As it happens, I’ve been thinking a lot about Chip and his wife Cindy, because there’s nothing like planning for a wedding to make you go over your mental list of friends and family.

I had been remembering their support, way, way back in the day, and in particular something that literally changed the course of my life.

I’d been separated from my husband for some time, but we were living in different bedrooms in the same house for financial reasons. I was young, broke, and muddling through, but finally moving into my own place when a man appeared on the horizon. I didn’t think I was anywhere near ready to deal with any kind of relationship, plus the guy was not without his own complications- it would have been an entirely unorthodox match.

We were sitting in their backyard, laughing, and when I told her I didn’t think I could handle anything else on my plate right now- never mind a man! – she sat forward with great intensity. “Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t you joke about happiness. There’s not nearly enough of it in the world, and you don’t know if it’s ever going to come around again. If you think you’ve got a shot, you’d better take it.”

Chip had come up behind and put his hand out to squeeze her shoulder, nodding. “We would know.”

So now, having followed that advice, I find myself planning a wedding to that same unorthodox man. Life has taken us in different directions, but I’ll always love Cin & Chip and this accident has just reinforced their words.



They found happiness and clung to it for all it was worth. They made a good life together and adored each other like few I’ve ever known. As horribly unfair as the accident was, they had something precious, and they were smart enough to know it.



May we all be wise enough to go forth and do likewise.

If I don’t do something about planning this wedding, Charlie will kill me if my sister doesn’t get me first. Though the venue and date are now set at least…which happened just yesterday. I know, I know, I’m a bad bride, but this should not come as a surprise to anyone who knows me, really. It’s hard for me to worry about those kinds of things. It’ll happen, it’ll be fine, it’ll be a party, and that’s that.

Honestly, the idea was that simple- although I should’ve seen the signs. Originally it was going to be dinner with the family at Commander’s, but it had grown to renting out a local haunt for an evening. It’s a strange little place with a good vibe and a lovely courtyard. The food’s decent, they weren’t going to charge us a venue fee, and the price was fantastic. It was going to be simple.


Done and done…except that I’ve discovered that having a wedding is like having a tube of toothpaste pierced by a thousand needles. Once you announce you’re getting married it starts oozing out of the pinpricks- the money hole, the friendship hole, the money hole, the tradition hole, the money hole, etc… and we all know you can’t put toothpaste back in the tube, so the pile of goop just grows and grows.


Now I realize that I must’ve accidentally purchased the extra-large economy size of Wedding brand ® dentifrice, which lurks on store shelves, hunting unsuspecting women to capture and transport back to its corporate headquarters on Brideworld.


Previously, the two ladies who jumped in to help me navigate the savage unknown of this alien plant were dragging info out of me. These are actual (I swear) examples:

Q: What are your colors going to be?
A: Colors?

Q: Okay, well we can take the colors from the flowers, then. What are your flowers going to be?
A: cheap?

Q: What do you want me to wear?
A (pause for thought): Well, not shorts. (in fairness, this was back when it was in the park.)

Clearly, I am not equipped to do this, and even a little proud of that fact, truth be told. This was never something I dreamt of as a little girl- the dress, the princess thing, the public validation of something private etc.


Still, we were doing this, and there were protocols to be followed, so I was getting the Save The Date cards (seriously. me. doing save the date cards. sigh.) together to start mailing when my sister reminded me that the venue hadn’t sent the final confirmation, which would be an excellent thing to have before we start telling people to buy plane tix, etc, so Charlie and I stopped over at the restaurant for a drink and to pick it up. The owner told us that “he’s just juggling so many balls right now it slipped his mind” and “could you sent me another email to remind me?” and my very favorite: “I’ve also been working days as a carpenter to get some money coming in.”


Pride, meet the stairs.


That was a little over a week ago. Since then I have:

• Panicked. Repeatedly.
• Called/visited/googled 3 dozen alternative sites
• Hyperventilated at the prices.
• Attended a bridal expo
• Signed up for 3 different wedding websites
• Begged friends for help, and through them…
• …found only place in town that costs less than one kidney per attendee
• Discovered they had exactly 2 dates available for the entire spring, one of which is while we’ll be gone on our honeymoon.
• Snatched that one remaining date like the life raft that it was, and counted ourselves lucky to only be paying 2.5x the original cost to get it…even though it’s Mardi Gras week, and a whole month earlier than we’d planned.
• Realized that the venue upgrade turned it from an easygoing lower case ‘w’ to upper case ‘W’edding and I was going to have to really get serious.
• Bought an economy size bottle of Jack Daniels and a case of Coke (REAL Coke, dammit, not diet, even though I am, like every bride everywhere, working out like a fiend).

And this is where I find myself now. Deadly serious about things like flowers, colors, knicknacks and dresses with actual, shocking interest that borders on obsession. Shooting out rapid fire emails: “Will this go with that?” “Do we need these other things?” “What about those useless gee-gaws? Will people expect them?” (Bonus bridal hint: etsy.com is your friend here. Stuff that doesn’t look like it was plucked from a store shelf. Handmade, gorgeous stuff for cheap.)


Periodically I try to grab the remnants of the me that was. I stand on the surface of this new planet and look fondly back at earth, reminding myself that really, it’s just a party for friends. The venue is beautiful all by itself- any decoration is just lagniappe. The menu is wonderful, the bar is open. If I only get as far as hiring a band and an officiant, we’ll muddle through. Everything else will take care of itself. Our friends are not the sort of people who will snigger if we don’t have the $300 silver etched cake servers.


Cake? OMG. Cake! Who are we going to get to do the cake? What colors? What flavor? How many layers? Who’s going to cut it? Did you know that some bakeries charge as much as a dollar a SLICE to CUT the cake for you? Why? Isn’t that stupid? It’s a cake! Or is it really stupid after all? Maybe there’s some mystical property of wedding cake that makes it impossible to cut unless you’ve earned some kind of certification??


And so…zzzoooooop! Just like that Brideworld has sucked me back in.

It’s been a real roller coaster of a month, good and bad. Kids to get home from college, puppies to deal with (more later on that disaster), existential crises to wrestle with…

The bad is obvious- the oil spill (Spill. Right. Gusher, more like) hangs over the city like the slowest moving category 5 ever. It’s been a time of weird dread and helplessness, and it’s left everybody listless and depressed. Just when things were getting better it’s back to volunteering and bootstrapping.

And yet in the middle of the city’s misery there’s great personal happiness. Alison survived her first year of college like a champ. She was happy and healthy enough to use her world-class arguing skills to drive her mother crazy before heading to see her father in NJ for what’s likely to be her last “kid” summer vaca.

While she’s gone I’m going to have a busy summer, thanks to amazing and generous encouragement from Charlie to stay home and focus on the things I enjoy most- writing, photography, research- and see how I can make my passions pay.

It means a lot of things- for starters, shit or get off the pot, not to put too fine a point on it. (who, me? vulgar? lol) Stop dabbling, get serious, get to work, to be more precise.

It wasn’t easy to make the decision, but I took the plunge. Gave notice, and today starts my first week out in the great wide world. So wish me luck, don’t hesitate to hold my feet to the fire, and keep your fingers crossed for me.

More to come. Soon. I promise.

Here’s how, and it’s all pretty amazing:

Crossposted to NoteworthyInNola

In case you haven’t heard of it, people anonymously create these really intricate postcards with an innermost secret that they could never,ever tell anyone and send it in to the site to be posted. Some are just what you’d expect, some are silly, and some are…wow:

So now I’ve got a couple of books with these crazy postcards inside, and lo and behold, I find out they were even featured in an All-American Reject video:

It’s utterly cathartic in some very base way and I’ve decided that it’s an antidote to the morons on all the “reality” tv. No one’s performing, or getting credit, it’s very raw and true; sometimes funny, too often painful (there are a horrifying number involving depression/suicidal thoughts/addiction/abuse), but in the end it’s just very very…human.

So if it turns out that I’m actually not the last person to discover this and you’ve got a couple of hours you’re not doing anything with go check it out: PostSecret.blogspot.com

First off, I won’t even get into all the Manning worship because, annoying as it was, maybe it actually played in our favor:

The Colts won’t say this and Colts apologists won’t admit it, but I’m convinced the Colts believed their own pregame hype; that they were gifted this game. The arrogance started at the top of the organization with president Bill Polian blowing off media day and former coach Tony Dungy saying the Colts would win easily and all of that cocky chatter and behavior filtered all the way down to the bottom.

“I can’t say I saw this coming,” center Jeff Saturday said of the 31-17 loss.

Then he later added: “We had the team to beat.”

See what I mean. They had the team to beat? How?

Manning was caught up in such lunacy as well. Manning heard and believed too much of the talk that he would be anointed the greatest quarterback of all time if he won.
—
Then Manning said this when asked what the Saints defense did to slow the Indianapolis defense down.

“Their offense staying on the field kept us off the field,” Manning said.

It was a subtle shot at the Indianapolis defense. Subtle throwage under the busage, to me. In reality Manning did at times look greatly confused.

-Mike Freeman, CBSSports.com

But the Mannings are a real fixture here in the city- their clan’s stature as a whole took a hit here when Archie Manning said there wasn’t a single shred of himself that wished the Saints well. Okay, I get it- your boy’s playing, and you’re loyal to him. But add it to Peyton and his coach stalking off the field without shaking hands and it all seems very petty, affected, and spoiled.

Then again maybe it’s a part of an unforgiving culture that’s so much different from New Orleans that I just can’t comprehend it. Even when the Saints lost to one of the worst teams in the country thousands of fans met them at the airport to support them. Even if they’d lost the Superbowl 56-0 we would’ve been out there to welcome them back . The parade would’ve been a madhouse no matter what.

11 people met the Colts when they got back to Indiana. Eleven? Seriously? That’s… unconscionable, really. They played their hearts out, and did a hell of a job all season. Their fans clearly adored them before- they spent a crazy amount of time on the Saints’ fan boards talking trash about how weak we were… and then they just disappeared with nothing to say, and certainly no congratulations on offer.

Maybe it’s just because we’re used to losing- as a people we’re good at it. We know how to be gracious in defeat after years of practice and we know that sometimes it really is the thought that matters and the effort that counts.

Happy Birthday, Beth!

And as we come to the one year anniversary of the business closing I’ve finally gotten rid of the last of the stuff. I feel like I NEVER stop thinking that, but every time I think I’m done I open some cubbyhole and find yet MORE stuff.

The dregs seem to be really and truly gone now- the filing cabinets that used to hold several thousand beads were picked up yesterday and dropped off to their new homes, and the huge box of leftover gift boxes that I couldn’t bring myself to throw away have found new lives.

In their Notably New Orleans lives, they would’ve looked like this:

In their new lives they’ve found a much higher purpose:

PRC’s Education & Outreach department does a fantastic job of working with local public school kids, giving tours and setting up different long term programs with the schools. This display came at the end of several months of working with a classroom and exploring what community really means and what goes into building a livable space.

They all did an amazing job, and it’ll be on display for another couple of weeks at the Preservation Resource Center (923 Tchoupitoulas) if you want to come check it out. There are quotes from the students and all kinds of other interesting things to check out.

And then of course there was the hard freeze that went on for days- the worst New Orleans has seen in 15 years. The carnage was fairly complete- all the hibiscus are dead. Ditto the passiflora, bougainvillea,and on and on- even the ginger took a huge thwacking, and I thought that stuff was indestructible.

Well, here- let’s save some time. Allow me to point out what survived using a photo from the fall as illustration: Arrow=survivor. No arrow=fallen soldier.

So yeah, that was freaking depressing.

But a good culling is like a forest fire, leaving behind newly excavated mental and physical space that needs to be filled up with new exciting plans. Some of those are writing based, and some are photography based. Some involve shopping for new and ever more exotic plants to fill up the yard with color.

And just maybe some might even involve finally making an honest man out of poor, long suffering Charlie.

It’s been a long year of post-going-out-of-business recovery- time spent clearing deadwood both practical and metaphorical. Here’s hoping it was time well spent.

Okay, well, one more thing:

And btw, how classy was it that they brought Deuce back?

Did I need it? Uh… what, exactly does ‘need’ have to do with it? The Canon had a great run, fantastic camera, and after 10k+ photos it’s been passed on to a wonderful new home where it’ll be appreciated.

But I thought it’d be nice to not have to carry around multiple cameras to get video. And we do a lot of night shooting, so not having vibration control has been a major PIA. Plus this one’s got a great tilt screen so when I’m holding it above my head shooting into a crowd I have an idea of what it’s looking at…

Need? No. But after all the craziness with the sale after all the drawn out stress of closing the business and the transition, I decided I’d earned a new toy.

And, apparently, Pratch thought he did too:

It seems that every kid, every where, just loves to play with boxes.