. . . Well, New Orleans Autumn, actually. I’m off next week to visit my old college friend David, who has a house on Ursulines Street, right in the middle of the French Quarter. We’re planning on raising as many kinds of hell as we can still raise at our delicate time of life. True, I don’t drink—but that still leaves an awful lot of naughtiness I can accomplish.
No restaurant recommendations, please—David and I are both dieting and broke. We’ll go sight-seeing during the day (graveyards! bookshops! cool old buildings!) and go helling around all night. Surely SOMEONE there has read Ben Franklin’s advice to young men on older women . . .
So if you don’t hear from me after next week, I will be lying in some boudoir, done in by a gigolo, one silk stocking knotted delicately about my swanlike throat.
Geez, Eve. Have you ever considered writing for a living?
Have a good time. I shall hope for your safe return, your swan-like neck left unscathed, and your silk stockings where they belong (on the bedposts, silly)
One word of advice, Eve, don’t go visiting graveyards on your own. Most of the graveyards of New Orleans have become hunting grounds for street criminals and they do not appreciate tourists (except in the sense that lions appreciate antelopes).
And I’ll assume you know the appropriate response when strangers walk up to you on the street and offer you strings of plastic beads.
Hmmm…I think strangling is the Boston speciality. In New Orleans you pretty much have to expire from an excess of vice and debauchery, usually in some dive called the House of the Rising Sun.
Lady! Hey, lady! I’ll bet you ten dollars I can tell you where you got those shoes!
(Please, please, Eve, tell us you’re taking a break from the diet while you’re down there. You can eat like a queen in New Orleans even if you do it on the cheap. The idea of anyone subsisting on green salad [dressing on the side] for a week in that town is too painful to contemplate.)
New Orleans cemeteries are quite safe during the day. Even at night, the yards downtown are lovely, peaceful and quiet. Once upon a time, I called St. Louis II home while I was down on my luck and I will never regret it. However, it is sound advice never to be alone in New Orleans. This is particularly relevant in boudoir scenarios.
“Lady! Hey, lady! I’ll bet you ten dollars I can tell you where you got those shoes!”
—Oh, please don’t tell me you’ve made a pop-culture reference that’s gone over my head! No, Ike, one of the reasons I’m on a starvation diet now is BECAUSE I’ll be eating like a pig (in a ladylike way, of course) next week.
Nemo, dear, I’ll be with my big strong friend David. Who, now that I think of it, can run a lot faster than I can . . .
Allow me to save you some annoyance. The shoe shiners and beggars of the Quarter have a tendency to make ridiculous wagers in an effort to part you from you hard-earned, shiny nickels. They will shout challenges to the effect that they can tell you where “you got your shoes”, how many letters are in your name, or how to spell your last name. The unsuspecting damsel, made curious by the challenge, will be quite annoyed to find that she’s got her shoes on her feet, that there are always eight letters in “your name” and that “your last name” is always spelled y-o-u-r l-a-s-t n-a-m-e.
There was plenty of “tit-for-tat” going on when I was down for New Year’s last year. I was also there briefly during Spring Break, where I met up with a couple of ladies at the Funky Butt who said they had been out on Bourbon Street being “bead ho’s”.
I can’t imagine any time of the year when a bare gazonga or two wouldn’t meet with approval in the French Quarter.
Well, crap. I’m jealous, Eve. I hain’t been to New Orleans for, well … too long now. This link is to an artist friend of elelle’s. Pretty neat Mardi Gras posters. http://www.mousie.com
ooooh, I want to go to New Orleans soooo terribly. It’s quite high on my list. Eve, have you considered the voodoo trade you could get into? Find yourself a mysterious woman, ingratiate yourself to her, set her up with a Fed Ex account and become THE spot in Manhattan where the privleged buy thier voodoo dolls or love potion. Of course, you’ll have to wear a scarf and fake an accent, but somehow I doubt either of those should be a problem.
I’d read “The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” on the plane to facilitate the mood, but that’s just me.
Hmmm, good idea, Swimming. Anyone want any voodoo stuff while I’m down there? Roots? Dolls? Newt’s eyes?
As for the plane . . . I am flying Hindenberg Airlines (their slogan is “Oh, the Humanity!”) so I think will will bring bios of Carole Lombard and JFK, Jr., to read, and maybe some Patsy Cline and Buddy Holly tapes to listen to.
Eve, have a blast!! My girlfriend and I go down every year in the spring (between Mardi Gras and the Jazz Festival) and always have a rather wonderful, if drunken, time. If you like to dance and drink, the best club we found was the “Bourbon Street Blues Club”. The two nights we went there (I think a Thursday and a Friday night), they had this killer cover band - very funky. Played lots of disco hits and kept everyone on the dance floor. We found the price for their drinks a heck of alot more reasonable than most.
We mostly did shots (in the test tubes - $1.00 each) but I got an Alabama Slammer there one night and it must’ve been 32 oz of pure buzz.
Will be going back there this spring - can’t wait.
