Archive for the ‘Nola Nuts’ Category

I have turned into someone I don’t recognize. Allow me to quote mock the old me, a mere 45 days ago:

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.

Ah, there’s all kinds of references on the floats this year about Nagin’s impending exit.

Honestly, doesn’t Carnival seem kind of like an afterthought this year? After weeks and weeks of election & Superbowl buildup? What could be better than what we already received? The mayoral race was starting to get nasty- I can only imagine how ugly it would’ve been like if we’d had a Mitch/Troy runoff.

And with Nagin opening his fool mouth on WBOK, trying to stir up racial tensions (again:shock), plus that asshat Riley lying on the same station about Councilperson Head calling him the verboten N-word in emails I just didn’t know what to expect. Of course the email couldn’t be produced (as it doesn’t exist) but with how much Stacy’s been targeted these last two years it was hard to say just how the numbers would fall.

But within half an hour of the polls closing it was clear that both Mitch and Stacey were going to take it in a walk. And now there’s not much left to do but laugh at the floats as we wave buh-bye to Nagoon, trying very hard to make the door hit him in the ass on the way out.

Actually, there is one more thing to be done- get up early tomorrow for the Zulu parade to boo Nagin as he rides by on his horse. It’s the last time we get to do that!

Whoo hoo!

I picked this hardy hibiscus up at the Farmer’s Market last year not quite sure what I was getting, but fell in love with it once it bloomed. It comes in bright white and fades to a deep pinkish red over the course of several days- the whole bloom lasts a good 10 days, which is fantastically long for these things.

Here are two blooms on the same bush- one had been out for about four days and had gone pink, and the other had bloomed that day:

And here’s two days later, the pink’s gone much deeper, but the white’s still white:

I just love how it’s chaos at its center, much more than a tropical hibiscus:

This is pretty amazing- I haven’t stopped to count how many references there are for things past and present around town, but it’s well worth a look n’ listen.

Also, a good reminder that it’s been too long since I’ve been to Preservation Hall…

HT to Michelle for passing it on.

Why do we stay in New
Orleans? Part 2
By Charles Burck, Special to the Beacon
Last Updated ( Thursday, 04 September 2008 )

According to news reports we heard while battened down in our home for Hurricane Gustav, some 10,000 of us had stayed behind — less than 5 percent of the city’s population. Hmmm, don’t the Hell’s Angels call themselves the 5 percenters? Do we stay because we’re closet outlaws?

We now break from our regularly scheduled post to note that the St. Louis Beacon has emailed to request I take the piece down. I assumed that as Charlie had donated his time to write this, it was public domain, and having left their website addy there would be sufficient.

Apparently not, so my bad. Apologies all around.

Link to full text of part II here.

Okay, so Gustav and Ike have both moved on, and while we keep our eye on the tropics and Texas in our minds, I want to pass something along that Charlie wrote in the 24 hours following Gustav.

Link: St. Louis Beacon

Blaine Kern, love him or loathe him, is the creator of 90% of the Mardi Gras floats in the city and is a larger-than-life local character. He calls himself “Mr. Mardi Gras,” but in the last year he’s expanded into Halloween, creating a huge haunted house that was voted one of the top 5 in the country.

Well, this year he’s taking it one step further, creating the Krewe of Boo, a club and parade to roll on Halloween to benefit the first responders in New Orleans. They had several of the floats out on the floor when I brought our company over to Mardi Gras World, and I have to say they’re pretty cool…

…cause you never know what you’ll totally miss.

How did I not know about this?

Monday night I stopped at J’anita’s on Magazine for some kickass bbq and they still had these notices on the counter.

An ‘erotic art rock n’ roll circus?’ The mind boggles. And, flipping it over to read the description of the planned activities, the mind…boggles some more:

Read the rest of this entry »

Aside from the bars, music and expected craziness on Bourbon Street, there are often those trying to save us from ourselves. Some are quiet, and want to talk calmly to you about your transgressions and win you over with the peace of Christ.

Some are there to hold prayer sessions in the middle of the street, volubly praying for them what knows no better.

But for sheer entertainment value my favorites by far are the out-and-out loons.

Let’s see who’s going to hell on the aptly named “Krazy Korner:”

(BTW, I do so love that the one guy took the time to alphabetize his list. Apparently OCDers are safe from the fires of hell.)

It really is an interesting list…

Some are straight forward- idolaters, abortionists, adulterers, and the blanket label “fornicators”- these are all to be expected on the express lane to hell.

But others…not so obvious. Sports nuts? Did some football widow come up with that one? And they REALLY don’t like Catholics- they make it onto both banners while agnostics, Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses only make it once each. Pill poppers? What, any pills or just specific ones?

Why is it that I think they feel anyone not in their group to be a ‘luke warm Christian?’

But the one that gave me pause was “revelers.” Does God have something against revelry in general? I don’t remember that one. Plus it seems we’re getting on shaky ground here…after all, they were having a damn good time doing this out in the middle of a party zone. Couldn’t they, in their sad little way, be considered to be reveling?

Just a thought.

On our brief tour through southwestern Louisiana, we stopped in Crowley while we waited for a crawfish place in the next town to open for dinner. Charlie actually would have liked to tour a rice farm and/or processing plant (it’s a guy thing), but there were no such immediately apparent establishments.

Instead, we just drove around. It’s a nice little town with some interesting touches.

This certainly got my attention more than a typical neighborhood watch sign.

The streetsigns are still in both English and French…

And then we ran into this odd car. Charlie got went to take a closer look, and saw the owner was sitting under his carpark, repairing his accessories. It’s something that was put together for a charity, and he drives in all the parades. He’s always accepting donations- both for the car and for the charity.

What most surprised me was a) How many commercially recognizable items there were (likely from Happy Meals and suchlike) and b) How many vaguely naughty ones there were. Ah well. I guess we all contribute our own unique talents.

We left behind $5 for the car and $5 for the charity. Click on the thumbnails for a closer look.