Over dinner with our friend Edie last night, Dan was kvetching a little about his cough he's had for a few weeks now, since he got sick from our son one fateful weekend. He has developed quite the hack, and I have to keep chiding him for practicing his cough.

He then said that Katrina must have brought something in, and we joked a little about "Katrina cough" having taken hold of him since he wasn't in the area when the storm hit (heck, we've only been back in New Orleans since February - after four years in Nu Yawk). Seriously, though, he said, "It seems to act up whenever I'm driving back from Baton Rouge. I reach LaPlace and then I start coughing again."

Which begged a little speculation on the prospect of something in the air affecting our bronchials. "Maybe it's all the house renovations and demolition going on. People around here are doing mold remediation like crazy." I said.

"I know one thing - I'm doing so much better now that I've retired and I'm not working in that school where I used to be, " Edie said.

"Your school was right in an area smack between two major levee breaches," I said. "There may well be all kinds of things getting kicked up over there. Retiring now must have been the best thing for you to do for yourself, mentally and physically."

And we raised our glasses to that one. Also in the hope that Dan's cough goes away. Very soon.

Overheard yesterday on the radio, a short sequence of songs:

-Some countrified, sassy, Tammy Wynette-ish vocalist singing about how she's too big and feisty for her "cotton patch" of a town.
- "I'm Gonna Make Her Love Me " - Jim Ford. Till the cows come home.
- "Rock & Roll" - Jerry Lee Lewis. I now date my life as BKL and AKL: before hearing the Killer doing Led Zeppelin and now after.
-"Southern Gul" - Erykah Badu. Enough said.
-"Ball & Chain" - Big Mama Thornton, doing it live in 1970 after a short explanation of how Janis Joplin learned the song from the maestra, Big Mama herself. Damn, its good.

Sometimes I just love WWOZ.

Tried to listen to some more of the radio after I got my son in the car from school - especially since I caught what I know was a smidgen of Bettye LaVette. My son, however, has become a James Brown snob when in the car, which, I'll admit, is mostly my fault from playing the 20 greatest hits album a lot. Right on, people. Super baaaaad.

Local school move, almost designed to flip the bird at all working parents: the decision to make one full day each month a teacher in-service day, and to offer no child care in the bargain. Before this decision was made, one day a month was a half-day for teacher in-service, and child care was offered for the rest of that day.

Since this was announced, many working moms, while applauding the dedication inherent in the decision to devote more time to teacher training, have done a collective "Oh. My. God." Then the suggestions came, fast and furious, on the school listserve/newsgroup. Hold it on a different day, closer to the beginning of the weekend. Do two half-days a month so that child care can be offered on both days. One suggestion was that the moms switch off on leading an in-service "camp" situation, organized by the parents for that one full in-service day a month. One single working mom's response to that:

I wish I could volunteer to do some "camp days" but frankly I'm so overwhelmed and exhausted at this point trying to rebuild my house, deal with SBA, FEMA, LRA and still get ready for a very big trial that happens to be the first week of December (great time for no childcare!) that I just don't have the ability to take it on and organize it.

First parents have to deal with the general state of New Orleans and their homes. Then their jobs. Then the raising and education of their kids.

Oh, the insanity continues in these parts. Maybe worrying over finding child care on a full in-service day is more of a return to normalcy than anyone would ever have thought. But there's always, still, some ways to go on the recovery mill. I hope this all gets cleared up soon.

Glassworking People I Have Known

(to see the one that started it all, click here)

A memory, triggered by having seen her face many times, and yet not at all. The most recent time was yesterday. On driving my son home from school, I spied her on Magazine Street, in overalls with a young baby in a pack on her back. I had such the impulse to go around the block once again and make sure it was really her, since it had been too late for me to roll down a window and call to her. My son's impatience to get home and play with his toy construction equipment ruled that out, however, and it left me to speculate, once again, on where she is, whether I really saw her on that local street, and what she's doing.

Okay, so I have some idea. Her last known whereabouts are in New York, as an interactive technology student/instructor and Pedicab driver. The last time I actually saw her was in San Francisco, when I was in the first few months of my engagement to Dan. But it doesn't stop me from glimpsing her in so many different places. Maybe because I recognize something in her that I finally saw in myself only a few years ago - the need to move beyond boundaries in one way or another.

Ava jumped into the glass department my second year of college, and my first year as a glass major. She was one of the people who brought the average age of the entire department up - Ava had to be in her mid-thirties when I had reached twenty. She carried around with her a certain fount of optimism, though her life could certainly be chaotic. She taught beginning glassworkers in her first couple of years as a glass major with a great deal of patience, something she must have brought to her job at a local psychiatric hospital as well. I got the idea that the job was wearing on her some, but she couldn't really give it up because the money was good and the hours allowed her to head to school.

I should have gotten some hints from the way she took up smoking to deal with the stress every time finals came around. From her love for first a motorcycle, then a Volkswagen Westfalia camper van as her primary transportation. From the observation she made once that as artists went, I was an order person attracted to chaos, whereas she was a chaos person attracted to order. Initially, I had seen her as one of the saner people at work and play in the glass department, but her restlessness got the better of her. Her ability to focus, barely there to begin with, went off to someplace else.

Maybe if a real multimedia major existed on campus, Ava would have found a home there. As it was, she barely graduated with a BFA in glass, and I couldn't help thinking what a waste it was that she didn't put more into it than she had. She had had such great ideas concerning glass as a medium when her heart was into it, but her heart had been led astray. What I was really tsk-ing at, though, was what her story seems to be telling me now.

She was leading the life that, in some ways, I wished I had had the courage to lead. She was following her bliss, and it didn't involve drugs in any way (with the exception of the nicotine at finals time), just a pursuit of ideas. I didn't have admiration for her general blurriness with regards to her ideas and their development, but I did have a faint wish that with my ability to focus on things and a good dose of her disregard for certain boundaries, the sky would be the limit. I was on track at the time for my degree and for graduate school, and, in all probability, a career teaching art at the university level. What my window on Ava's life planted in me was a seed that had the potential to blow that seemingly set plan out of the water. And at the time, that scared me some.

Eventually, however, that seed began to sprout. And now my life is very different than what I thought it would be. Once in a long while, I see Ava in a restaurant, on a street corner, at a museum... and I want to share that with her, and see what direction her life has taken. And I want to drink in her optimism and savor it like I never did.

I never did truly appreciate her smile and her outlook until it was out of my life for over a decade. As I embark on some adventures teaching young children, I find I need that outlook more than ever. But when I least expect it, and possibly when I most need it, Ava will be close by. Of that I can be sure.

Okay, so I guess my husband's birthday isn't quite over yet, because here I am blogging about him. Again.

Dan simply has these moments when he wants to cover all his bases, make things right again. Just do the right thing. It's taken us on some adventurous detours.

Our honeymoon, five-plus years ago. After observing Dan's obsessing over how we were going to see all of Europe in a month, and yet dwelling the most on locales in Spain and Portugal, I finally told him to just chuck the rest of Europe and plan the trip around those two countries. And with that, he researched countless guidebooks, got the maps, made the online reservations and the itinerary (all of which he excels at, so much better than I do), and we flew off to London, then Toulouse. We rented a car in Toulouse and took a hop, skip, and a jump over the border into Spain.

After a stop at the Salvador Dali museum in Figueres, we made our way to the resort town of Pineda de Mar, a short train trip away from Barcelona. For the next few days, we took the train into the city and walked down La Rambla, took in Antoni Gaudi's mind-blowing Modernisme architecture masterpieces, and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

But on that first day, all we wanted to do was to check into our hotel. So we parked our teeny rental car, pulled out our stuff, dropped it off at our room, and came back to the car only to find that we had been ticketed. Turns out there was a big municipal meter that was sitting on the sidewalk only a little ways up from where we parked, and we not only didn't see it, we didn't feed the meter for the time that we had parked there.

Now, keep in mind: the fine for our faux pas was miniscule by American standards. It was the equivalent of two bucks. I don't know exactly what it was - maybe the first flush of a new marriage, the need to do right by a foreign country, or just Dan - but suddenly, inbetween all of the other things we had on our itinerary, we had to pay this ticket somehow.

So, every day we stayed in Pineda, at some point in each day, Dan had to be on the trail of settling this ticket. He was armed with only the ticket, his better-than-average elementary Spanish, and my company. We managed to shoe-horn this quest inbetween Gaudi-viewings, a visit to the Miro museum, and checking out the area's preparations for the festival of San Juan.
It also took us into a small glimpse of the law and its enforcers a la Espana.

Our quest took us first to the local Guardia Civil house, which was situated on the beach in Pineda. I read later on in James Michener's Iberia that the Guardia Civil had been an official branch of Franco's enforcers in the days before the restoration of the monarchy. What we saw, however, was the equivalent of a National Guard troop as uniformed beach bums. They directed my husband to the local police station to help with the ticket. And so we had to pursue its payment another day.

That next day we stopped off at the local station, which was much more formal and together than the Guardia Civil beach bunker had been. Through a lengthy conversation in Spanish, my husband finally got the story. Payment of the fine was achieved through the muni-meter itself. Seems a teeny slot at the bottom of the machine was where the ticketed person inserted the ticket, the money for the fine, and, presumably, a mea culpa, and all was forgiven.

Dan and I went back to the machine. We examined the bottom slot, which was large enough for only bills, not coins, to pass through. So we couldn't pay it with our coin pesetas at all. Sigh.

We went to a local restaurant that night to take in a traditional meal commemorating the beginning of the San Juan celebrations. A woman on the train back from Barcelona we had been on earlier in the day had pointed out all the people fishing in the sea from shore and told us they would be fishing all night for the feast of San Juan. Dan and I left them to it after the meal and went back to our room.

The next morning, we drove off down the road to Valencia. We had a candied cake in the backseat, a traditional festival food that we were noshing on as we drove. Before we left, Dan handed me the ticket and two American dollars to stuff in the muni-meter slot. They barely managed to fit.

Mea Culpa, Pineda de Mar. We hope all is forgiven.

First off, though I told him early this morning at dawn's crack,

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAN!!!!!

My husband is another year older today, and later on, we will be going out for dinner at an undisclosed (to him) locale. This morning I gave him Sufjan Stevens' Illinois album, because we saw him performing with his Band of Butterflies on Austin City Limits this past weekend when we were flipping through the channels for something to watch, and we just couldn't pass up watching a guy who'd outfit all the members of his band with big butterfly wings on their backs. Couple that with my husband's Midwestern ancestry (by way of California, where he was born and raised), his being a University of Illinois alum, and the fact that Stevens does a song on his album about Pulaski Day, and voila! Birthday gift for my love and my life partner.

He can take in Sufjan Stevens occasionally when he carpools off to Baton Rouge and back for work, since he's the one with a CD player in his car (my husband, that is). Enjoy, honey.

How else did I commemorate my husband's birth? I dropped our son off at school, I went on in to vote "Dollar Bill" Jefferson out of office and to amend the city charter to put one assessor in office to attend to property values down here instead of seven assessors (I kid you not. Who says political patronage is a thing of the past? HA. HA. I say.), among other things to vote on locally in the booth, and I helped out at our local library with shelving books and making sure kids and parents were happy campers in the children's section.

These days, every time I vote, I think of my husband, who is one of the few people my age that I have known (including myself) who makes it a point to vote regularly. I think it's one of the reasons why he loves it down here in the first place is because politics is such a spectator sport here in which we really can participate, at least on many local issues. Lately, he hasn't been able to vote in the past few elections because of the idiotic hold that was put on his license ages ago when we moved to New York. Now that it's lifted, he can once again use his index finger in the electronic booths here to exercise his voting rights. Nice birthday gift, huh?

I wish I could give my husband the world on a platter. But I can't.

1) I'm just not making enough money. Period.
2) Where the heck would he put it?
3) Our family and home is all he needs (right? Right?????!!!??!?)

So I'm taking him to this place tonight instead. Best way to his heart sometimes truly IS through his stomach.

Huh. This blogging every day stuff is a different thing for me.

Thus far, I've been seeing my blogging through the eyes of a patient reader of hard copy, which is what I am. I have no problems sitting down and reading a novel, a tome of nonfiction, or some heavy magazine articles at the drop of a hat. In fact, it's one of the things I've rued as a mom - that the time needed to devour such stuff is dwindling. Trying to bring the reading material with me to a playground is truly an exercise in futility, since I try reading a sentence, even a paragraph, only to be interrupted by my son, by his interactions (or, God forbid, altercations) with others at the park, and by having to just keep an eye on every little thing having to do with the environment in which he plays.

And yet, the more I have been checking out the NaBloPoMo randomizer, a device that instantly lets me browse the participants in this "writing every day for a month" exercise, the more I realize what an anomaly I am. The blogs I've been checking out, the few I have been revisiting, and the very few I have left comments on specialize in the short and sweet post, the ADHD write bite. Recap the days news on a personal, local, national, or international level. Throw in a meme when things get writers' block-y.

My absolute personal favorite, and one which is turning into a daily ritual since I first saw it, is the daily care and feeding of a virtual pet. Mr Pibbles is just too cute for me to pass up. And what a way to keep people coming back to your blog to see what's new. Heck of a lot better than reading back on my attempts to teach art and Judaism to young 'uns, maybe. Unless I find a way to make it more interesting as well as short and sweet.

I'm thinking along the lines of the way I converse, I guess. Too bad the computer can't show me through facial expressions whether or not I've grabbed its attention by blogging about my home or something. The closest I can get to that is in the number and content of comments to the blog, which, thus far, have been few and far between. Though I started this whole thing with the idea of letting our out-of-town friends, who otherwise have no clue, get some idea of what life is like down in New Orleans for us, it is developing a life of its own.

And boy am I getting sucked in. As it is, I feel like I've already gone on too long in posting. So I'm off 'til tomorrow, all.

Bit of a warm fuzzy today. I think.

I taught my religious school class this morning, laying down the law a little first by assigning seats. I tacked up a big class art project the kids did a few weeks before, and they admired it and eased right into their first lesson. There were a number of other activities scheduled during the day, so we didn't get to everything on the lessons I wanted to do.

Near the end of the school period, I said goodbye and see you tomorrow to one of the kids who attends the school where I teach art during the week. Another kid (one of the reasons why I did assigned seating in the first place; his behavior was much better when I did it) asked the first kid why he was going to see me tomorrow. When he heard I was the art teacher at the kid's school, he said to the kid, "You are so lucky!"

I felt all warm and happy, until I realized I hadn't seen the facial expression of the kid who made what I took as a compliment. He could have been rolling his eyes as he said it or something.

Simply another sign that I need to develop a thick skin.

Hope tomorrow's art classes go well...

I was sitting with my husband and son over dinner at a Japanese place, and I brought up the guy I used to know. I told Dan about the Offbeat article and everything.

Dan asked me, "Was this the birthday boy?"

I told him no, that the way the guy worked, nobody there was that close to him (more about the birthday boy thing later in this post). I then filled Dan in on the Offbeat guy's talent as a glassworker (prodigious), but that he preferred to work alone during the week or with just one other fellow on the weekends. Usually, glassworking is a collaborative endeavor, and the Offbeat guy is one of only two people I've seen who can create amazing glass sculpture or vessels completely by themselves.

"Was this the guy whose wife was jealous of you?" Dan then asked.

"No, that was the girlfriend of somebody else," I said. Then I laughed a little at my realization.

"What?" Dan asked.

"I just realized that most of the people I used to work with were just nuts, and not in the way that I'm nuts."

Dan only smiled, acknowledging the correctness of my assessment.

The other part of my assessment of my past associations, the part I didn't go into in great detail over dinner, is that having met these people, and knowing that they exist, it makes me rethink going back into working with glass. I'll run into them again, I know. And this time around, I may well be less tolerant of them.

Yes, I know, there are people like this in every walk of life. I shouldn't just hermetically seal myself off from something that still tugs at me just because of the people involved, right? I guess so, but I had clues from the very beginning of my glass working days that the number of people working in glass on some professional basis is very small...and that the material itself seems to encourage and flame the eccentric fires (pardon the pun) of the people who work with it. Glassworker Walter Lieberman, and author of Walt's Glass Guide, had it right when he put on the cover of his book, "Glass is a cruel mistress." He should have added the admonition that if you play with fire, you're going to get burned somehow.

Forget what happened to me ...and wrap this one around your head:
An acquaintance of mine described an apartment hunt she embarked on with a former classmate of mine right here in New Orleans. The guy was actually a couple of years older than me, but because the glass department was so small, most everyone there was familiar with his work. He was a great artist and sculptor, and he had a real love for burned wood, for the look and the smell of it. The man had exhibited a common trait among glassworking folks, and I must admit that I am no exception to this: the love of burned wood and the need to work with a fiery material speak loudly of pyromania. Heck, of my graduating class, three of the six of us getting BFAs in glass were fire signs, with birthdates within four days of each other.

The two looked at one apartment in the city that seemed to be just perfect, maybe a little pricey. The people showing the place, the building's owners, were very nice in the bargain, even apologizing immensely when a rug was nudged by someone's toe to reveal a patch of burned wood in the otherwise refinished floor. My former classmate's eyes got big - there was one of his great loves, right there on the floor. "You don't understand," his apartment hunting companion began. "You see, he loves the look of burned wood, the smell..."

And with that, the potential apartment deal was off.

I was a teaching assistant at a summer crafts program the summer after I graduated college, and I was witness to a seasoned artist and craftsman testing out an assessment of the heat of a blast furnace, or glory hole. Shortly before all the glassworking equipment, except for the glass furnaces, was shut down for the night, the artist casually walked into the studio with a twenty-five pound block of wet clay, enclosed in a plastic bag. He opened the doors to the glory hole, chucked in the entire block of clay, plastic and all, and closed the doors. Flames immediately shot out from the hole, then subsided as the plastic burned off the block, and then the clay began to fire in the 2000-plus degree heat, from the outside in to the center of the block. As bits and pieces of heat hardened clay popped out of the glory hole, those who were gathered in the hot shop discussed the debunking of the hyperbolic assessment of a glory hole's heat. I can tell everyone, unequivocally, that a glory hole will not instantly fire a twenty-five pound block of wet clay. And it leaves behind a big mess.

The artist's teaching assistant came in the next morning. "What is this in the hole?" she asked when she was firing up the equipment. Heh, heh.

Oh, and the birthday boy thing? Not much to do with heat, but everything to do with employee-to-employee pranks, and this one was pretty gross. It happened the very day I was cleaning out my stuff from one studio to go to work at another. I walked past the hot shop towards the back of the studio and spied an iced cake sitting on one of the observer's chairs on the viewing floor. A maintenance guy saw me looking at it and told me not to touch it. A coworker had made it for the birthday boy, and after the singing and the candles were over, the one slice missing from the cake was given to the lucky guy. He took a large forkful, put it in his mouth, began to chew, and made a face. Turned out the cake was iced with mayonnaise.

I shook my head, and thought, as I gathered up my stuff and walked out the door, good riddance. To malicious cooking coworkers.

More on other glass crazies I have known - coming very soon.

Oh, and I'm now posting daily due to this NaBloPoMo thing I found out about through another blog I've been lurking at sometimes and commenting at often lately. I figured, what the heck. It is a chance to win some cool stuff, flex some writing muscles, and get my addled brain in gear. Feel free to scroll down and click on the links to past posts if you've missed out on some stuff, because, hopefully, the writing will be fast and furious for the next month. I may have to hijack my husband's work laptop while we are away over Thanksgiving to post. It's all for a good cause, right? Right???!??!!!!!?????

Good teaching is apocalyptic talking.
-Edward Dahlberg, 9-2-64

Ouch.

I never wanted to see myself as some sort of agent of an ersatz Cultural Revolution. Then again, the above quote is one from a "disappointment artist", as author Jonathan Lethem calls Dahlberg. Reading Lethem's essay on Dahlberg, by way of his aunt's experience of Dahlberg as a (non) teacher, I am reminded of one of the teacher stories that went around at my art school. The storied instructor seemed to take such nasty glee in belittling the work of others, going so far as to destroy a student's work to prove a point. It wasn't unusual for him to walk up to work he thought was crap and take a lighter to it as it hung on the wall for critical perusal. Once the initial shock wore off, the students began to vie for whose work could be the worst just to provoke a reaction - since everyone passed the man's courses anyway, why not have some fun?
Let him rip some stuff off the wall and stomp on it; nothing like good entertainment, right?

Then again, I have to wonder if the kindergarten-first grade art group I began teaching last week falls into the category of those students. Or if I'm just green as green can be in the kid discipline department. Well, I know the latter wondering is true. But in a class of ten kids, how do you handle three to four problem ones without shortchanging the rest who are doing well?

First off, I didn't understand the discipline system that was set up at the school where I teach twice a week. The second mistake I made was leaving the classroom door open - for both my older class (second-third graders) and my younger one. The open door was especially detrimental to my authority as teacher (or, as Edie says, as alpha dog), since it unfortunately established to the homeroom teachers of the younger group that things were not as they should be. Major strikes against me in the eyes of these teachers.

I'm starting to get het up as I write this. I feel like such a failure.

The older group likes the marionette project I am giving them, and they are really getting into it, despite some snarky comments from one kid or another. The younger group was doing well with the papier-mache hand puppets we were making, but then I gave then a tracing and coloring project (based on this man's illustration of Robinson the Cat. Check out the gallery of prints on the site for the Robinson book cover.) to do in big sections when they were done with the primary major task at hand (which was, at the time, the puppets), and all hell broke loose. One kid would act up and need to be settled down, then another would start up. It was like trying to put out brush fires with a thimblefull of water and my feet. And I know the art period is the one time when the homeroom teachers can get an hour's break, and I let them down.

I know one kid is really, consistently trouble, but I felt like I there had been a minor breakthrough with him yesterday, because he was all ready to blow off the tracing project, until he looked around at some of what the other kids were doing with theirs and decided to retrace it better than he had done. I let him know I was very proud of him when he retraced it (and did very well), but then he got distracted again and sucked in to his antics a little girl who had been doing her work well before then. Off he went to his homeroom class.

I need to lay down the law somehow and combine it with projects that are interesting enough to hold these kids' interest and what is proving to be a very short attention span, but I worry about stomping on them too much, too. The previous art teacher would give all the kids, older and younger groups, short, easy projects and then let them play on computers, play board games, mess around with stuffed animals, or do puzzles until class was over. Am I wrong in thinking this is art class and that they are there for instruction? Or is an hour really too long?

I can't help but think that they can make it through most of the day in a classroom on a regular basis - why should one more hour be a big problem? Hence, the problem must be me.

Ouch, again.

I want to teach these kids how great art is, especially, in the early stages, the process of it. The older kids are at the dawn of getting it through some of the projects I've been doing with them. I think some of them were definitely ready for a full hour of art. The younger ones probably need more of an indoctrination...the Jonathan Edwards-ish "fire and brimstone" way. Which probably means the equivalent of chaining them to their seats and sitting on them to really finish something - and then letting them go a little.

I really hate certain aspects of this job. But I guess it'll have to be done somehow or else I'll be hounded out on my rear by the teachers of the younger group. And it'll have to be done deftly or else I'll be hounded out by the parents of the younger group. Oh, joy.

And now, the apocalypse...

Coffee Shop Lit

Dropped my son off at school, hopped over to a local coffee place and saw they had my now-favorite free funny paper, and a copy of the latest Offbeat magazine. I sat down with my frozen coffee drink and my toasted everything bagel, and realized that I recognized one of the guys in the band pictured on the Offbeat cover as someone I used to know as a fellow glass rat. I opened up the magazine only to read a nice diatribe from the guy - one that took up a large chunk of the article - about drinking, the barfly culture in New Orleans, and other alcohol-related (and possibly alcohol soaked) musings. I mean diatribe in the best way, and I'm glad he has put his bar-hopping to artistic use.

And then I opened up The New Orleans Levee and laughed my fool head off at this:

www.nolevee.com/issue2/wagerdome.php

I got some looks from other customers, but it was well worth it. Hey, if you can't have the giant sign over your convenience store and gas station in sight of the highway, then go for broke and bid on a stadium sponsorship.

Imagine having a big Wagner's Meat ad such as this on top of the Dome when the next hurricane blows through (hopefully, not in my lifetime, but that's highly unlikely). A big old storm may be able to flood the area and cause major property damage, but it can't beat Wagner's Meat!

The New Orleans Levee is a newcomer to the free paper scene down in these parts, but I think it could really give The Onion a run for its money someday. Peruse the rest of the latest issue and check out the Kim Jong-Il/governor Blanco comparison article.

Some windows onto life right here, right now, courtesy of Ronnie Virgets and Andrei Codrescu.

Take a little time, click on their columns, read 'em, study 'em a little.

The French Quarter murder-suicide weighed on my mind some when I first heard news of it, and not because of its sensationalism - well, not entirely because of its sensationalism. Come on, who can pass up the allure of a couple who got together the day Katrina hit, who squatted at the edge of the Quarter, working all kinds of jobs just to live on that knife edge, who fought like tigers frequently but who couldn't escape each other's fierce orbits - until their deaths? It certainly has made many salivate over the details as fodder for storytelling, fiction or nonfiction, as Poppy Z. Brite can tell you (check out October 19 and October 20 on her online journal), and I hate to say I was one of the many. For a day or two. And every once in a long while.

No, it sat on me a bit because I knew so many girls, especially in art school, who were headed down the path to Quarter Rat-dom. I would see them all over town (and I still do) finding ways to be noticed or unnoticed. To scrape by and show how strong they are in the process. To weave their bodies into the fabric of the city streets - of ANY city streets, really, though New Orleans has been attractive for a long time because of the ease with which one can live here on the cheap and still construct a life of sorts.

I can understand the allure of that life, sure. Sometimes, at my worst moments, that life still retains that greener grass sheen. The impulse to chuck it all and live like a postmodern bohemian. What most don't realize, until they are in the middle of it, is that it can be a hollow sort of life. A life that doesn't heal the one living it so much as it ensures that the wounds and injuries one can get from life will never scab over.

At least, that's the way it was for me.

I tried, for nearly two years, to live a life that seemed to be free of what I felt encumbered me - family expectations, the scorn of coworkers in a previous job, the long-distance clutching of a now ex-boyfriend. It only created new problems, different problems...and ones I am still confronting and working on to this very day.

Addie Hall, ultimately, could have been any one of us, even me. I wish she'd found the place to let her sexual abuse scars heal, because the Quarter certainly wasn't it, in her case. From what I've read, she seemed to be attracted and repulsed by the opposite sex at different times and in some of the best and worst ways. She didn't find her match in her killer, only her end. And she kept on doing this all alone.

It is an unfortunate story with a tragic backdrop in New Orleans at this time. In reality, the location of it has very little to do with this city, or with the general malaise here of people trying to rebuild their lives. The two lived the same way after the storm as they did before it.

But I will look at the girls that hang onto lives in the Quarter with the skin of their teeth a little differently. Any one of them could well be someone's damaged daughter in the guise of a brazen broad. And I hope to God not a one of them falls down the wrong rabbit hole...because, in the end, even the characters in Wonderland had their problems.