right now is that we are SO FUCKING RETARDED that we are willing to reelect a corrupt politician who has lost pretty much all of his political clout in DC.

hhhhaaaaaahhhhhhhnnnnnnhhhhh.

so why do i choose to stay in a city where i sometimes feel like i am surrounded by, you know, mo-rons?
10. i don't really ever interact with the morons. i sure didn't talk to anyone who voted for jefferson.
9. it's december and it's 70 degrees out and there are flowers blooming.
8. my next-door neighbor brings me lemons from her parents' tree, which i make into lemon-ginger sorbet, which i then share with my neighbor.
7. my neighbor across the street sees a couple guys standing in my driveway scoping out my house and calls me to make sure they're actually workers who are supposed to be there (they are).
6. i turn on the radio and frequently the DJ is a friend of mine.
5. i've never been a football fan, but on sunday we went to a xmas/pig roast/saints game party, and watching the saints whup the cowboys was both exhilarating and somewhat emotional.
4. i have a hilarious, dysfunctional, fabulous extended family in the new orleans theatre community.
3. crawfish, oysters, jambalaya, red beans & rice, beignets, muffalettas, chicory coffee, king cake, satsumas, gumbo, bananas foster, bread pudding...
2. i may be surrounded by morons, but i am also surrounded by music.
1. if i lived anywhere else in the country, i would spend the day before ash wednesday at work like it was any other day, instead of standing on st. charles avenue with a bloody mary at 9 a.m. vying for painted coconuts.

so there it is.

meanwhile, we've got major construction going on at our house-- they're reshoring one of the walls, which involves jacking the house up, which is really freaky when i'm sitting in the living room and suddenly i hear the jack cranking and then i hear the walls cracking and i watch as the cracks start appearing in the plaster. i know this stuff needs to be done (and it's a good thing we hadn't already painted the living room). but i really don't like seeing it happening. on some levels it's like having one's child undergoing surgery-- you know it has to be done, but you don't want to think about it, and you certainly don't want to watch it happening.

twelve days of post-k xmas, part deux

2006-12-05T12:49:00.000-05:00

i started thinking that maybe i should write a sequel to last year's "twelve days of post-katrina xmas," my silly little ditty that took on a life of its own and gave me 15 minutes of fame on xmas eve. yesterday morning i was finally inspired.

It’s a year after Katrina, and I would love to see
My street without a pile of storm debris.

One year after Katrina, and I’d be psyched to see
Honest politicians
And my street without a pile of storm debris.

A year after Katrina, and I still hope to see
Streetcars on St. Charles
Honest politicians
And my street without a pile of storm debris.

A year after Katrina, and maybe soon we’ll see
No more broken stoplights
Streetcars on St. Charles
Honest politicians
And my street without a pile of storm debris.

A year after Katrina, and still we long to see
CATEGORY FIVE LEVEES!
No more broken stoplights
Streetcars on St. Charles
Honest politicians
And my street without a pile of storm debris.

A year after Katrina, and perhaps one day we’ll see
Theatre at the Saenger
CATEGORY FIVE LEVEES!
No more broken stoplights
Streetcars on St. Charles
Honest politicians
And my street without a pile of storm debris.

A year after Katrina, and someday we might see
No more FEMA trailers
Theatre at the Saenger
CATEGORY FIVE LEVEES!
No more broken stoplights
Streetcars on St. Charles
Honest politicians
And my street without a pile of storm debris.

A year after Katrina, and I’m still waiting to see
Nagin doing his job
No more FEMA trailers
Theatre at the Saenger
CATEGORY FIVE LEVEES!
No more broken stoplights
Streetcars on St. Charles
Honest politicians
And my street without a pile of storm debris.

A year after Katrina, and we all want to see
The Corps being held accountable
Nagin doing his job
No more FEMA trailers
Theatre at the Saenger
CATEGORY FIVE LEVEES!
No more broken stoplights
Streetcars on St. Charles
Honest politicians
And my street without a pile of storm debris.

A year after Katrina, and who knows if we’ll see
Congress giving a damn
The Corps being held accountable
Nagin doing his job
No more FEMA trailers
Theatre at the Saenger
CATEGORY FIVE LEVEES!
No more broken stoplights
Streetcars on St. Charles
Honest politicians
And my street without a pile of storm debris.

A year after Katrina, and will we ever see
Curbside recycling
Congress giving a damn
The Corps being held accountable
Nagin doing his job
No more FEMA trailers
Theatre at the Saenger
CATEGORY FIVE LEVEES!
No more broken stoplights
Streetcars on St. Charles
Honest politicians
And my street without a pile of storm debris.

A year after Katrina, and fingers crossed we’ll see
Coté Sud reopen
Curbside recycling
Congress giving a damn
The Corps being held accountable
Nagin doing his job
No more FEMA trailers
Theatre at the Saenger
CATEGORY FIVE LEVEES!
No more broken stoplights
Streetcars on St. Charles
Honest politicians
And my street without a pile of storm debris!!! Seriously... who ARE these people who are just gutting their homes now?! Jeez...

© Trina Beck
December 2006

julie's cats

2006-12-01T15:29:00.000-05:00

it's got to be pretty weird for julie's cats. after over a year away from their home turf, living in cramped quarters in julie's parents' house, they're back. a couple days ago i was in my kitchen, and two of them were just hanging out on her windowsills, watching her work on her garden. i live vicariously through my neighbors' pets, so i'm glad they're back.

indian summer officially ended last night, when a cold front swept in and drop-kicked the temperature down about 40 degrees. it's cold enough that when i was walking home for lunch today, i decided someone should invent ipod headphones that double as earmuffs.

it looks like our friend lloyd will be able to paint our living room, and will hopefully be able to start next week. i'm not sure that will leave me enough time to get a tree and a piano and hang artwork before i leave for massachusetts on the 22nd, but we'll see how it goes.

my new theatre blog

2006-11-29T15:45:00.000-05:00

hey... why not?

i'm calling it "trina upon the wicked stage." as in "life upon the wicked stage ain't ever what a girl supposes," from "show boat."

indian summer thanksgiving

2006-11-29T10:48:00.000-05:00

every year, somewhere in early november, we get some nice, chilly, break-out-the-hats-and-gloves weather that makes us feel like it's really fall. (yes, for us that means the temperatures dip into the 50s or MAYBE the 40s, but that's enough for me.) but every year, just in time for thanksgiving, it soars back up into the 70s, making the turkey and pie and cranberry sauce seem strangely out of season.

this year i sleepwalked through a sunny thanksgiving at will & lisa's house with some sort of viral sinus infection (i was careful to wash my hands every five minutes so i wouldn't contaminate my fellow diners). i was too groggy and out of it to take any pictures, which is unfortunate. but when someone suggested a toast to start the meal, i knew immediately what i was most thankful for, and toasted to our miraculously hurricane-free 2006.

i am also thankful for my next-door neighbor julie finally having moved into her house. she stopped by on monday to give us some fresh grapefruits from her parents' tree.

i was not so thankful for the tubercular virus that was threatening to prevent me from performing my role in "annie," which opened on saturday. i ended up going to the ER on friday morning to get a steroid shot and various other drugs. the doctor was skeptical that i would be able to sing by saturday night, but i had no choice, since community theatre doesn't know the meaning of the word "understudy." so i walked through our back-to-back dress rehearsals on friday, with our stage manager reading my lines, our musical director singing my solos, and me lipsynching. it worked; i managed to get through our performances on saturday and sunday, though i had a coughing fit in the last scene on sunday that nearly felled me. the show itself, on the other hand, was a technical disaster. opening night went about as smoothly as a first dress, if that. but i digress. i think i may have to start another blog about my theatre life.

so now i'm more or less feeling better, though i'm still coughing and my voice is shot. and now it's officially christmas season, and it's still 75 degrees out (it is supposed to zoom back down into the low 60s/high 50s on friday). generally, the way i cope with the lack of seasons is by seasonally decorating my living space. but i have a little problem right now. back before i got dragged, kicking and screaming, into this production of "annie," chris and i planned to paint the living room and hallway together, which would more or less complete the bulk of our upstairs renovations. then "annie" happened, and chris planned to paint by himself. well, we have this texture thing going on on our walls, and chris decided to try out the special textured paint on the hallway ceiling first. it didn't work so well. our ceiling ended up with stripes. screw it, we said, let's hire someone to paint. this is where we're getting stuck. the guy that julie recommended won't call me back. and until we paint, i can't really put out my christmas stuff, and i can't buy a piano, and i can't get a tree. so i'm having a bit of a freakout, because all i want for christmas is to have our living room fully liveable. i know i should just be thankful that we HAVE a living room, and that our kitchen is done, but it's been nine months since we moved back in and i really need the upstairs to be finished.

and by the way...

2006-11-17T17:25:00.001-05:00

hurricane season officially ends in two weeks, and we seem to have made it through unscathed, knock on wood. based on the initial predictions, i was sure we'd be evacuating to atlanta at least once, probably twice, but we didn't even have the slightest scare. i wouldn't celebrate so early, except there have never been any major hurricanes recorded in november. so... i think we're good.

today we had the bellsouth guy out to fix our phone line that got fried in the storm the other night (okay, yes, we still have a nasty storm here and there, but no hurricanes). i was listening to WWOZ while i waited for him to finish fixing it. they were playing some classic jazz: louis & ella and the like. finally he was done, and i thanked him and he left. ten seconds later he came back in and said "i'm sorry, but what is that album you're listening to?" i smiled and told him that i was listening to the greatest radio station in the world, WWOZ 90.7 FM. he was an atlanta import, so he didn't know about 'OZ. i still remember how i got turned on to 'OZ; the lawyer that i worked for when i first moved here was a big fan, but it was a short-lived boyfriend a few months later who got me hooked. that made the whole relationship worthwhile, as far as i was concerned.

i may have just started someone on the road to becoming a new orleanian. once the music gets into your blood, you can never really leave.

a progress report

2006-11-16T15:35:00.000-05:00

my next-door neighbor, julie, just moved back into her house today. she's been living with her parents for over a year. i can't even imagine how insane i'd be if i were just moving back into my house now.

we were planning to break up & repour the cracked & shifted slab in our basement. however, we just discovered that we do not, as previously thought, have a floating slab in the basement, but a support slab. i was dubious about the whole breaking-it-up-and-repouring-it thing to begin with, so i'm sort of relieved, but now we need an alternative solution before we can fix the downstairs up. i don't even care any more. i just want a second bathroom down there, a decent laundry area, and storage.

meanwhile, we did finally get the new doors and windows installed downstairs. chris is currently working on painting the living room and hallway-- without my help, since i got sucked into doing "annie" when i was supposed to be taking a little break from shows. but we should have the kitchen/living room area all painted by christmas, and my goal is to buy a piano by then (my much-belated 30th b-day present) and maybe even get a christmas tree.

they're finally picking up the trash on a more or less regular schedule, but there's still no recycling. we're recycling our glass by donating it to the tulane art department's glassblowing studio.

we had a nasty thunder-and-lightning storm early yesterday morning, and i still get spooked by that kind of weather.

the pilot light on our hot water heater kept going out, and when it got chilly out and we tried to turn our heat on, it was blowing cold air. it turned out we had no gas pressure, due to the water that's STILL turning up in the pipes. this explained a lot (like why the burners on our brand-new stove were acting really weird, and why our brand-new dryer often left our clothes damp.) entergy came and flushed out our gas pipes, and now everything works, but if someone else down the street has to have THEIR pipes flushed out, we may end up with the same problem again.

we decided to have our wedding at rosy's jazz hall.

and thanksgiving is in a week. a year ago, we stayed at john & cindy's and i took advantage of her nice kitchen to make three pies. i certainly didn't expect that a year later, i'd have my own pie-crust-friendly granite countertops to make pies on. that's something i'm definitely thankful for.

accentuate the positive

2006-11-08T16:28:00.000-05:00

so naturally, i am thrilled by the dems' wins in the house and senate, and locally, we passed amendment 7 by a wide margin. and then rumsfeld iced the tasty, tasty cake of victory with his resignation. but, true to louisiana politics, one election result produced a resounding WTF??!! from anyone around here with half a brain: william jefferson, despite currently being the subject of a federal bribery investigation, still managed to get more votes in the primary than anyone else.

WTF???!!!

i know this is not the first time this kind of stuff has happened around here. for example, our former insurance commissioner, Jim Brown, was elected in 1999 despite having just been indicted for lying to the FBI.

but really people... WTF??!!!

my friend (and boss) sarah says "everyone must think they're gonna get some of that freezer money." i think she must be right. as in: hey, if dollar bill can keep $90,000 cash in his freezer, and i elect him, who's to say i won't get some freezer money of my own?

i really can't come up with a more logical explanation. meanwhile, it's tempting to assume that everyone who DIDN'T vote for jefferson will vote for karen carter in the runoff... but that theory obviously didn't work in the last mayoral runoff.

so i'll just focus on the fantastic nationwide election results, and rummy calling it quits, and our successful abolishment of the current assessor system. that's plenty to be positive about.

confessions of a former non-voter

2006-11-06T15:50:00.000-05:00

i used to hate politics and politicians with such a passion that i just didn't vote. i know... i know. awful. but when i lived in massachusetts and connecticut, i could always be fairly sure that the lesser of two evils (in my opinion) would win. then i moved to louisiana. the first election i voted in was bush-kerry 2000, even though i knew blue new orleans would never outweigh the red rest of the state. since then, i've been a stickler about voting, even though the choices are often depressing and the results even more so. our last governor's election basically came down to whether conservative voters were more comfortable with a "democrat" (but anti-abortion) woman, or a right-wing republican (but non-white) male. they took the cajun girl over the indian guy, and while i don't agree with jindal's politics by any stretch of the imagination, he's a whole lot smarter than blanco. i'm sure part of him secretly enjoyed watching her flounder in the aftermath of katrina.

anyway, tomorrow we have to vote on a couple of important things. congressman william jefferson, who still lives in the bad'ol days of corrupt louisiana democrats (i.e. huey long), is defending his seat, and one can only hope that we'll get him the hell out of congress. but we reelected nagin, so nothing will surprise me.

we're also voting on an amendment that will reduce the number of assessors in orleans parish from 7 to 1. everyone in their right mind knows that this is the best thing to do for the city. of course, there are a handful of fat cats (including the assessors themselves) who are afraid their million-dollar homes may no longer be assessed at a third of their value, and they may, god forbid, have to contribute their fair share to the city's coffers. if this amendment doesn't pass, i will be very, very angry.

living in post-K NOLA, i don't see how anyone could possibly fail to vote, since our very survival as a city may depend on the representatives we elect and the amendments we pass.

my favorite holiday

2006-11-03T17:02:00.000-05:00

the great thing about new orleans is that no one ever outgrows the whole dressing-up-for-halloween thing. we dress up for mardi gras, too. in fact, we dress up for the flimsiest of excuses.

i carved our pumpkins on my lunch break, as is my tradition. this was our first year actually living in our house on halloween, and we weren't sure if we'd have any trick-or-treaters, but we did have some, which made me happy. chris was once again forced to recycle his disco costume, but he added a jacket, shoes and a necklace from funky monkey on magazine st. i'd sewn my costume (sally from "the nightmare before christmas") and wig by hand, and spent over an hour applying makeup, and was pretty psyched with the end results.

we met up with our friends for dinner at snug harbor on frenchmen street. miles and josie were both dressed as pumpkins. laura, a week and a half from her due date, was dressed as a ticking time bomb. word on the street is that she had the baby yesterday.

after dinner, we started roaming the streets, which were packed compared to last year. i saw a couple other sallys, as i expected, but my costume was far superior, if i do say so myself. i took a video of our roamings on my digital camera:

in the course of the evening, we ran into at least 20 people we knew. we ended up staying out way too late, but hey, it's halloween.

deep breath, count to 10

2006-10-26T13:53:00.000-04:00

this morning, as i walked to work, i noticed a couple of smashed pumpkins in the street. i turned to look back at my house and ascertained that MY pumpkins were okay, then continued on to work. what i'd failed to notice was that the pumpkin-smashers had also thrown a brick through the rear windshield of chris's car, which was parked on calhoun street right in front of our house.

AAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

chris called me at work to tell me about it and to ask if i needed my car today. i called NOPD to report it, and they actually said they'd send someone out, so i walked back home and prepared to wait for hours. but they showed up within an hour, took a report, and took the brick for evidence.

meanwhile, that crucial web of community kicked in. first, my friend don lewis randomly sent me a text message that read "have a great day, my friend." then julie, my next-door neighbor (whose appliances are being delivered today and who hopes to move back into her house within the next couple weeks), offered to let us park the car in her carport until we get it fixed, since her carport has a roof and ours still doesn't.

so, as i waited for NOPD and listened to kermit ruffins singing "what is new orleans?" on WWOZ, my rage abated and i was able to put things into perspective. given the other stuff that's happened lately, if a brick through our windshield is the worst thing that happens to us, i'll take it.

not bad for community theatre

2006-10-25T12:11:00.000-04:00

while i'm on this whole "community" kick, i thought i'd segue back to the post i meant to write last week, before it was preempted by upsetting events.

so at some point during the first weekend of our run of "the full monty," our director sonny borey announced that terrence mcnally, who wrote the book (script) for the show, was planning to come down from new york for our final weekend. we spent the rest of the run making jokes about the big visit-- if someone complained about the wording of a line or the flow of the dialogue, we'd say "well, you can take that up with terrence when he gets here." i think we joked about it so much because we feared that we'd end up in a waiting for guffman-esque situation if he didn't actually show.

but he showed. on saturday night before the show, our co-director/musical director derek franklin ran around passing out notes, which we found mildly hilarious since we were in the fourth weekend of our run. act one was okay, but not our best; we didn't have our usual drummer, and the sub kind of botched a couple numbers. then, just before the climactic "michael jordan's ball" number that closes act one, our sound board fried. dead. kaput.

at intermission, we learned we'd be doing act two sans mics. somehow, this helped us focus our energy, and act two kicked ass. le petit is a small enough house that old-fashioned vocal projection really is sufficient when necessary.

after the show, we had a cocktail party in the courtyard and lobby, and i figured i'd wait a while before introducing myself to The Man. but then someone said he had asked to meet the girl who played pam. wow. i got my camera and a program for him to sign, and went and introduced myself. he was super nice, said i did a terrific job, and willingly posed for some photos.

as if that wasn't enough, derek later told us that terrence said we were the strongest group of women he'd seen in ANY production of "the full monty."

this coming from the man who wrote "master class" and has won 4 tony awards. how bout THEM proverbial apples?!

we also rated another mention (and a photo) on playbill.com.

a lot of us-- myself included-- often feel frustrated that non-new orleanians just don't understand what we're all still dealing with, and how much it means to us just to be able to do the things we used to do (like theatre, for me) in those rosy pre-K days. sometimes it's easy to nurture a persecution complex that feels sort of like teen angst: no one out there understands me. nobody gets it. so it was somehow very validating to have such a renowned theatrical figure take the time to visit our city, eat our food, drive through the devastated areas, and see our show.

terrence wrote "thank you!" on my program when he signed it. no, terrence-- thank YOU.

cyber-community, and overcoming technotardation

2006-10-24T16:24:00.000-04:00

one of the communities i neglected to mention yesterday-- only because i was blathering on and didn't want my post to be too long-- was the blogging community, several members of which i met at ashley's birthday party on saturday afternoon. as an infrequent and inferior blogger, i've only been vaguely aware of this community. but at ash's party, there were a lot of new faces, and the answer to the "so, how do you know ash?" question was almost always "the blog." kind of amazing. i'm still totally taken aback when i find that people are actually reading my blog. it's usually because ashley or daisy (my other hard-core blogger friend) have mentioned my blog on their blogs.

blog is a funny word to begin with, but when you say it multiple times in the same sentence it's even funnier.

anyway, i started blogging as a direct result of katrina, since i felt i needed to write about my experiences, and i knew there were a handful of friends and relatives that might occasionally want to read about my life in post-K NOLA. but blogging was only the beginning of the end of my resistance to most modern technologies.

october 2005: trina starts a blog
december 2005: trina gets her first cell phone ever (no, i am not making this up)
february 2006: trina gets an ipod
march 2006: trina joins myspace
june 2006: trina gets a digital camera

i've wondered why it took katrina to shove me into the 21st century, and i think it may be sort of strangely related to the whole need for community. having a cell phone and being on myspace have their down sides, but on the whole, they keep me connected to people, and that's not a bad thing. the camera documents good times with my friends and keeps me focused on the positive things in my life. meanwhile, having an ipod is like carrying an IV of music therapy with me on my walk to & from work.

it's not that i used to be totally technotarded; i'm perfectly capable of programming a VCR (no, i still don't have tivo, and don't plan on getting it), i'm often called on to figure out computer weirdness in my office, and i've been an email junkie ever since freshman year of college (which was 1993). but i really held out on all that other stuff.

i think i'm okay with the new, slightly more modernized me. i cook from scratch, and that's all that really matters, right?

community

2006-10-23T19:07:00.000-04:00

i don't think it's an accident that one of the favorite local coffee brands here is community coffee. one of the things that keeps us all here, despite everything, is the strong feeling of community.

there are scores of mini-communities in new orleans that are woven together into the overall fabric of the city, and this fabric is often what keeps us in one piece as individuals. thursday night, after writing my last (rather depressing) post, i started my night off by going to ballet class. sweat and endorphins always help my mood. but the ballet studio is also another home, my fellow dancers another family, and the importance of this can't be discounted. after ballet, i met up with a whole bunch of my theatre friends at le chat noir, where we watched our full monty castmate cynthia owen give an incredible, emotional cabaret performance. sitting in the candlelit cabaret, i felt completely, totally at home.

the theatre community offers the most intense sense of belonging for me, since i spend so much time with my fellow actors when i'm doing a show. i especially loved being at le petit, since we had the green room to hang out in, rather than being stuck in separate dressing rooms. the theatre really does become a second home; we bring our fuzzy slippers, our sweatpants, candles for the bathroom. now that i have a kitchen, i got in the habit of baking for everyone, so the green room was always stocked with ginger snaps, pumpkin bread, banana bread, or black & orange cookies. we'd watch on the monitor as the 6 main guys did the "michael jordan's ball" number, and we'd cheer and high-five them when they came upstairs panting and sweating. but inevitably, the run ends, and we pack up all our stuff and move out of the theatre, and it's easy to get depressed.

last month, right around the anniversary of you-know-what, i took a post-K stress survey that tulane conducted. i've known for a while that i haven't been quite right in the head. but i'm functional. it just sometimes takes a herculean effort to force myself to deal with unpleasant things, and sometimes i'm really irritable, and sometimes the mood swings are a bit much. so this was the verdict on whether i'm exhibiting symptoms of PTSD: "Your Score: 51. Normal Range: Under 50." great. just as i suspected, i'm teetering on the edge. sigh. not nuts enough to feel like it's worth the bother to get some therapy, but nuts enough to be not quite normal. i read chris rose's detailed account of his struggle with depression, and i think i can safely say that whatever i've got going on is much less incapacitating, though i'm sure i'd have been in even worse shape if i'd been in his place and seen the stuff he did.

so: i wrap myself in my community, as protection against the crazies. i sit on my screened-in porch on a blissfully cool sunday in october and i sew my halloween costume, which i look forward to wearing on frenchmen street on halloween night. i bake pumpkin bread and give some to my next-door neighbor. i water my plants. i spend time with my friend who was attacked last week, doing whatever i can to remind her that she is part of a larger family than the one she was born into.

angry and nauseous

2006-10-19T16:08:00.000-04:00

i was going to write today about our closing weekend of "the full monty," which was a blast and a half. but that post has been preempted by more bad things. chris wouldn't let me read the paper as i ate my cereal, because i would have puked it right back up if i read the top story: "BOYFRIEND CUT UP CORPSE, COOKED IT."

so i was already in and out of queasiness all morning, and then i talked to a friend of mine that i'd started to worry about because she hadn't returned my calls in a few days, and it turns out she was assaulted in the gated parking lot of her apartment complex the other morning.

what is going on here? is this just a bad spot, or is the crime just going to get worse and worse? where the hell is NOPD? where the hell is our mayor? do i need to start carrying pepper spray? a gun? when will it be my turn to be the victim? i have lived here for eight and a half years, knock on wood, without being mugged, raped, robbed, or grazed by a bullet. i've left my keys in the front door overnight, walked alone at night when i probably shouldn't have, driven through the hood because it's faster. i'm trying to be more careful, but if i were my friend, i would have felt perfectly safe in that gated parking lot. apparently, the gate just isn't quite high enough.

i don't know what to do. it just makes me feel exhausted.

"i am tired, i am weary
i could sleep for a thousand years
a thousand dreams that would awake me
different colors made of tears"
-"venus in furs," velvet underground

but i won't sleep for a thousand years. tonight i'll go to my ballet class, then i'll go to le chat noir to see my full monty castmate cynthia owen's cabaret show, and i'll make sure one of my friends walks me back out to my car at the end of the night.

so long, harry

2006-10-13T17:05:00.000-04:00

i knew i wasn't the only one who'd gotten a totally absurd bill from a local utility company, but apparently, even local celebrities aren't immune. chris rose's column today describes harry anderson's $7000 entergy bill as the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back and prompted him to move to asheville. i wish i'd made it to see his magic show before the kafkaesque absurdity of post-K life drove him away.

the funny thing is that after our june trip to asheville, where we got engaged, chris and i agreed that we'd probably move there if, god forbid, new orleans got hit by another katrina.

there were some positive things in the paper today. this corrupt judge who's been notorious for letting thugs back out on the street has finally been suspended by the LA supreme court. and the criminal sheriff's office is deploying deputies to help combat the marigny crime wave (oh, yeah, on tuesday, a guy shot and killed an armed robber who pulled a gun on him).

for us, the good still outweighs the bad. but i can understand how some people's scales are tipping the other way. chris rose quoted harry anderson as saying "...it's like a bad drug trip. This town was always a good drug trip. My heart is broken." i totally understand what he's saying, but for me it's still a good drug trip, despite the sometimes frequent harsh intrusions of unpleasantness. i worry, though, about ending up with my heart broken. but i've always been a believer in the "'tis better to have loved and lost..." philosophy. so i'm going to continue loving new orleans hawd, hawd, i sweah to gawd. and even sometimes adopting a yat accent to prove my point.

two faces of frenchmen street

2006-10-10T16:23:00.000-04:00

okay, for the three of you that read this, i know. i suck. i actually tried to publish a lengthy post back in june, but blogger.com had some sort of freakout and lost the whole damn thing. i was extremely irritated, so i just gave up for a while, and the longer i didn’t write, the harder it was to pick it up again. but whatever. long story short:

1. the sewerage & water board finally did end up fixing that ridiculous water bill
2. i finally got my fleur de lis tattoo
3. chris and i finally got engaged
4. our kitchen is finally done

i was inspired to write today by dichotomous events that took place within a 24 hour period on frenchmen street, one of my favorite areas in the city. but first i need to give a little more background.

so i’m currently performing in “the full monty” at le petit theatre in the french quarter, right on the corner of jackson square. i’d never auditioned for le petit before; i was afraid they wouldn’t cast me, and i heard horror stories about rehearsals running until 2 am. but one of the (usually) positive post-k changes in my personality is a greater willingness to take risks, so i auditioned and ended up with one of the main female roles, pam lukowski. i’m having a blast with the cast and i’ve fallen in love with the theatre itself, which was built in 1797 and has its own little courtyard, as well as a ghost or two. and i just love being in the french quarter.

after our matinee this past sunday, the weather was ridiculously nice, so angela and i decided to get daiquiris and wander around. we walked through the french market and found a guy selling mini harmonicas, which we naturally could not live without. then we sat outside at louisiana pizza kitchen, drank some wine, ate some food and tried to learn how to play our mini harmonicas. after that, we headed over to hookah café on frenchmen street, where we were joined by natalie and sean. we ate some more food, drank ridiculous martinis, watched belly dancers performing, and naturally smoked the hookah (just flavored tobacco, mom). somehow we ended up staying there until we were the last people there, around 1 am. we wandered over to d.b.a.; natalie had lost her i.d. and they wouldn’t let her stay, so sean walked her to her car and then the remaining three of us settled into the window booth to watch the few passersby. i started getting excited for halloween, when frenchmen street is packed to the gills with people in crazy costumes. eventually, we pulled out our harmonicas and decided to record our performance for posterity on my digital camera; the results are far from professional, but to me they’re a perfect frenchmen-street-at-3-am-on-monday-morning moment.

fast forward 16 hours, and this shit happens. “Two Men Shot, Bystander Grazed On Frenchmen: Marigny Gunman Hunted Pair Down”

i’m at a loss about this whole crime thing. these guys who got shot yesterday were arrested for murder back in 1998; unfortunately, restaurants in this city can’t afford to be picky about their lowest-paid employees, so dishwashers are often straight outta opp. but the marigny neighborhood, which includes frenchmen street, has had a lot of problems lately. mimi's, one of my favorite places, was recently the victim of an armed robbery.

so at any rate, it’s a struggle, because i still love this city so much it hurts, and i have some of my best times at places like mimi’s and frenchmen street, but there’s always that fear now in the back of my head that i’ll be the person at the wrong place at the wrong time that gets in the way when one thug tries to take out another thug.

and i don’t want to end this post on a downer note, so i’ll end it with the link to our extremely silly harmonica video.

a little bit kafka

2006-06-14T15:49:00.000-04:00

June 14, 2006

Sewerage & Water Board of New Orleans
625 St. Joseph St.
New Orleans, LA 70165-6501

Re: Account # ****************

To Whom It May Concern:

I have some major problems with a bill I just received from the Sewerage & Water Board.

First of all, the bill says it is due by June 9, but the envelope is postmarked June 13, and I just received it today, June 14.

Second, and more problematic, the bill alleges that I have been using 5500 gallons of water a day on average for the past month, and that I owe $1,191.76. This is completely absurd. For the same period last year, my water usage was 220 gallons per day.

Finally, I have been trying repeatedly to call to speak to a customer service representative, but I keep getting a busy signal.

I would appreciate a representative contacting me as soon as possible to discuss this matter.

Sincerely,

Trina Beck
**** Calhoun St.
New Orleans, LA 70118

CC: City councilwoman Shelley Midura

hellooo alberto

2006-06-12T13:27:00.000-04:00

wow, it only took a little more than a week for our first named storm to materialize in the gulf. after rehearsal last night, i watched some of the tony awards that i taped, and the lower left-hand corner of the screen kept informing me of alberto's latest coordinates. there was even the occasional scrolling banner at the bottom of the screen, bright red, encouraging me to freak out. i didn't. why bother? we're nowhere near the cone, at least for now. but i think other people are freaking out on my behalf. chris's mom called me at work to make sure i'm okay. yup... really... i promise...

speaking of work, everything has been turned upside down as the university reorganizes. i was about to write my resignation letter, and then i got scooped up by student programs, which should be considerably less stressful and should be a nice change. i'll officially start my new position on july 1, and i'm going on vacation the last week of june, but for the next two weeks i'm kind of in limbo-- still advising, but all the other advisers are moving into the temporary building cluster (aka the mod quad, aka the doris double-wide-- it sits on the former site of the doris dorm). so i'll be the loner in cudd hall. i get to stay in the same building, i'll just be moving into a different office.

so this weekend, in between rehearsals for "show boat" (which opens on thursday), i caught a couple of shows, both of which were packed to the gills. my friend's dance company, tsunami, had a full house at the CAC, and then i met up with a couple theatre buddies to see ricky graham's "naughty bits" cabaret show at le chat noir. we got the very last seats. the post-K audiences for dance, theatre, and the like have been amazing, and thus far there's no sign of them slackening, which is great. we hung out at the bar after the show, and then our night was marred by a frightening moment as we walked back to my car. we heard a gunshot, then across a parking lot we saw two guys running like hell. needless to say, we got in the car and got the hell out of there. i just hope nagin does a better job on the crime front in his second term, and doesn't let the post-K drop in crime rates lull him into complacency. because, as that moment reminded us, we've still got our share of thugs. still, i suppose it's better than having MORE than our share, as we did before.

my next-door neighbor is around a lot more now, and is hoping to get back in her house sometime in the fall. in our postage-stamp-sized front yard, where the azaleas used to be, passersby had gotten into the habit of tossing trash, since it was just a pile of dirt. but julie did some impromptu landscaping, transplanting some little flowering plants that had sprung up on the side of the house, and then she had some extra mulch that she put down, and when i got back from my lunchtime whole foods trip today she was watering all of it for us. meanwhile, our neighbor across the street has given us a key to her house so that we can do our laundry there instead of lugging it all the way to will & lisa's. i can't stress enough how lucky we are that our neighborhood has come so far; other areas that got comparable amounts of water are still ghost towns. the two saving graces for our 'hood are 1. its proximity to tulane & loyola and 2. the number of raised-basement homes, like ours, whose second floors were largely spared. a couple weeks ago, we walked over to tulane to see a performance by the joffrey ballet, who were originally scheduled to perform last fall at the damaged mahalia jackson theatre downtown. instead, they performed at dixon hall, where i'm performing this weekend with tulane summer lyric. i kept thinking how crazy it was that we live in a flooded neighborhood, but we were able to walk to a performance by the joffrey ballet. how many people can say that?

incidentally, both the joffrey ballet and the parsons dance company, who also performed at dixon this spring, waived their fees for performing, so all the money went to the new orleans ballet association. dancers do not make the big bucks, so that was incredibly generous on their parts.

okay, so there's a storm in the gulf... but honestly, right now i'm more preoccupied with whether i still have a useable pair of false eyelashes in my make-up case for first dress tonight.

open season

2006-06-01T17:15:00.000-04:00

ladies and gentlemen, start the engines on your evacuation vehicles. today marks the start of hurricane season 2006.

granted, as the times-pic points out, no hurricane has ever come within shooting distance of the gulf coast in june. still, it's an unsettling feeling.

so where do we stand as we head blindly into the season of storms?

my next door neighbor finally got her power turned back on last week.

my brother and his wife closed on a house in atlanta today. (i.e. trina & chris's new evacuation destination)

the times-picayune resumed delivery to our house today.

we finally got the first big chunk of insurance money deposited in our bank account.

downstairs is still a gutted shell.

mayor wonka was inaugurated into his second term today.

and the army corps's new report says, oh, yeah, i guess we kind of fucked up.

so... here goes nothing. fingers crossed.

festival therapy

2006-05-12T15:21:00.000-04:00

who needs drugs when you've got festivals?

french quarter fest kicked off the three-weekend festival blitz. i actually didn't make it out there until sunday; on saturday i took a gig at harrah's and hung out with my friend lacey, handing out bathroom passes to the buffet while dressed in crazy showgirl outfits (see photo). so sunday i was determined to spend the entire day at FQF.

we started out in louis armstrong park, the former site of congo square, where slaves were allowed to gather and play music on sundays. wynton marsalis and the lincoln center jazz orchestra, along with the ghanan drummer jacub addy and his group odadaa!, were premiering marsalis's new work, titled congo square, in its namesake location. it was extremely hot and the square filled up quickly as we waited for the musicians to arrive via second line. jesse jackson showed up with an entourage and shortly thereafter, the familiar trumpet and tuba sounds heralded the musicians' arrival. the concert started very late, but it was well worth the wait in the hot sun. i had worried that the piece would be dark and brooding, but it was much more celebratory, and fascinating in the way it wove african rhythms together with american jazz to show their common soul.

chris, angela and i made it almost to the end of the piece, but then realized we were close to passing out from the sun and the lack of food and water, so we headed over to jackson square for vaucresson sausages and bottles of water. sufficiently fed and hydrated, we moved on to woldenberg park-- bumping into several friends on the way-- and bought hurricanes. we caught the end of trombone shorty's set, then stuck around for the radiators, who were frankly kind of dull, but it was enough to feel the breeze off the river and sip on our hurricanes.

FQF, of course, was merely a warm-up for jazz fest. the fest was scaled back to six days this year instead of seven, and i managed to make it to 5 out of 6. i cut out of work early on the first friday to meet up with my friends in time for bob dylan's set at the acura stage. okay, so his set wasn't exactly the most inspired thing in the world, but it didn't really matter. the weather was perfect, we were barefoot and drunk and giddy, and when bob played "like a rolling stone" for his encore... ahhh.

day two was a big jazz tent day. chris was unfortunately sick with a virus, but i met up with his dad & his dad's friend laurie, as well as my friend lacey. we caught a tribute to nina simone by a woman named jhelisa, whom i'd never heard of, and this was one of the unexpected jewels of the fest. jhelisa sang over just a sax, bass & drums, an instrumentation that i've always loved (i.e. the late great mark sandman's band, morphine). the sound was phenomenal. after that, the jazz tent's population swelled and sprawled onto the surrounding pavement in anticipation of herbie hancock's set, which was kickass. afterwards, i headed over to the soco stage to hear the last half of etta james's set. dang, was etta fiesty. she's lost a ton of weight and she spent a fair amount of time grinding her booty in the direction of the audience. and, most important, she still sounds great, unlike some of the other female vocalists of her generation whose pipes have gotten pretty rusty.

on day three, the final day of the first weekend, we decided to camp out at the acura stage for bruce springsteen & the seeger sessions band. it had rained torrentially the night before, so the ground was riddled with puddles, and we wished we'd had the presence of mind to recycle our blue roof as a jazz fest tarp, as some smarter folks did. instead, we sacrified a bedsheet to the gods of the fairgrounds in order to mark our territory. we took a couple trips to the hospitality tents that my friends had hooked me up with-- the W tent for the high-end port-a-potty and free beer, the shell tent for all-you-can-eat crawfish monica-- and were back in time for allen toussaint & elvis costello. i'd never seen allen toussaint perform, and it was pretty cool to see him play a bunch of the classic NOLA tunes that he wrote. then elvis costello joined him and they played stuff from their new collaboration, "the river in reverse." pretty amazing, but we had no idea what was still to come.

no one really knew quite what to expect from bruce springsteen and the seeger sessions band. we just knew it was going to be more on the folky side, and probably wouldn't include the standard boss fare (born to run, etc). well, bruce stormed the stage with his 18-piece band and from the opening number, "oh, mary, don't you weep," he had us all in thrall. it didn't take us long to realize that we were witnessing a performance that would go down in jazz fest history. fest snobs may bitch about the excess of non-local music to be had at the fairgrounds, but springsteen's set was so in tune with his audience and his surroundings that he earned honorary status as a local, as far as i'm concerned. the whole band had an amazing energy and soul.

springsteen wrote "my city of ruins" for new york after september 11. i was unprepared for the emotional power this song held for all of us, as it might as well have been written for new orleans after katrina. i was crying hard. he sang "come on and rise up," and a sea of hands reached skyward, and i just let the tears fall. the tagline for the fest's promotional materials this year was "bear witness to the healing power of music." amen to that.

weekend two never quite lived up to the magic of the springsteen set, but even an average day at the fairgrounds is enough to soothe the soul. we caught some rockin' sets by robert randolph and bonerama. on the last day, the rain that we'd dodged for two weekends finally caught up with us in the middle of the hot 8 brass band's set. we all just kept dancing, some people holding their fest chairs upside down over their heads, as these huge fat raindrops splatted down. but it didn't last long and it felt good. after that, we headed over to see paul simon, who played most of his big hits and brought irma thomas out to sing "bridge over troubled water," which cued the group tears again. but the day ended sort of anticlimactically when fats domino cancelled due to health concerns, and he was replaced on the acura stage by lionel richie. we rolled our eyes and headed over to congo square to see ivan neville's band, dumpstaphunk, but apparently we might have been better off sticking around and embracing the Lionel Moment, as chris rose dubbed it.

at any rate, after my festival therapy, i'm feeling somewhat less of a need to visit my friendly neighborhood psychiatrist and demand to be hooked up with some antidepressants. isn't music amazing?

here comes my 19th nervous breakdown

2006-04-20T15:51:00.000-04:00

i debated just calling it quits on this whole blog thing, since i haven't written in, oh, a month and a half. but i feel the need to write some stuff down for therapeutic reasons, so i might as well write it here.

first of all, i finally figured out how to upload photos, so here's a good one:

so my last post was at the beginning of tech week for "buddy," which was about the worst tech week i've ever experienced. at one point, the petite asian woman who designed the lights started physically shaking and cursing at our (also petite and female) stage manager; at another point, our director literally had to prevent a fistfight from breaking out between scott, our technical director, and billy, who played buddy holly. scott proceeded to walk off the production for two days, leaving everyone else scrambling to finish the behemoth set in time for opening. of course, as it always does, everything did come together in the end.

that's me in the blonde wig and glasses, playing celeste on "everyday."

so then we had a blast doing the show, and i started laboring under the delusion that i was some kind of rock star, staying out way too late, drinking way too much, and even resorting to consuming red bull. i also appointed myself the ambassador of new orleans culture, and introduced our imported guest artists to some quintessentially NOLA nightlife: bonerama at the maple leaf with george porter jr sitting in on bass; tab benoit at mid-city lanes rock'n'bowl . i was very proud of myself when they went out and bought CDs by the meters and bonerama.

and then the run ended, and our new friends returned to new york and omaha, and i jumped into a two-week run of a ghost play called "the woman in black." i was the ghost. it was fun to scare the hell out of the audience, but most of my time was spent alone in my dressing room, which was pretty depressing in comparison to the boisterous and crowded "buddy" dressing room. nor were my two cast-mates inclined to go out and party, though they were entertaining enough in the limited time i did spend with them. here we are backstage, posing as "extreme makeover: woman in black edition."

and then that show ended, and for the first time in months, i had no rehearsals, no performances, and i could start focusing on the house, spending time with my long-neglected boyfriend, and dealing with the other aspects of my life that i'd been neglecting. and i soon realized that i was really, really depressed.

but why? we're back in our house; the weather has been beautiful; it's festival season, and every week i've been going to wednesday at the square; and chris & i went to a B&B out in cajun country this past weekend, which was nice. but i'm miserable. my job is a big part of it; i am really, really, really sick of it. the fact that i am apparently going to be booted out of my office on june 1st and relocated to the "temporary classroom building" (read: trailer) doesn't help, nor does the fact that no one has any idea how all the logistics of the new reorganization are going to work out. and though the assistant provost assured me that he would want me to be able to teach in the dance department again, the department can only rehire three adjuncts, so of course they are hiring the people with the most seniority.

but it can't just be about my job. i nearly had a nervous breakdown last weekend over a ridiculous laundry mishap. since we still don't have laundry facilities at our house, i brought our laundry over to will & lisa's last sunday, and made dinner for the four of us in between loads. i asked chris to switch out the loads at one point, and later discovered that instead of putting our dirty clothes in the machine, he'd put our friend lynette's clean laundry in. this made me both irrationally angry and irrationally miserable. i sat on the couch in a near-catatonic state with tears rolling down my face and thought, damn, i am not right in the head.

and i'm not the only one. chris admitted that he's been pretty depressed lately, too, and my friend angie is in a similar funk. it seems to be some kind of post-traumatic stress kind of thing. interesting. maybe it's because we spent so long pretending everything was okay, when our lives had been completely turned upside down. i feel really angry a lot lately, and it occurred to me that it's probably displaced anger about the whole katrina thing happening in the first place, and the why-me-ness of it all.

so, yeah, i'm a bit of a mess. but this weekend is french quarter festival, and then it's jazz fest, and that can only help.

home at last

2006-03-06T11:43:00.000-04:00

last night, we slept in our own bed for the first time since that sleepless saturday night, six months and one week ago, when my brother woke us up at 3 am and talked us into evacuating to houston with him. i spent most of the weekend in rehearsals, but did my best to help pack up the amazing amount of crap that we'd accumulated at will & lisa's in the three months that we stayed with them. when i got home from rehearsal last night, utterly wiped out, i was a little cranky to discover that our pillows had not yet arrived. soon, though, chris got back from his final trip, and i was able to collapse into our amazingly comfortable bed.

so we're back. but, of course, it's a lot different than it was six months and one week ago. our kitchen is out of commission, so i couldn't make myself a cup of tea last night when i got home. we borrowed a dorm fridge from our friend ash which currently holds several sample bottles of wine (for chris's job) and one carton of orange juice. we need to invest in another small fridge so we can keep some milk and cheese and stuff, too. the basement is a no-man's-land, and you can kind of smell it when you're in the bathroom, because there's some sort of airflow between the two. also, when you walk out onto the front porch, it smells of floodwater. i really wonder how long that will take to go away, and where exactly it's coming from: the ground? the house next door? our basement?

i'm looking forward to going home on my lunch break today and unpacking and cleaning up a bit. it does feel good to have our own space again, despite all the little inconveniences that keep popping up. for example: i used to keep my bike downstairs, so i'd bring it in the basement door and then go upstairs via the basement stairs. but after the city broke into our basement-- twice-- to turn off the gas (which was, of course, already off), we had to padlock the basement door from the inside. so i have to carry my bike up and down the front stairs and negotiate the door of the porch, which is a pain in the ass. and it will be a while before we have a washer and dryer again, so we'll have to do laundry at will & lisa's. and i don't know if we can get the times-pic delivered to our house; they were delivering it, sporadically, for a while, but then stopped. and i'm assuming we have no cable TV, since our cables flooded, and we're so fed up with cox that we might not bother getting it back.

but, of course, when i see all the FEMA trailers on our street as i bike to work, i really can't complain.

incidentally, it was my birthday this weekend. i had rehearsal, naturally, but then my "buddy" castmates, chris & i went to see "the last five years," the current offering at teatro wego (where we did "cabaret"). it was very good, albeit a bit of a downer, but then we all went to mimi's in the marigny for drinks (too many), tapas (delicious and super-garlicky), and dancing to the sounds of DJ soul sister. it was a blast.

happy detox day, aka ash wednesday

2006-03-01T12:16:00.000-04:00

my face is a beet-colored sunburn, my throat is sore, there is a huge pus-oozing blister on the back of my ankle from my go-go boots, i'm completely exhausted, but it was all worth it.

sunday was a crazy parade day, because on top of the four parades that were originally scheduled-- okeanos, thoth, mid-city, and bacchus-- endymion moved from saturday due to the threat of rain and rolled after bacchus. it was the first time in history that two "super-krewes" paraded back-to-back, and we all predicted that endymion wouldn't finish rolling until 5 am, since both bacchus and endymion are notorious for lengthy breakdowns when their obscenely huge floats fail to make turns or get caught up in electrical lines. in the afternoon we bopped around to three different parade parties and ran into about a million friends along the route. really, to answer kris's comment on my "clank, clank, clank" post, this is what it's all about for locals (new orleanians is the proper term, kris): it's like a city-wide, week-long block party, where you wander around, drink in hand, and run into ALL your friends. it's fantastic. at one point i saw a guy who looked vaguely familiar in some kind of crazy get-up, and i told chris to check out his outfit; it turned out to be tory mcphail, executive chef of commander's palace, which is currently being renovated and won't open till late spring. tory, meanwhile, is jetting around the country doing the celebrity-chef thing; not a bad gig. he invited us to stop by for gumbo and i regret that we didn't make it. but there were too many other people to see.

chris stayed through bacchus and then went home, since he had to work on lundi gras making last-minute alcohol deliveries. i stuck around for endymion, which i hadn't seen in years, since it's usually way too crowded. a couple of my cabaret buddies and i met up, along with the out-of-towners who are playing the crickets in the buddy holly story, all of whom are mardi gras virgins. it was hilarious to watch one of them duck as a barrage of beads came at him; in new york, he said, when people throw things at us, we run away from them. they got the hang of it, though. i managed to get beaned in the forehead so hard that i saw stars; i grabbed my friend's drink and held it to the rapidly growing lump for a while, which helped, but i still had a goose egg on my face for the rest of the night. the fact that this didn't deter me from continuing to catch beads was highly amusing to the mardi gras virgins. miraculously, endymion finished rolling at a reasonable hour.

on lundi gras i slept in, went to our house & took a bath (i am so excited to be able to take baths in my own bathtub again-- will & lisa's is european-sized, way too small), went for sushi with my friend natalie, and then we stocked up on provisions for her place on the parade route. the monday night parades are proteus (boring) and orpheus (fun). proteus throws nothing but red & white beads with seahorses on them. yawn. we stopped by a theatre-people party and caught seahorse beads for a while, then we moved down by natalie's and watched orpheus. the crickets elected to skip parades that night in favor of looking at boobs in the french quarter. ah, mardi gras virgins. our friend frannie, one of the kit kat girls from cabaret, was riding with her dad in orpheus and gave us heaps of beads. while trying to find my friend sherie on the leviathan float, i found my friend lara on the same float, so both she & sherie hooked us up.

after stopping at natalie's for a bit and then going to the columns hotel for a drink with a bunch of theatre buddies, i went home to get some sleep so we could get up for zulu on mardi gras morning. this is the tradition: after several days of nonstop partying, you have to get up at 8 am, fix yourself a bloody mary, and head out to see the zulu parade. chris & i dressed up in our usual groovy mardi gras day outfits (me as a go-go dancer, chris in a huge afro) and headed down to natalie's, where we had bloody marys and donuts for breakfast and then headed out to the parade route. only one of the crickets managed to make it through mardi gras morning, which wasn't surprising; mardi gras virgins never know how to pace themselves.

out at the route, we met up with our other friends, along with their kids: will & lisa with 1-year-old josie, dave & laura with 2-year-old miles, and john & cindy with newborn lillian for her first mardi gras. there were the usual frantic attempts by the crowd to score hand-painted zulu coconuts, and as usual, i was sure i wouldn't get one, but then a guy on the last float liked my outfit and decided to hand me one. of course, it wasn't that easy. as soon as the coconut came over the edge of the float and i went to grab it, everyone around me rushed in too and i found myself squashed against the float, with my bloody mary dripping down my leg and into my go-go boot. the rider took the coconut back so no one else would get it, and i squeezed alongside the float, determined to get the coconut that was rightfully mine. when i caught up to the rider again, he warned me to be careful, and then stealthily handed it to me.

after zulu, we needed some serious sustenance, so nat, kristin and i decided to make a popeye's run. a trip to the popeye's on the parade route on mardi gras day is only recommended if you have a good buzz on and are prepared to hang out in line with your friends for a long, long time. it actually only took about an hour, not nearly as bad as we expected, and then we brought our booty back to the boys and ate it at nat's apartment.

many mouthfuls of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, red beans & rice, french fries, and biscuits later, we were all lying on the floor ready for a nap. everyone else had stayed up the night before till about 5 am, so chris & i were the only ones who resisted the urge to sleep and rallied to head downtown. we walked down to the french quarter & met up with sherie & AJ at a balcony party on st. peter street. we normally never make it downtown after zulu, but i'm so glad we did; everyone's in costume, there are brass bands and drum groups walking around, and the weather was so amazing that i just couldn't stop smiling. after hanging out on the balcony for a while, we headed down to frenchmen street, the same place we always go for halloween, and it was just like halloween only warm and sunny and there was loud marengo and calypso music playing and everyone was dancing. we ran into a zillion people we knew, including my friend angie, who hooked us up with free drinks and a bathroom at snug harbor where she works. and we saw other familiar faces, like the big bearded dude with the tympani who was there at halloween, too. it was really just magical, and i feel totally incapable of describing it.

and now it's wednesday, and i'm sitting here at work, where it's very quiet because the students are on spring break, and i think i'm getting sick, and my birthday is on saturday, and i have rehearsal tonight, and i need to get my car registered, and we need to move back into our house, and life is back to being a lot less crazy. but i don't think i'll ever be able to live somewhere where the day before ash wednesday is just another tuesday.

my friend damon

2006-03-01T11:57:00.000-04:00

i need to write about mardi gras. but first i need to dedicate a moment to a friend of mine who was killed by a stray bullet in DC this past weekend. damon ward was one of the nicest people i've ever known. why is it always the nice guys who end up being innocent bystanders when some thugs pull out guns?

we'll miss you, damon.

clank, clank, clank

2006-02-24T11:37:00.000-04:00

every new orleanian knows the familiar sound and feel of a neck full of beads. as you stumble back to your mardi gras central (for me, my friend AJ's apartment at 2nd and st. charles), the beads around your neck clank in rhythm with your stride. clank, clank, clank. it's not so much the first marching band playing the theme from sportscenter, or the first float, or the first king cake that makes me realize it's mardi gras every year, but the first post-parade walk with my personal percussion section. music to my ears.

so mardi gras for me started last night, when i caught my first parades of the season: babylon (boring, except for my brother's band, who were playing "domino" when they rolled by us), chaos (great floats, weak throws except for the float-specific plastic cups and trading cards), and my absolute favorite, muses. i am a muses groupie. one of these days i will ride, but first you have to join as a non-riding member and pay $100 dues every year until a spot comes open, at which point you pay > $1000 to ride. a lot of money, and i can never bring myself to cough it up. but oh, to be a muse. i got some fabulous loot, some from friends, some from strangers: two hand-decorated shoes, muses manicure/pedicure sets, a muse doll, of course some fabulous beads, and all kinds of other stuff. and there were all the typically atypical elements of a muses parade: fantastic fiberoptic dragonfly and butterfly walking puppets; the "camel toe lady steppers," a dance team made up of women of all shapes & sizes, among whose chaperones was my friend steve's crazy friend juan, who rescued people in a "borrowed" boat and was featured in GQ and the times-pic; and the rolling elvi, a squadron of about 50 elvises in red capes on scooters.

check out pics from last night's parades.

i have rehearsal tonight, so unfortunately i will miss krewe d'etat, another one of my favorites. i'll also miss tomorrow's parades; i'm sorry to miss tucks, but not so sorry about missing endymion, which is notorious for horrific crowds and three-hour breakdowns.

the really kind of crazy thing is that this year marks the 150th anniversary of mardi gras in new orleans.

i designed a fleur de lis tattoo for myself. i'm very excited.

HAPPY MARDI GRAS

back in the saddle again

2006-02-22T18:35:00.000-04:00

three or four weeks ago, i took my poor bike down to bicycle michael's in the marigny to be overhauled. he warned me that it would take a few weeks, because he said they could only handle doing one flooded bike a day; it was just too depressing. well, i picked it up this weekend, and it felt so good to ride it to work today. i really thought it was a goner at first, so i'm thrilled that it's been resurrected. we haven't done chris's bike yet-- wanted to wait for more cash flow-- so his is still sitting forlornly in the basement.

whenever we have time, we're trying to get the house in order so we can move back in. i've spent a couple lunch breaks cleaning up the front porch and the bathroom, and chris cleaned up the sheetrock mess in the hallway, but we still have to do the living room. and we still need to get a little fridge or something.

mardi gras fast approacheth, though, and i'm already knee-deep in rehearsals for the buddy holly story , which opens march 10 (yikes), so that doesn't leave a whole lot of time for house stuff. today i spent my lunch break making a new sign for the muses parade, my favorite one, tomorrow night (luckily, i'm not called for rehearsal). i'd been using the same one for the past few years-- a pair of old pointe shoes attached to a sign reading "muse shoes"-- but it drowned. so i made a new sign reading "welcome home muses," and did the same bit with the old pointe shoes (it usually gets me some good loot).

the first parades rolled this past weekend, but i was too busy with "cabaret" to go see them. however, i did get to drive past a couple of them with my friend sarah, who took me in her brand-new car to pick up my prescription at the trailer rite aid at st. charles & louisiana after ballet class on saturday morning.

yes, the trailer rite aid. some things are still pretty weird around here. i used to go to the rite aid at st. charles & napoleon, but it hasn't reopened. the only reason i went to the trailer rite aid instead of to a different, more convenient pharmacy is that i miss my pharmacist and i'm hoping he comes back. seriously. he's this nice guy named joe who actually brought his whole family to see me play roxie in "chicago." so seeing him every month to pick up my prescription is one of those little pre-K rituals that i still miss. but the people at the trailer rite aid don't know if he's coming back. i hope he & his family are doing okay.

i also hope my next-door neighbor is all right. we used to see her at least once a week, but i haven't seen her in a long time. she was having such a rough time of it, and i worry about her.

so even though things are getting more and more back to "normal," there are frequently things that jar you and remind you that there's still a whole lot of crap beneath the surface.

but we're rallying for mardi gras, damnit. laissez les bons temps rouler encore!

i think i may get a fleur de lis tattoo.

damn, and i thought the times-pic review was good...

2006-02-17T12:45:00.000-04:00

check out this review by patrick shannon. holy crap.

cookin' with gas

2006-02-16T12:18:00.000-04:00

yes, folks, entergy turned our gas on yesterday. hard to believe, but our tenant reports that he can indeed take a hot shower, and the stove works, too. we still need to do some wiring on the HVAC system, which should be done monday, i think, but otherwise we are good to go. chris thinks we should move back in next weekend... which happens to be mardi gras weekend... but hey. i'm ready. we do have a whole lot of cleaning up to do. our hallway and living room are still covered in plastic sheeting which is in turn covered with bits of sheetrock which we are tracking all over the place which is really not good for the hardwood floors. and we still need to set up some sort of temporary kitchenette sort of thing while we redo the kitchen. but goddamnit, it's been six months and i am ready to have my own space again. we have been incredibly lucky; far from being antsy for us to leave, will & lisa keep talking about how they're going to miss having us at their place. we'll probably still be over there all the time to do laundry and eat with them while we fix our place up.

in other good news, my bike has been overhauled and is ready for pickup. i can't wait. i'm sick of driving to work and parking three miles away.

and "cabaret" has been a huge success, with great reviews in the times-pic and the gambit. the gambit review is really too much of a plot synopsis, but still, it's a nice review. it's also provided an excuse for my friends and family to visit NOLA, which is a good thing. we were supposed to close this past sunday, but we're held over for a fourth weekend. oh, and we may be going to croatia this summer... it's a long story.

and then there's my job. i still have one, so i know i'm lucky. and i've been insanely busy (hence the lack of posts). but the vibe around here is not so good. there is some major tension between certain of my coworkers that never existed pre-K, and there's also a lot of general anxiety about the pending reorganization and the fact that we still don't know any details. and there's a lot of bitterness and resentment over the way the president and provost have been making decisions. i'm just taking it day by day, since i have so much else to think about with the show and the house and all. but there's sort of a pervading uneasiness about everything right now.

LET THERE BE LIGHT

2006-01-25T13:03:00.000-04:00

no time to write. students beating down my door. cabaret opens friday. (check out our listing in gambit weekly-- scroll down-- they forgot to mention we run through 2/12) but just in case anyone is occasionally reading this, yes, they finally turned our power on last week. my tenant called me and left a voice mail saying "i'm at the house and you're not going to believe who's here!" he'd seen the entergy truck working down the street, and he approached them, ready to offer a bribe. but our house was the next one on the list. i went by after work, turned the breakers on, and went around the house turning on lights, squealing with glee. it's really surreal to have the power back. so now we just need to get the gas on, get the electrician to hook up the new HVAC, and we can pretty much move back in. the roofers should be done today. we're scrambling to keep enough money in our account to pay the contractors, since we STILL don't have a flood check and there's just a ton of paperwork to go through to get disbursements from our SBA loan. but WE HAVE POWER!!!

praying to the gods of entergy, and other anecdotes

2006-01-10T18:14:00.000-04:00

the city inspector OK'd our house to get power. entergy confirmed that they have received the permits. but they can't tell us when we can expect to actually have the power turned on. it could be days... weeks... months? so please join me in praying to the entergy powers that be (no pun intended). the HVAC guy is supposed to start on monday, so if all goes well, or as well as can be expected, we could possibly move back in at the beginning of february. possibly.

this past weekend, in addition to rehearsing for "cabaret" (we ran the show twice on sunday, and it's in pretty good shape considering we don't open for three weeks), i had two experiences of note. one was attending the wedding of one of chris's co-workers. yes, another wedding. anyway, the ceremony was in the chapel at trinity episcopal on jackson avenue, and the reception was held at a private home in the garden district. i've been in some pretty swanky NOLA homes, and this one put them all to shame. it was obscene. when we walked in the door, i did a double take at the band, which was no mere wedding band, but the astral project, one of NOLA's most prominent local jazz bands. but hey, a gig's a gig, as 50 cent proved when he recently performed at some girl's bat mitzvah. the house was naturally equipped with the de rigeur trophy kitchen: wolf range, enormous island with bar seating, etc. however, since the wolf range lacked a hood or any other form of ventilation, we concluded that no one ever actually cooks in the kitchen, unless you count the caterers. how depressing.

it was easy to figure out who our hosts were, since there were enormous portraits of them adorning nearly every wall: the wife in an evening gown, the younger son in a mardi gras page's costume. they seemed to be descended from a long line of mardi gras royalty, judging from the older portraits that also hung on the walls. the wife eventually introduced herself to us, told us we looked fabulous, and took a picture of us. debutantes must have training sessions on How to Hold Parties and Make Your Guests Feel Welcome in Your Obscenely Large Garden District Mansion. speaking of debutantes, the times-picayune society page is once again abuzz with pictures and cheesy descriptions of balls and sweet sixteen parties. pre-K, there were white debutante balls, black debutante balls, and a very few racially mixed debutante balls. post-K, there seem to be hardly any black debutantes around here.

my other notable experience this weekend was a gathering of local dancers at the performance site for one river mississippi, a site-specific dance piece that will be performed simultaneously in seven cities along the mississippi river on june 24th. the project was in the works pre-K, but now it obviously has even more resonance for us. and happily, the group we are working with is a lot more diverse than the debutantes on the times-pic society pages. we all explored the space together, shared some ideas, and met the project's director, who is based in minneapolis. i think it's going to be pretty cool. the director was in town on her way back from choosing a new site for the southernmost location, since the original location, (venice, LA) is still underwater.

status report: new year's 2006

2006-01-02T18:20:00.000-04:00

i thought i'd take a moment to review where we're at, four months after katrina:

ELECTRICAL: our electricians finished the necessary work last week. they'd put in for a city inspection when they started the work, and they said the turnaround time was normally about four days. when four days went by and they hadn't heard from the city, they called to see what was going on, and got chewed out by someone who explained that they're down from ten inspectors to three inspectors-- THREE-- and the turnaround time is now three weeks. once the city finally comes out to inspect it, we will have another long wait for entergy to come out, based on everything i've heard from my neighbors and coworkers.

GAS: after about seventeen visits from the plumbers, our two new water heaters have been installed. our gas lines have been inspected and leaks have been fixed. gas is available. but we can't get the gas back on until we replace the HVAC furnace, which won't happen until we get the electricity back on, because the HVAC installers don't want to work without electricity.

MOLD: the basement has been completely gutted, pressure-washed, and treated with moldicide. but it's started smelling kind of funky down there again, so we probably need to re-treat it. we've ripped out all the moldy sheetrock upstairs (from the roof damage) and sprayed the moldy areas with bleach; the sheetrock's been replaced on the tenant's side, but we're waiting to replace it on ours until after we redo the kitchen.

INSURANCE: homeowners cut us a check, but they were smoking some really good crack when they estimated the replacement cost of our slate roof, so we are still trying to get enough money from them to actually replace the roof with something other than thatch. they also mysteriously ignored the tenant's side of our house on the adjuster's report, although the adjuster was shown the damage on that side. flood is still processing our adjuster's report, so we still have no idea what they're giving us.

unfortunately, i don't have a NOLA new year's eve story, as chris & i said good riddance to 2005 at my friend anu's wedding in jackson, mississippi. we did get back by mid-afternoon on a downright sultry new year's day, in time to hang out with several friends at will & lisa's place (our current home) and eat gumbo prepared by our friend lynette and her family, who were visiting from opelousas. and of course, we ate black-eyed peas for luck and cabbage for money in the new year.

here's hoping it's happy, healthy and hurricane-free.

holy crap it's everywhere

2005-12-27T19:09:00.000-04:00

i did a google search and discovered that my "twelve days of post-katrina christmas" has made it into:
the WWL-TV forum (with 287 views!)
the democracy for america blog, with corresponding posts on all the sub-blogs for each state, and amusingly, edited slightly
some texas chick's blog
hunt'n'fish dot com
the AOL travel message board (with a note: "author unknown"... only because some jerk decided to edit out my byline!)
on the website of jim brown, former LA insurance commissioner, best known for being elected to office despite being under indictment by the federal government

and so on... i've created a monster.

christmas eve on the creole queen, and a taste of celebrity

2005-12-27T11:52:00.000-04:00

the weather didn't bode well for bonfires or river cruises as we drove out to the docking site in st rose. as we started rolling down the river, sheets of rain pelted the windows. we were initially sat at one table next to some beer-drinking folks, but then the hostess realized she'd made a mistake and we were moved to a table of people who, we later learned, were a family of insurance adjusters. my friend sherie's sister monica was sitting at a table nearby. there was a trad jazz band playing called new orleans spice; a few hors d'oeuvres were passed around, but not quite enough to offset the open bar.

eventually the rain cleared up and chris and i walked around the upper decks. it was actually pretty warm out. judging from the accents we heard, we had some real live cajuns on the boat.
every time i crossed paths with one of our former neighbors, he lamented the fact that we'd been replaced by some "church people" who had their bibles out and were playing some sort of religious card game. the more beer he drank, the more impassioned were his lamentations. finally, when the buffet dinner was served, our former neighbors got rather argumentative when they, like us, waited until everyone else had been served only to find that there was no more rice, seafood pasta, or bread pudding. they made a small scene, demanding to see the chef and the captain, while we rolled our eyes and ate our gumbo over jambalaya instead of plain rice. not a bad tradeoff, though i was a little disappointed about the bread pudding.

so this is where the story gets good. chris & i were sitting at our table, which was some distance from the band, so we only half heard the bandleader's announcement that a couple of ladies had brought in a song that they'd printed off the internet, and that they were going to try to play it, though the banjo player didn't know the chord changes. we heard him say something about "post-katrina christmas," and chris said "what if it's your song?" it dawned on me that it really conceivably could be, but i said nah, no way. but sure enough, the band started playing, and the bandleader sang "on the first day of christmas my true love gave to me... the power turned back on by entergy." holy crap! it was indeed my song. i knew it had sort of made the rounds, but this was really something else. i explained to our tablemates that i'd written it, and wondered whether i should go tell the band that i wrote it; i figured no one would believe me, but chris and our tablemates encouraged me to go tell them. so as the song ended, i crept up to the bandstand and found the two ladies who'd brought the song in. they'd actually printed it off my blog. i told the bandleader the story, he announced it to the crowd, and i skulked back to my table, blushing.

later on in the evening, after seeing the bonfires (very pretty, and only a few seemed a little damp from the earlier rain), the band announced that they'd had several requests to play the 12 days of post-katrina xmas again. i said what the hell and went up to sing it with the band. of course, i'd never actually sung it before, and i didn't realize how hard it is to say "seven sacks of sheetrock," especially after two bloody marys and three glasses of wine. but eventually i got the hang of it.

after my performance, the kids on the boat were very impressed with me. one nine-year-old music mogul-in-training in a skull cap and baggy pants offered to buy the lyrics for $5, but i turned him down. a little girl came up and asked the address of my blog for her nanny, but confessed that she'd never be able to remember it, so i went and wrote it down for them. i posed for a picture with one of the ladies who brought the lyrics in, and received many compliments from other passengers. it was hilarious.

of course, i made sure to tell everyone that we STILL haven't gotten the power turned back on by entergy.

a list of excuses for not posting for a while

2005-12-23T11:12:00.000-04:00

1. the house. nearly every day i have to run over there at some point (sometimes twice) to meet a plumber or other contractor. it's been mostly plumbers, though, because two weeks and several plumber visits after i bought those two water heaters from home depot, they are STILL not completely installed. i got the 50-gallon ones because they were in stock, but now they can't get them to fit quite right with the existing venting system. should've just special ordered the #$&^% 40-gallon ones and they'd probably be all done. and then there's all the fun paperwork. the other day, we had a three-hour ordeal trying to get stuff notarized for our loan modification; that was fun. and we're still trying to explain to our homeowners insurance co. that $13K is not nearly enough to fix our roof (the lowest estimate we've gotten was $19K). and we still haven't even heard back from flood; our adjuster finally got the paperwork in, and it's under review. it's really pretty much a full-time job trying to handle all of this. which brings me to

2. my job. i've been pretty busy with all the students who've waited until now to call and email with their issues, real and imagined. and this week i moved into the upstairs office, since jamie, our new assistant dean, resigned and we won't be replacing her. i'll only be here for 6 months, until tulane college is disbanded under the new reorganization plan, but i figured i might as well enjoy it while i can, because who knows where and under what conditions i'll end up working. naturally, jamie's office was one of the ones that was NOT all packed up by belfor, so i had to pack up all her stuff for her, and there was a lot of it.

3. the holiday season. no nutcracker this year, but i've been plenty busy trying to squeeze in all ofmy holiday shopping. i refused to do most of my shopping online as i usually do, preferring instead to support my local retailers, and it felt good to do it; but it does take a lot more time out of your day. and in the past couple weeks i've been to two baby showers, three holiday parties, a play featuring my friend lisa, a cabaret show featuring my friend ricky, and the list goes on. and it's been great... but it's all kept me very busy.

4. cabaret. two weeks into rehearsals, i think it's finally hit me that i really do get to play sally bowles. wow. and i have a lot of lines, a lot of lyrics, and a lot of movement to remember. since our lovely brand-new theater in westwego got peeled like a grape by katrina, we will be performing in the community center next door, which is being slowly transformed into some sort of theatre space. actually, it should be pretty cool-- cabaret is a great show to do in a small space, so that the audience feels like they're actually at the kit kat club. it's great to be in rehearsals again and to be working with a lot of old friends. i've been crying a lot less lately. i also had a great time at a theater-folk christmas party where i enjoyed seeing theater buddies like julius, an enormous gay man with a bald head, a bushy black beard, a beer belly, and hoop earrings, who tends to wear short shorts 10 months out of the year but was decked out for the party in a pair of jeans and a fleece vest, unzippered to the belly button, with nothing on under it. he's a doll. and i saw brandi, who was velma to my roxie in "chicago," and whom i last saw over the summer when both of us were vying for the role of sally. i felt kind of bad about beating her out, but her luck went from bad to worse with katrina, when she & her family in chalmette lost absolutely everything. so i was thrilled to hear that she'd just gotten engaged, has an apartment uptown, and is looking forward to starting grad school at UNO in january.

so, anyway, i think i have some pretty good reasons for not having time to write. but i've been wanting to; there's always so much to write about. for example: everywhere you go around here, you still hear people telling their evacuation stories to friends that they've just bumped into for the first time since the storm. everywhere. and everywhere you go, you still hear (or find yourself a part of) the same conversations: "so how'd you do?" "oh, not too bad, we didn't get any water but we had a couple trees come through the roof. you?" "oh, we lost everything." the inflection is usually the same as if the speakers were discussing the weather. i know that in the rest of the country, no one has any concept how much katrina still pervades every moment of our lives, even those who did relatively okay. it's just weird to think about.

but, hey, it's christmas. right now aaron neville is singing a holiday song on WWOZ, who have finally moved back to NOLA from baton rouge. my office is about to go to lunch at the savvy gourmet. tonight, chris & i are joining our friends john & cindy to see the scaled-down celebration in the oaks and then to have reveillon dinner at upperline restaurant. and tomorrow we are going on a riverboat cruise on the creole queen to see the bonfires along the mississippi, a cajun christmas tradition to light the way for papa noel.

merry christmas, new orleans. i still loves ya hawd, hawd, i sweah to gawd.

a year ago today

2005-12-09T12:41:00.000-04:00

last year, when we were buying our house, i put together a 3-ring binder with sections for mortgage, appraisal, insurance, and so forth. now we've been carting it around stuffed with manila folders labeled FEMA, home insurance, flood insurance, SBA. i knew it was last year around this time that we actually found the house and put it under contract, so i flipped through the binder a couple nights ago and looked at the dates. it was exactly a year ago today, december 9 2004, that we signed the contract. a year ago right now i was overwhelmed with handling all the paperwork that goes along with buying a new house; i'd forgotten just how stressful it was. and now i'm dealing with another round of house-related paperwork, and it's much worse.

the funny thing is that now it's starting to look like, if we're really really lucky and things move fairly quickly after our electrician comes out next week, we might be able to move back into our house right about the same time we moved in last year: mid-january. so in some ways there's some deja vu going on, and it's pretty weird. it's crazy to think about the fact that we were only able to spend 7 months out of our first year actually living in our new house.

yesterday i had yet another one-step-forward-two-steps-back kind of experience. the plumber called to say they'd gotten a city inspector to come out, so i had to go meet them at the house. i was pretty psyched that we got the inspector out so quickly. but when the inspector and the plumbers arrived-- early, no less-- the inspector almost immediately said they were wasting their time, because we hadn't replaced the water heaters or HVAC system.

it would have been nice, i commented, if someone had explained to me that the water heaters & HVAC had to be replaced BEFORE the inspection. we've been trying to get water heaters for weeks, but no one seemed to be able to tell us whether it was possible to get water heaters installed if there was no gas running through the lines.

so now we're set back a few more weeks, at least, on getting the gas restored, because the HVAC guy said he can't replace the HVAC system until the power's back on.

after that i went out to home depot for an umpteenth attempt at getting water heaters. we wanted the 40-gallon 12-year warranty gas model, which was a special order, but they had 50-gallon in stock, so i consulted with chris via cell phone and we decided to just get the 50-gallon ones. naturally, i got stuck with a woman who'd never processed an installation order before, and 45 minutes later i was ready to slit my wrists. i think i bought two water heaters, and i think they're supposed to call us at some point today to install them, but i couldn't tell you for sure. it's entirely possible that i just made a $1500 donation to home depot.

august on the calendar, december in the air

2005-12-05T18:08:00.000-04:00

we just returned to our office on campus, after spending weeks asking the powers that be to let us come back. our office didn't flood, but it apparently had some sort of damage, because they ripped up most of the rugs and moved most of the furniture around. said rugs and said furniture have still not been replaced. strangely, those of us whose homes had the most damage-- me, robert, tara, steven & sarah-- are the ones whose offices are pretty much intact. on the other hand, george, emma and darroch, whose homes all did fine, came back to offices that were either empty or turned upside down. so emma & darroch are working on the mezzanine, george has gone home for the day, and i am enjoying being back in my own space, despite the lack of heat. after a sweltering 80-degree weekend, the temperature plummeted and tonight it's supposed to get down into the 30s. maybe we'll use mike & gayl's fireplace... they left it all set up for us to use.

meanwhile, in my office, it's still august; at least if you go by the calendar on the wall, the paperwork on my desk, and the message next to my phone. so very strange.

i spent the morning in our house while the plumbers inspected our gas lines and fixed the leaks, and while it got progressively colder. $1200 later, we're ready for the city inspection, and then for entergy. i was very bummed to discover that the electrician is not scheduled for this friday, but the friday after that-- the 16th. if we have power by new year's, it will truly be a miracle.

but our calendar is totally packed with baby showers, xmas parties, theatre outings, and the like, so this month should go by quickly.

oh, and i bought a couple of xmas wreaths at michael's after my umpteenth thwarted attempt to purchase a water heater at home depot (don't ask) and i stuck them on the front of our house and it looks a lot happier now. :)

The Twelve Days of Post-Katrina Christmas

2005-12-05T18:05:00.000-04:00

anyone who's reading this blog has probably seen this already, but just in case... yes, i wrote it.

The Twelve Days of Post-Katrina Christmas
by Trina "no, it's not short for anything" Beck

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...
The power turned back on by Entergy.

On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...
Two rubber gloves
And the power turned back on by Entergy.

On the third day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...
Three flood adjusters
Two rubber gloves
And the power turned back on by Entergy.

On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...
Four jugs of bleach
Three flood adjusters
Two rubber gloves
And the power turned back on by Entergy.

On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...
Five MREs!
Four jugs of bleach
Three flood adjusters
Two rubber gloves
And the rubber turned back on by Entergy.

On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...
Six FEMA payments
Five MREs!
Four jugs of bleach
Three flood adjusters
Two rubber gloves
And the power turned back on by Entergy.

On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...
Seven sacks of sheetrock
Six FEMA payments
Five MREs!
Four jugs of bleach
Three flood adjusters
Two rubber gloves
And the power turned back on by Entergy.

On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...
Eight electricians wiring
Seven sacks of sheetrock
Six FEMA payments
Five MREs!
Four jugs of bleach
Three flood adjusters
Two rubber gloves
And the power turned back on by Entergy.

On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...
Nine sweepers sweeping
Eight electricians wiring
Seven sacks of sheetrock
Six FEMA payments
Five MREs!
Four jugs of bleach
Three flood adjusters
Two rubber gloves
And the power turned back on by Entergy.

On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...
Ten dump trucks hauling
Nine sweepers sweeping
Eight electricians wiring
Seven sacks of sheetrock
Six FEMA payments
Five MREs!
Four jugs of bleach
Three flood adjusters
Two rubber gloves
And the power turned back on by Entergy.

On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...
Eleven roofers roofing
Ten dump trucks hauling
Nine sweepers sweeping
Eight electricians wiring
Seven sacks of sheetrock
Six FEMA payments
Five MREs!
Four jugs of bleach
Three flood adjusters
Two rubber gloves
And the power turned back on by Entergy.

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...
Twelve plumbers plumbing
Eleven roofers roofing
Ten dump trucks hauling
Nine sweepers sweeping
Eight electricians wiring
Seven sacks of sheetrock
Six FEMA payments
Five MREs!
Four jugs of bleach
Three flood adjusters
Two rubber gloves
And the power turned back on by Entergyyyyy! PLEASE! PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!

© Trina Beck 2005

on the upswing: seamen, streetlights, and shopping

2005-12-03T16:27:00.000-04:00

on prytania street, in the lower garden district, there is a norwegian seamen's church. i've long wondered at its existence, given the relative absence in new orleans' ethnic gumbo of persons of nordic descent, and the fact that this church further narrows its focus to seafaring norwegians, which must make for a particularly small congregation.

however, yesterday i saw this listing in the times-picayune:

Christmas Boutique Norwegian Seamen's Church, 1772 Prytania St. In lieu of the traditional holiday bazaar, the ladies auxiliary will sell Christmas cookies and Scandinavian themed gifts, noon-3, Tues.-Sat. through Dec. 15. Open-faced sandwiches and cakes sold on Saturdays. Call 525-3602.

this was too good to pass up. the norwegian seamen's church even has a LADIES' AUXILIARY. chris and i headed over there about an hour ago and were greeted by several real live norwegians, who were selling various christmas tchotchkes, bottles of a beverage called "glogg," knit sweaters and socks, and The Viking Cookbook (chris opened it and the first recipe he saw was for nettle soup... mmm, nettle soup).

i bought a little baggie of christmas cookies from an elderly norwegian lady, and then we got an assortment of the open-faced sandwiches: salmon with scrambled eggs, some type of sausage, pate, and roast beef. we also got a slice of almond cake. the guy who took our money eagerly asked if we'd ever had norwegian sandwiches before; we told him we hadn't. he recommended eating them with a nice cup of coffee.

we brought them back to mike & gayl's, i dutifully brewed some coffee, and we had our first-ever norwegian sandwiches. okay, so they weren't a spectacular culinary experience, but it was worth it. and the almond cake was very yummy.

as you can probably tell, i'm in a bit of a better mood. it really started last night when i decided to go by our street on the way home from work and see if the streetlights on our block were on yet, since entergy told me that would indicate that power is available. the streetlights on story street (our cross street) have been on for weeks, but so far no luck with our block, which had me worried that even after we get the electrician to rewire the basement, and get the city to inspect it, there still might not be power available. so i sat in my car as it got dark and watched the streetlights, praying that they'd come on. and they did! i wanted to jump up and down.

last night john & cindy had us over for dinner to thank us for dog- and bird-sitting. they felt really bad that our weekend had not been entirely restful. cindy made crab cakes, cabbage rolls stuffed with homemade pork sausage, lentils, and cranberry souffles. we had a little too much wine, but after a ballet class this morning i felt thoroughly cleansed. i decided to do some shopping on magazine street and support the local economy. first i stopped in at my friend mary carol's store, the n.o. surf shop (apparently people find places to surf around here). i hung out with her for a while and bought myself a t-shirt. then i got a muffin at the little vietnamese/french bakery across the street and stolled along amid the other christmas shoppers, stopping at scriptura to buy a birthday gift and some cards. by now i was really in a great mood.

one of the reasons i started this blog was to counteract the overly negative tone of most of the press reporting about new orleans (not that enough people are reading it to really make a difference, but still). so i didn't like the fact that my last few posts were getting kind of down. but the highs and lows are the reality of my life right now, and i guess i just need to roll with it, focus on the good stuff, and let myself get a little depressed when i need to.

for now, though, i'm still psyched about actually setting foot inside the norwegian seamen's church. awesome.

well, so much for that

2005-12-01T11:42:00.000-04:00

yesterday morning i packed all our stuff up at ash's so it was ready to be crammed into my car on my way to ballet class after work. (ash, thanks... we did drink some of the beer, and i ate three pop tarts... but we left you the champagne.) as usual, i was in much better spirits after ballet, which was a pointe class last night; nothing like a little supervised self-torture to perk me up. i headed over to our latest digs, mike & gayl's beautiful garden district home. mike & gayl flew out yesterday afternoon for a week-long vacation in the galapagos. i brought a couple bags in, smiled at the christmas tree, and headed back out to the car to get some more stuff. the door closed behind me. it locked. and then i realized that while my set of keys was in my hand, the house keys were locked inside, sitting on the kitchen counter.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

cue the floodgates. my eyelids were breached like the 17th street canal. i sat there sobbing for a good twenty minutes while i repeatedly tried to call chris and kept getting that damned nextel woman intoning "please hold while the nextel subscriber you are trying to reach is located." finally i collected myself somewhat and opened my address book, which was luckily still outside. i found the number for mike & gayl's son, our friend lee, who lives on the northshore with his wife and kids. lee & kristina told me a couple places that a spare key might be stashed, and i prowled around the backyard looking for one, but no such luck. then chris called and i lost it again. he has been very, very good at handling my recent bouts of hysteria. he was on his way over with some sushi & sake from wasabi in the marigny. bless them for selling bottles of sake to go.

when chris arrived, i was still heaving with sobs. i wonder if any of the neighbors heard me. maybe they just figured i was a ghost haunting lafayette cemetery #1 around the corner. lee called back and said that he was going to make the hour-and-a-half round trip to bring us the key, saving us from having to move somewhere else for the night, which i really didn't think i could handle. we took our sushi and sake into the back yard and i felt considerably better after our meal, albeit very chilly; it was about 50 degrees out and we could see our breath. we took the rest of the sake out to the front steps where we huddled together until lee, my hero, arrived with the key. we gave him a nice bottle of wine and then he headed back to the northshore.

once inside, i took a hot bath and i never wanted to get out of it.

no more tears damnit

2005-11-29T18:12:00.000-04:00

okay, i am officially on edge. last night at dinner i picked up my sweaty water glass and it slipped out of my hands, spilling everywhere and breaking. again, the tears started. all of this is really starting to wear on me.

we were eating at mango house, a caribbean restaurant that laurie, chris's former co-worker from peristyle, recently bought with her boyfriend, the former sous-chef from lilette. they're planning to remake it into a neighborhood bistro, but for now they're still serving jerk chicken and pepper pot (both delicious). you may remark that we're eating out an awful lot; it's just too hard to stay in and cook when we're bouncing around from house to house. at ash's place, where we're currently staying, the fridge is stocked with abita beer, heineken, mayo, tasso, cream cheese, french onion dip, champagne, more beer, and the orange juice and coffee i've been carting around with me. i've been eating ash's winn-dixie brand pop tarts for breakfast the past couple mornings, since i don't have my usual milk & cereal.

anyway, it took me a while to pull myself together after the water spillage incident, but the food and wine helped. toward the end of the meal, a resounding thud came from the bathroom, and a large woman emerged and hollered at our friend laurie about the drain hole that she'd slipped on and how "she'd better fix it." chris and i gave each other a look. shortly thereafter, another woman used the bathroom, and when she came out, i overheard the woman at the table across from us saying "SHE didn't fall in the hole." i looked up at her and she covered her mouth with her hands, realizing i'd heard her; then we both started laughing. she and her husband started chatting with chris and i, and by the end of the meal we had some new friends, who will probably turn out to be friends of some of our friends, because that's the way it works in new orleans.

the sitters

2005-11-28T15:11:00.000-04:00

we seem to have become migrant sitters. in the past couple weeks we have sat for two dogs, a bird, houses, and a baby.

in my last post i said something about how chris and i would have john & cindy's place to ourselves for the weekend, except for the dog and bird. little did i understand what we were in for.

when i got to their place on coliseum square in the lower garden district on wednesday afternoon, i was greeted by the very excited annie (as in little orphan), a german shepherd hurricane stray that john & cindy recently adopted. after jumping all over me and licking me for a few seconds, she suddenly started gagging, so i took her out into the back yard, where she promptly puked. this pretty much foreshadowed the entire weekend.

i did get to use cindy's fabulous new kitchen to make my three pies and grand marnier cranberry sauce for thanksgiving dinner. i made the cranberry sauce and pumpkin and chocolate pecan pies on wednesday night while listening to john's django reinhardt CDs, and the apple on thursday morning while half-watching the macy's thanksgiving day parade, which lent a sense of normalcy to everything. i had some extra pie crust after making the woven lattice top for the apple pie, so i cut out a little fleur de lis and stuck it in the middle.

we had a decent crowd at will & lisa's for thanksgiving dinner, which was nice, especially since we originally thought there might only be 5 of us. in the course of conversation we ended up with two more offers of places to house-sit-- one from ashley, who finally succeeded in closing on the uptown house that he had under contract pre-K but is still living in chicago, and one from mike & gayl, who are going to the galapagos for a week. so we decided that after our dog- and bird-sitting weekend we'd crash at ash's for a couple days, then stay at mike & gayl's while they go to the galapagos. (ps if you don't object to foul language, check out ashley's blog at http://ashleymorris.typepad.com)

when we returned to john & cindy's, there were two piles of puke on the floor. oh, and i haven't mentioned the bird yet. the bird is LOUD. and the bird, like the dog, stays in the bedroom. if the bird can hear you but can't see you, it will screech and squawk to wake the dead.

friday morning, after being nosed awake by annie at 3 am and again at 6 am (which was the norm for the rest of our stay), i went and took a ballet class, then headed to our house to meet chris and my friend mike, who is starting a design and contracting business with his friend jason. they're going to help us redo our kitchen, basement, and eventually back yard. it's exciting to think about redoing the kitchen, a project that wouldn't have happened for years if we hadn't ripped the kitchen up when we got rid of the fridge. might as well do it now. the basement is a little more daunting; i still don't really want to think about it.

i did some shopping on magazine street (wedding gifts, a fleur de lis ring for myself-- it was on sale) before heading back to find only ONE pile of puke this time. how nice. chris & i had some time to kill before heading over to babysit josie at will & lisa's, so we took annie around the corner to a dog-friendly bar, the bridge lounge. she was mostly very well-behaved, other than barking at one guy that she took exception to.

at 3 am that night i'm not sure whether i was awakened by the pawing or the smell. annie had made a few piles of sheer nastiness in the bedroom, and i'm not sure which end of her they came out. i cleaned up as best i could in the dark, so as not to wake chris, but i kept smelling something all night, and in the morning i discovered i'd missed a couple spots. ugh.

after ballet class chris & i started walking down to woldenberg park, where there was a free concert. http://www.neworleansmusiciansrelief.net/ we hadn't gone a block when a car stopped and honked-- it was our friend emily, pregnant with twins, and chris & kendra, whom chris used to play volleyball with. we'd just seen the three of them last week at the prytania theatre when we went to see harry potter. they gave us a ride, since they were naturally going to the concert too. once there, we saw about a million people we knew: chris's coworker gina and her partner ginger, who gave chris the rest of their muffaletta; this guy paul, who also used to play volleyball with chris; rob, my former co-worker from admissions, and his girlfriend jessie, daughter of a certain celebrity chef (hint: bam), who also turned out to be a friend of our friend emily; larry, shelby and 2-year-old son david, whom they'd trained at 22 months to say words like "doppelganger;" laura & myles, who spent much of the concert sleeping in his stroller; sherie, who was her usual jubilantly boisterous self; william, lisa & baby josie, whose hair, which continues to defy gravity, elicited many compliments and comparisons to rod stewart; daisy, on her first trip home to NOLA since the storm (she's in school in FL) and her boyfriend andy, who'd never been before; sarah, wearing a just-purchased t-shirt that read "new orleans is for levees;" lara, one of our most talented actresses, who is happily committed to staying in NOLA and who joined me in dancing up a storm; dan, my erstwhile leading man for "cabaret" (cliff, not the emcee), who says no one's called him about doing the show, which does not inspire confidence that this is really going to happen; drew, my brother's former roommate; erin, my fellow former-and-hopefully-future adjunct ballet teacher at tulane; luz, who sometimes takes ballet classes with me and gave me a big hug and a compliment on my "cabaret" photo in the times-pic; and the list goes on. as chris said, this was always a small town, and now it's even smaller.

that's one of the reasons so many of us just can't leave. living in new orleans makes you part of a big, weird, sometimes dysfunctional, but always welcoming family.

after dinner with will, lisa & josie at slice on st. charles, we went back to find NO puke-- hooray! however, within fifteen minutes of our return, someone's house or car alarm started going off, and it went off for TWO HOURS. we called NOPD, who showed up pretty quickly, but they apparently couldn't get it off either. we were about ready to call will & lisa and see if we could stay with them, when finally it ceased. hallelujah. meanwhile, it was raining pretty hard, and the roof started leaking. john's closet upstairs was soaking wet, and there was a constant drip on the stairs downstairs, so we had to set out pots and pans and buckets and pull stuff out of john's closet. and then the power went out. we just started laughing. thankfully, it came right back on.

one more night of dog-interrupted sleep (no more bodily secretions, though) and we were done. we packed up, picked up this mold-prevention stuff called shockwave from my coworker over at his place, then headed to our house, where chris sprayed the downstairs with shockwave while i used cold water in the sink to wash the full load of dirty dishes that have been sitting in our dishwasher for three months. after that, we took a field trip to home depot to look at floor tile and get some ideas for the kitchen; there we ran into jessie, who was scheduled to play sally bowles in le petit's september production of "cabaret," and her boyfriend nick. the last time i saw her was at the times-picayune's photo studio, with both of us costumed, wigged, and made up for our photo shoot for the lagniappe cover that never happened. we were both looking a lot less fabulous at home depot. le petit initially thought their theatre was fine and they were planning to reopen with "cabaret," but it turned out there was more damage than they thought. meanwhile, roy, who was due to play the emcee, moved to new york. the worst thing is that they'd already been in rehearsals, unlike us, who were just about to start.

speaking of the times-pic, they've started delivering to our house again, which is kind of cool.

last night we had a nice dinner at dante's kitchen, one of our favorite little places that recently reopened, and we sat outside in the courtyard. gotta love being able to eat dinner outdoors in late november. afterwards, utterly worn out by our dog- and bird-sitting weekend, we went to bed at around 9:30. i think we'll stick to babies and houses from now on.

on the move again

2005-11-23T18:31:00.000-04:00

i just finished packing all our stuff up and loading it into the car; we're leaving TJ & anna's today after about 6 weeks (only a month for me, since i spent a couple weeks in MA). i'm happy to say that, unlike many others who've been stuck in close quarters with their relatives for weeks on end after the storm, we are still speaking to each other, and in fact, TJ sort of tried to talk us into staying longer. the key to our familial harmony? free booze. chris has been keeping the house stocked with beer, wine & vodka (which he gets at a discount at work), and they confessed that they will miss the ready flow of alcohol.

two nights ago, chris & i sat down and went over SBA loans, mortgage forbearances, insurance settlements, and other fun financial stuff. afterwards, while doing laundry, i was horrified to discover that chris's ipod shuffle-- a birthday gift from his sisters and mom-- had gone through the wash in the pocket of his workout shorts. for some reason this made me burst into tears. i realized all this money stuff was really starting to freak me out, and the careless loss of an expensive electronic gadget sort of made it hit home. i did feel better the next day when i talked to the SBA guy, who explained the terms of the loan (which has still not officially been approved).

last night it was anna's turn to burst into tears, for a much better reason. she got a call from her cousin in the ukraine, and suddenly we heard her sobbing in the next room. her father's brother, who'd been ill for a long time, had passed away, and anna had to tell her father, because her cousin couldn't get in touch with him. anna was upset that she couldn't think of the words in russian to tell her cousin she was sorry that his father had died. at that moment the house felt very small.

we'll have john & cindy's place to ourselves this weekend-- well, if you don't count the dog and the bird-- which will be nice. but i'm still a little sad to be leaving TJ & anna's place.

blatherings

2005-11-21T19:38:00.000-04:00

first of all, i called entergy about the absurd catch-22 gas situation, and they put me on hold for a while and then came back and said that when the underground gas company gets the water out of the lines, they will 1. put fliers on doorknobs and 2. call us to let us know that we can schedule a turn-on. so that made me feel somewhat better. we'll see if they actually do it.

home depot told us they were getting a shipment in on friday night of the tall, 40-gallon, 12-yr warranty, gas water heaters that we've been looking for, so after the annual fete du beaujolais nouveau at will & lisa's, we borrowed their pickup truck in order to hit home depot nice and early on saturday morning. chris drove over at 8 am while i took care of the dog (TJ and anna went to a B&B for their first anniversary), but came back empty-handed; the entire shipment had been reserved by special order. so much for that. i went to ballet class and chris went to the gym, then we met up at the house. before chris arrived, i spent some time chatting with julie and two other neighbors that i hadn't met before, louise and marie. louise was full of neighborhood gossip (tulane is DESIGNED to drain into our neighborhood; that guy that just drove by is mad at me because i reported him to the city for trying to turn a duplex into a fourplex without the proper permits; etc), but eventually the conversation devolved into a rehashing of the horrors of the convention center, which were apparently witnessed firsthand by a neighborhood couple in their 90s who were left behind by their kids during the evacuation, and then into the kind of conversation where people start lowering their voices in case there are any black folks around and using the pronouns "they" and "them" a lot. i extricated myself as soon as i could.

we broke out the lil'giant ladder, which was luckily salvageable from the flood (i guess the infomercials don't lie; they're pretty indestructible), and started cleaning the gutters. they were jam-packed with pine needles (thanks to the four pine trees next to our house), oak leaves, and gobs and gobs of mud. we didn't finish cleaning them on saturday, because the AC/heating repair guys that will & lisa recommended showed up to check things out & give us an estimate (you don't want to know). they're two brothers, and they have the talkative brother/silent brother dichotomy going on, which is pretty funny. they thought the estimates we got for our roof were high, so they called their buddy and he's supposed to be coming out today to give us an estimate.

on our way to dinner at will & lisa's on saturday night, we got the FEMA do-you-want-a-trailer phone call. no thanks. at dinner we were joined by steve bass, his friend juan, and a newcomb student who is apparently dating juan, although he is twice her age. juan is in the december issue of GQ as one of 6 or 7 NOLA men who were selected for the "men of the year" feature; he rode around in his boat and saved around 20 people and a bunch of dogs & cats after the storm. the newcomb student has been volunteering with the red cross. chris & i were going to try to make the 11 pm set at snug harbor (my friend angie gets us in free), but we were beat, so we had to bail.

on sunday we finished the gutters and started tackling the demon shrubbery, without much success. we met our neighbor across the street, gerri, who has apparently moved back in, and even has power restored to her second floor (her electrician just turned it on, since entergy is being so slow). it's encouraging that she's back.

meanwhile, julie still has not even had a homeowners adjuster out to her house. she's still thinking about selling, but she can't really do anything until she knows what she'll get from the insurance companies. our homeowners' finally mailed us a check-- about six weeks after the adjuster came out-- but mailed it to the wrong address, so they just called to tell us it was returned to them. chris had already told them about three times that they had our address wrong. the amount of the check was a few thousand less than the roof estimate we originally got, so i'm really hoping the AC guys were right.

speaking of mail, i did something really boneheaded. we'd changed our address to chicago when we evacuated, and did a permanent rather than temporary change since we had no idea how long it would be. well, since they've allegedly restored mail service to all NOLA zip codes (though that may mean mail is delivered once a week), i went online and changed my address back to NOLA. it didn't occur to me that this meant my mail would be forwarded to chicago, and then back to NOLA. i had to go to the post office and fill out two forms and i have a feeling it will be months before i get my mail straightened out. sigh.

we were hoping to move back to the uptown campus this week, but tulane is totally dragging their feet on finishing our office, which had relatively minimal damage but still needed work. our dean checked it out today and was seriously pissed off to see what a mess it was. we were originally going to stay with TJ & anna until my office moved back uptown, but i think it's time for us to stop waiting for tulane and get out of TJ & anna's hair. we're dog-sitting at john & cindy's in the lower garden district from wednesday through sunday, and i think after that we'll move over to will & lisa's.

people whose homes i have stayed in since evacuating:

darrelle, houston, TX (friend of my friend angie)
jonathan & anna, houston, TX (chris's friend dave's cousin)
rick & beverly, nashville, TN (john's aunt & uncle)
jim & laurie, wheaton, IL (chris's dad & his SO)
mom & dad, duxbury, MA
meg, sturbridge, MA (chris's mom)
TJ & anna, metairie, LA
steve & erin, NYC (let us stay at their place for their wedding)
will & lisa, NOLA
(and, soon, john & cindy, NOLA)

the great thing is that thanks to all these people, i've only spent one night in a hotel, and that was to catch my 6 am flight out of bradley after missing the original one due to flooding.

it just gets funnier

2005-11-18T15:06:00.000-04:00

if anyone's reading this, sorry i haven't posted in a while... we've been swamped with spring registration at work. last weekend we had a nice break from working on the house to fly up to NYC for my friend steve's wedding. it was fun, and we met some fellow new orleanians... but no time to talk about that, i need to share my story from yesterday.

i somehow managed to schedule, all on the same day:
1. entergy, to turn on the gas; they said they would come between 8 am-5 pm
2. plumbers; they were due at 8:30 am
3. our electrician, who was scheduled for 2 pm

this amazing trifecta seemed too good to be true, and in fact, it was, but not in the way i expected (that being that one or more of them wouldn't show up).

i crashed at will & lisa's uptown to be closer to the house. lisa sent me off with a tupperware container of eggs and a go-cup of coffee, which was incredibly welcome, especially once i got to the house, where the temperature hovered around 45 degrees. lloyd's partner sean was already there, finishing up the sheetrock work on the tenant's side that we'd hired them to do. they also pressure washed the exterior-- look, ma, no more water lines!-- and the inside of the basement. i went looking for my fleece pants, which i thought were in my upstairs dresser, but apparently they were in one of the bins downstairs that got flooded. ditto for my fleece jacket, my fleece vest, basically all the stuff i wanted to wear to go outside and rake pine needles in the cold. damn. while i was trying to figure out what to wear, the plumbers showed up, right on time. they took care of some stuff and took a look at some of the scarier-looking pipes downstairs, which we'll probably need to replace. after they left, i put on about three layers of clothing, went outside, turned right back around and went and put on another two layers, then started raking and bagging the enormous piles of pine needles in the gutter.

eventually a guy in an entergy hat wandered over and asked if he could check the pressure on my gas meter. there was water in the lines, he said, and they were digging a hole across the street but hadn't been able to find the source. so... if entergy is supposed to be coming by today to turn my gas on... what are the chances of that actually happening? he chuckled and said well, you gotta keep the faith, if we get it fixed, it might happen. he checked my meter and sure enough, there was no pressure and no gas.

great. well, to be honest, i really needed a day off work anyway, so i resolved to just get as much done as i could. about an hour later, the same guy came by and said "hey, workin' lady, could i check that meter again?" sure. go ahead. i didn't bother asking him whether there was pressure now.

i was lucky that lloyd and sean were there around lunchtime, because otherwise i wouldn't have been able to leave to get food. i'd hoped to get a po'boy at zara's, but they still aren't open, so i got a chicken sandwich and a bag of zapps from langenstein's. i went back to work and eventually brandon, our electrician, showed up. he rewired our place last summer, and after a quick look he said he could get our place ready to go fairly quickly. so it will just be a matter of how long it takes for the city and entergy to do their part... and i've heard a lot of horror stories by now. still, it was encouraging to at least get the process started.

while brandon was there, the entergy guy-- the one who was supposed to be turning my gas on-- showed up. our conversation went something like this:

EG (Entergy Guy): um, did y'all have an inspection?
ME: no, we'd assumed we'd need one, but we called and they told us we didn't.
EG: who told you?
ME: entergy!
EG: well, y'all got a lot of water, so technically, you really should have an inspection.
ME: fine, we can get one, but they told us we didn't need one.
EG: i don't think you even have gas available here.
ME: i know, they've been working on it today and they said there was water in the lines.
EG: (checks meter) nope, no gas.
ME: so what do i do now? do i call for another appointment for someone to come out who may or may not be able to turn on the gas?
EG: no, now i turn it over to the underground people [i swear, it was something like that] and they'll just come by to turn the gas on as soon as it's available. (he winces) except you have to be here for them to turn it on... and they won't be able to tell you when they're coming.
ME: (blank stare)
EG: well, i'm not supposed to tell you this, but if you think that the gas is back on your street, you can call & tell them that you smell gas and think there's a leak near the meter, and then they'll come out real quick and check it and turn it on for you.

yes! like i said... it only gets funnier.

technically, i could have gone back to work at that point, but i said screw it and finished cleaning up the pine needles. i had over 20 contractor bags by the time i was done and i was quite pleased with my progress. however, i could also barely move, so i decided against my original plan of going to ballet class at 6:30. chris & i decided to do an early dinner at la crepe nanou, which recently reopened; while i waited for chris to finish up with a couple accounts, i sat on the porch, as bundled up as possible, and read through my "cabaret" script to see how well i remembered the lines that i learned pre-K and will now, happily, have occasion to relearn. (http://www.nola.com/theater/t-p/index.ssf?/base/entertainment-0/1132036953260250.xml, scroll down to 'CABARET' AT JPAS TEATRO WEGO)

i went and met him at the wine seller, across the street from nanou, at 5:40 or so; we had a glass of wine, then walked out to discover a long line already forming at nanou. luckily, we made the first seating, and had a terrific bowl of mussels, quail with mushrooms (me), roast chicken (chris), and a crepe belle helene (ice cream, pears, and chocolate sauce). mmm, french comfort food at its best. by the time we left there was barely room to walk through the place.

i finally got my halloween pics online: http://www.kodakgallery.com/BrowsePhotos.jsp?&collid=529964810305&page=1&sort_order=0&favorites=true

two happy things

2005-11-10T12:02:00.000-04:00

i stopped by the house last night on my way to ballet, as usual. as i was surveying the exterior (latest big pile of debris finally picked up; piles of tree debris/pine needles still there on the side of the house, will probably need to be bagged), a man approached me and asked if i knew chris. he turned out to be our roofer, JT, whom i hadn't met yet; he was patching our neighbor's roof. we discussed roof stuff for a while: we need a new one, according to both the insurance adjuster and our roofer, but we don't know how much the insurance co. will give us, and i've been hearing horror stories from coworkers about insurance cos offering them $4000 to replace the roof when a replacement usually starts around $20,000; we need to find out whether we're historical, which would mean we'd need to put another slate roof on, to the tune of $40,000; etc etc. at least JT seems to be a good guy, and does his own work instead of sending out unsupervised crews.

after talking to JT ("bye, dawlin") i climbed our steps and stopped to check on my little key lime tree, which survived the storm, and lo and behold there were little white buds all over it! it's blooming! woohoo!

i went inside to grab a couple things and when i came back out there was a strange orange light bathing the street. it took me a beat to realize that the light was coming from the streetlight on our corner, which had just come on for the first time since the storm. again: woohoo!

posey and lady were coming down the street, so i expressed my excitement about the streetlight. posey's still trying to get power on in his house; inexplicably, his neighbor across the street was able to get power back without an inspection or anything, but posey's still trying. i looked down the street and saw multicolored christmas lights on someone's second-floor screened-in porch.

baby steps... but as i've seen with my friends' kids, babies can move pretty damn fast when they want to...

visiting hours

2005-11-08T14:30:00.000-04:00

we pretty much finished gutting the basement this weekend, so we got in touch with the electrician who rewired our house this summer and we're hoping to get him out sometime soon. after he's done whatever he needs to do to make sure our house won't burn down when we restore power, we'll need to get a city inspector out, and then we'll need to get entergy to turn it back on. this will all probably take several weeks, which makes me somewhat anxious, since we need the power back before we can do all the other stuff we need to do before we move back in. oh, and the gas, too.

daylight savings is kind of pissing me off. i've gotten into the habit of stopping by the house after work before heading to my ballet class uptown. sometimes i'm just dropping stuff off and picking stuff up; sometimes i just water the plants; sometimes i just sit on the steps and watch the occasional car drive by. but now it's getting dark by the time i get there. yesterday i wanted to clean up the rest of the big pieces of sheetrock that we took off the water-damaged upstairs ceiling and walls on sunday. but by the time i got to the house and changed into work clothes, it was dark. so i put on my REI headlamp and hauled sheetrock in the dark. it helped that i got some batteries for my little boom box, so i could turn on WWOZ and listen to "jazz from the park."

after hauling sheetrock, i still had a few minutes to kill, so i sat on the porch, lit a candle, and read the new "gambit weekly" (http://www.bestofneworleans.com/) by the light of my headlamp. with WWOZ (www.wwoz.org) in the background, it was almost a normal november evening, other than the fact that i was the only person on my block.

i think my street enjoys having some company.

stella! by starlight

2005-11-03T18:17:00.000-04:00

scott boswell, the chef and owner of our favorite local restaurant, stella! (and chris's former boss from his table-waiting days), gained worldwide fame when he was one of the first restaurants to reopen in the french quarter. there was an article in the chicago tribune while we were there, called "new orleans gets its groove back," in which scott was prominently featured; he also turned up in the NY times, the denver post, and several other publications, and a japanese film crew showed up to film him for a reality-TV type show about him reopening in the aftermath of katrina. stella! was actually in the middle of renovations when katrina hit, and scott was in the process of opening a second, more casual restaurant-- called stanley-- on decatur street. when he reopened, he opened in the stanley space, and served burgers and gumbo instead of his usual high-end fare. after several weeks of this, he was jonesing to cook some fancier stuff, so he decided to do stella!-style prix fixe menus on friday and saturday nights: stanley by day, stella! by starlight. of course, like everyone else, he's short on staff right now, so chris got an emergency last-minute phone call to help them out by waiting tables for the first weekend. i, meanwhile, rounded up some friends to help out by eating the food. :)

so, after hauling debris all day, i went and showered at william & lisa's, tried to make myself presentable by covering up the nasty red marks left by the respirator with makeup, and headed down to the quarter with william, sherie and lloyd (lisa was still in houston at this point). my friend carrie and her husband tucker also came with a couple of their friends. we had a fabulous dinner. i'm going to share the menu, which i saved as a souvenir of my first post-katrina meal in the french quarter.

First Course:

Tri-Colored Vine-Ripened Tomatoes with Fresh Mozzarella,

Sweet Red Onions, Chiffonade of Fresh Basil and

100-Year-Old Balsamic Vinegar

Second Course:

Gulf Shrimp, Smoked Andouille Sausage and

Melted Brie Risotto with Fresh Scallions

Third Course:

Choice of:

Cornmeal-Crusted Soft Shell Crabs with Warm Crawfish New Potato Salad

and Lemon-Tabasco Honey Butter

~or~

Grilled Beef Tenderloin with Herb Roasted New Potatoes,

Sugar Snap Peas and Truffle-Barbeque Butter

Fourth Course:

Bananas Foster French Toast with

Vanilla Bean Ice Cream and Crisp Plaintains

after the meal, which was uniformly delicious, we talked to scott for a while. he was pleased with how it went, but was looking forward to having the staff and the resources to cook the more adventurous food that he's known for. i for one cannot wait until i can once again have my favorite stella! dessert: frozen grand marnier creme brulee with green tea ice cream and roasted pineapple en brochette.

we tried to get lunch at stanley last weekend, but there was a line out the door. our friend steve bass went there for breakfast recently and had a religious experience over an eggs benedict po-boy.

www.restaurantstella.com

halloween in the marigny

2005-11-02T21:00:00.000-04:00

halloween is my favorite holiday. new orleanians, accustomed to carnival costuming, never outgrow the practice of dressing up for halloween. i was determined this year to 1. have a costume and 2. go out in the marigny, our usual halloween haunting area, where all the wildest costumes can usually be seen. i assembled most of my costume while i was still in MA, which was a good thing, because i barely had any time to work on it once i got back. but i finished it, and it was pretty damn good, if i say so myself-- i went as the corpse bride, from the tim burton movie (www.corpse-bride.com) unfortunately, i didn't have time to make a costume for chris, so he recycled this year's mardi gras costume (disco attire with giant afro and aviators, always a crowd pleaser despite its lack of originality).

after carving a pumpkin and handing out candy with TJ & anna in metairie, we met up at william & lisa's house uptown; they had dressed up as characters from an old rankin-bass marionette xmas movie (william was the cold miser, josie was the heat miser, and lisa was mother nature). steve bass showed up wearing a NASCAR cap and a t-shirt that involved a shark and a guitar-playing skeleton, but that was just his normal attire. we all ate at taqueria corona, where josie (11 months old) passed out; chris and i were the only ones who rallied to head down to the marigny (after lisa sewed me into my dress, which split down the back when chris stepped on my train). down on frenchmen street we met up with dave, dressed as a greedy contractor, and john, dressed as a blue roof. there weren't nearly as many people out as usual, but it was a pretty decent turnout, all things considered. for some reason, hookah cafe was the hangout spot for all the uncostumed national guard guys and their girlfriends, who sat around looking bored.

the stinky discarded fridge was, unsurprisingly, the costume of choice this year. we also saw a pair in FEMA shirts with dark glasses and canes, and a tall guy who had fashioned an impressive wizardy-looking robe and hat from a blue tarp. a band was set up on the street corner playing electronica and the drummer turned out to be my friend steve garofano, former tulane admissions intern and my former bandmate (from the short-lived tulane band, colonel thunder and his musical militia). all the crazy people gravitated toward the music, where there was a powerful scent of weed and incense. one white-bearded dude in a strange pink get-up was playing a tympani, of all things. another had a vehicular musical contraption that totally defied description. the guy on the microphone spouting reggae gibberish gave way to some chick who didn't last long who gave way to a certain former WWOZ DJ in a spotted clown suit with a very tall hat. DJ ***** was very drunk at rio mar when chris was working there the other night, and he was very drunk now, and he started trying to get the crowd to join in an audience-participation political rant, which didn't work so well. apparently he got kicked out of his own band for being drunk all the time. go figure.

toward the end of the night i found another corpse bride. we were mutually impressed with each other's efforts and we got a picture together. i'll post pics once i get them developed.

i'm already planning next year's costume.

Flora and fauna

2005-10-31T14:30:00.000-04:00

Last summer, I spent a few days in New York City, and on my last night there I stayed at the home of my friend Angie's aunt Grete. Grete is an elderly Jewish woman who retains a bit of her German accent and has lived in the same apartment on the Upper West Side for about forty years. In her apartment, she grows things, mostly from seeds (or "pips," as she calls them) saved from things she's eaten. She insisted that I take a cutting back to New Orleans with me, so she took a teeny little orange tree plant and packaged it carefully in a film canister with some water in it. I carried it on the plane with me, wedging it into the pocket of the seat in front of me, and when I got back to New Orleans I planted it in a pot.

Grete's orange plant took root and thrived, and I'd recently repotted it when Katrina hit. As the weeks went by and I mourned my plants, the little orange plant was the one I was most sad about, since it had such a great story. So naturally, I was thrilled to discover that it was one of my few plants that had survived, along with my key lime tree (citrus is apparently pretty drought-hardy), the african violet that Earl Scioneaux gave me for a housewarming gift, and the "devil's ivy" plant that I bought for my first apartment in NOLA and that's pretty much impossible to kill. It's quite therapeutic to take a break from hauling debris and water my plants.

The stuff in the ground naturally didn't fare as well, since it sat and soaked in the toxic floodwaters. My poor little jasmine plant, planted in the spring, had started to twine its way along our back fence, and I was looking forward to its perfume next year. It was reduced to a blackened, shriveled twig. The roses that Julie tended along the side of our house didn't make it either, except for the tallest one, which has been blooming, improbably enough.

On the other side of our house, there was this evil shrubbery that needed to come out anyway, so we were happy to see its demise. I bought some shears and a shovel to take it all out. The shrubbery laughed. It's already started growing back, and the stalks that look dead are actually alive inside and too tough to be cut with the shears. The roots are also impossible to dig up with a shovel. It'll take some power tools to get rid of the demon-spawn shrubbery.

Animals are coming back, too. I'd read about how there were no birds around in the flooded areas, so I was happy to see a couple of the loud, lunatic neon-green parrots hanging out in a palm tree on our first trip back. I haven't seen any sign of the mourning doves that used to frequent our telephone wires, but I've been hearing the chirping of other birds, and a little black cat was prowling the street yesterday. And, of course, there's Posey's dog Lady, who roams around with her master. I had a chat with Posey on Friday; he's living in his house, and he even has gas service, though still no electricity. While we talked, Lady flopped down in the middle of the dusty street and rolled around on her back; as far as she's concerned, everything is just fine.

A tale of two cities

2005-10-28T13:30:00.000-04:00

so i still don't have a cell phone, but i've succumbed to the techno-trend of blogging. well, i type faster than i write, and the hand-written diary i started a few days after evacuating NOLA fell by the wayside pretty quickly, so this seems to be a convenient format for unburdening my brain of all the post-katrina debris.

it's so good to be back. but it's a strange new world. our house has taken on a sort of dr. jekyll- and- mr. hyde split personality: upstairs, where it didn't flood, is nearly intact, with a few exceptions: serious water damage on the ceiling in the living room and hall where the roof leaked; kitchen door frame ripped off in the process of getting the fridge out of the house; said fridge, and crappy stove that we figured we might as well toss while we were getting rid of major appliances, missing. but, you know, overall it's not terribly different than it was before the storm. downstairs is a whole different story. open the door that leads downstairs and you get a powerful whiff of mold. down there it's a wasteland, now that we've cleared out most of the debris and gutted a great deal of it.

the city is similarly split. drive down st. charles avenue and the only signs of the storm are an occasional fridge sitting on the side of the road, or cars parked on the streetcar tracks, since the streetcars aren't running yet. magazine street on a friday night is hopping; a majority of restaurants are open, and they're all slammed with customers. but then you drive down claiborne, where it flooded, and it's a totally different world. streetlights have been replaced with temporary stop signs propped up on the ground. water lines are visible on all the buildings, and the neutral ground is littered with debris and with small colonies of refrigerators that magically multiply. at night, when you drive from a non-flooded area into a flooded area, you suddenly find yourself in total darkness.

since our neighborhood flooded, it's pretty quiet. but our next-door neighbor, julie, is almost always there when we are, and this guy named posey, who apparently never left, is often walking around with his dog, lady. i stop by our house almost every day-- on my way to my ballet class on magazine street, or to feed our friend's cat-- and the more i stop by, the more normal it all feels, though it's still anything but. but after over a month of not seeing our house at all, i'm grateful that i can stop by, water the plants, pick up a pair of shoes, or whatever. and i'm so grateful that we were as lucky as we were, especially when i can go upstairs after shoveling debris in the basement and wash my hands and sit on my couch. julie, and most of our other neighbors, are not so lucky.

last night after work i met chris and our friend steve bass at the ogden museum of southern art, which celebrated its reopening with a free concert by james andrews. it was packed. there was free abita beer (their new "restoration ale," whose proceeds are donated to LA disaster recovery) and we bopped around the galleries listening to classic NOLA music. the gallery of herman leonard's photography was my favorite; his 1960 photo of louis armstrong, sitting backstage in paris http://www.hermanleonard.com/catalogue/music/pages/armstrongLSA01.htm, made me tear up.

we ran into john & cindy toward the end of the concert, after steve had taken off (we'd also run into our friends mike & gayle), and the four of us went to rio mar, where chris has started waiting tables temporarily to help them out, for dinner. chef adolfo saw chris walk in and joked, "chris, we need you to bus table 14!" nick, the co-owner, sat us down and had his 5-year-old son hand us menus (like almost everywhere else right now, rio mar has a photocopied temporary menu). we had a fabulous dinner and adolfo brought us a round of after-dinner drinks to go with our flan and tres leches cake. brett anderson, the times-picayune's restaurant reviewer, was sitting at the bar, and the galatoire's maitre'd was sitting at the table next to us, along with an older gay couple that chris used to wait on at peristyle.

it's the same small town, the same great music, the same amazing food. it may be split in two right now, but it's healing, and it's home.