As promised a while back...

Presenting to you a selection of:
Pearlgirl's Photos!

Daddy Oyster in a relaxed, conversational mood. I certainly hope none of the adult beverages on the table before Dad are in that bottle that's being devoured by my sister! If so, I want some, too...

Our hostess, Ms Liprap, walks off to the kitchen to tend to another party guest. Daddy gives the shirt she's wearing in honor of a momentous occasion in the life of a sports legend a big grin.

There's quite the flurry of activity as guests wander in and out for bathroom breaks, parade breaks and - more adult beverages!

...BUT that doesn't mean there's no time for guests to pose with some Mardi Gras must-haves - a nice set of beads and a swag bag from Dorignac's!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging on this site.

Cheers! Stay fabulous, all!

And, if you haven't had enough Mardi Gras, go here. Beware of cheesy dance troupe music...

On occasion, I gotta wonder what the hell it is I'm doing, and what possesses me to try to get beyond what I am and what I do on a daily basis. I'm Jewish, I'm a woman, I'm Mom, I blog, I have artistic tendencies (and yes, I know that word is gonna be read waaay too quickly as "autistic". Quit skimming, people.), I sing, I teach on occasion, and there are a myriad of other things that make me me.

Problem is, I think total immersion in this thing called the blogosphere is tapping me a tad too much into the hive mind, sometimes. It can be kind of daunting when it all seems to have been done. It's why there are folks who become journalists, I guess. See It Now (hee!). Investigate. Question. Observe. Get the five "W"s in there right from the very beginning so that people know where you're coming from. Eyes and ears and not much in between: let the readers put that in themselves. Analysis? Maybe as the story develops. Whatever.

A great European master miniaturist and another great master artist are walking through a Frank meadow discussing virtuosity and art. As they stroll, a forest comes into view before them. The more expert of the two says to the other: "Painting in the new style demands such talent that if you depicted one of the trees in this forest, a man who looked upon that painting could come here, and if he so desired, correctly select that tree from among the others."

I thank Allah that I, the humble tree before you, have not been drawn with such intent. And not because I fear that if I'd been thus depicted all the dogs in Istanbul would assume I was a real tree and piss on me: I don't want to be a tree, I want to be its meaning.*

We jump up and down so much these days about the new. Most of us crave that new perspective, that originality. A makeover, whether physical, intellectual, or otherwise, is a must. Move on to the next story, the latest thing, the "it" to be with, the absolutely fabulous, the out-of-this-world. In the process, many, many things get left behind.

Oh, damn. That's not a new thing I just wrote. There go the readers...

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm going through one of those times when I've lost the meaning for all the detailed trees. FEMA finally gets around to the fact that their trailers are slowly killing people who have already had something die inside of 'em from having their homes seriously damaged or destroyed and it's supposed to be news. Two idiots masquerading as leaders who were shown wielding assault weapons as though they were playthings for the kiddies are given a pass by the paper that published their foolhardiness in the first place. The city gives the NBA a $7,000 pass over five days to use a public space as a private party locale and some of the rest of us peons are disgruntled at the whoremongering discount ("Book it for the little guy's bar mitzvah!" my father says in jest, both of us knowing the city will give us no such price if we do decide to declare that on that thirteenth birthday of his, "the little guy is now a man" in Jackson Square). Marketers have been targeting me as the gatekeeper to my son as a potential consumer almost since before his birth (which now makes me want to kill my television and throw away any and all toys in my house that have to do with supposedly benign cartoon characters, Disney, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network [which reminds me that I oughta give the Bloo pencil topper to Maitri], and many, many other horrific corporate brands out there). The elementary, middle, and high school-aged kids with revenge on their brains and access to guns seem to have graduated and are taking their tendencies to our college campuses - and damned if we're still somehow helpless in the face of it all. A drug and alcohol addled badass Jewish girl singer gets five Grammys and I try to make sense of it all (and I'm not alone). Folks are going berzerk for Barack while I still feel like the person who takes the caution about the coming of the Messiah very seriously: "If you are planting a tree and the Messiah comes, finish planting the tree, then go and greet the Messiah." And yes, I know that this man is no moshiach, but when people have been down for so long and a fellow (or a lady, for that matter) arises who is able to shoulder the hopes of those people as effortlessly as Obama seems to, well...Barack, man, don't pull a Shabbetai Zvi on this country if and/or when you get to the highest office in the land, or I'll go medieval on your ass.

Gee, are you overwhelmed yet? I know I am.

AshMo said to me once, concerning the tree quote, that "it had better be one hell of a tree".

Consider that the tree ain't a tree, but its meaning... in a different sense. A metaphor, if you will. A plea that, just because a so-called single savior has appeared, it doesn't automatically give you the excuse to suddenly neglect your work. To leave your communities behind. To sever all your connections. To kiss your roots goodbye. Responsibility nurtures that tree.

Fine, most of us want to grow beyond our roots. It's forgetting that that's where we came from that gets us into messes like the one the rebuilding of New Orleans is embroiled in right now. A balance must be maintained somehow. We ultimately can't use illicit (or even some prescription) drugs or alcohol to get ourselves right in the long term (though it might be a hell of a lot of fun). Corporate consumerism isn't going to help our kids become smarter - they will simply become slaves to the brands and disconnect from the people around them. No one person holds our salvation in the palm of his/her hand, except maybe ourselves.

And, yeah, it's all been done. But a good amount of it still works. Sometimes reinvention is just another way of seeing value in the same ol' same ol'.

Or maybe a tree is just a frickin' tree.

My brain is fried.


*My Name Is Red, Orhan Pamuk

Note to the Times Pick-Yer-Nose: If you were gonna backpedal like panicked bikers at a collapsing bridge, why'd you publish that picture of the Walking Id and his Cheshire Cat-faced police chief in the first place? You're missing a prime opportunity to connect some dots like E so ably does (on a regular basis! Forget being Da Mayor, man, and go for President!) and start asking some hard-hitting questions that get to the nitty-gritty of why the hell these guys are still here if this city is still struggling under their trigger-happy feet. They need to shape up or ship out. We can use the mouth of the Mississippi for other activities besides the shipping of goods, you know...

I'm in recovery right now from a heck of a Valentine's dinner over at this place, which recently relocated to Magazine Street. I highly recommend it - I had some great redfish over there and a pecan torte with a cafe au lait ice cream that was out of this world. The meal was nearly over shadowed by a certain painting in the dining room, which shows up in the background of a photo (wait for the one with flowers and wineglasses) on the Vizard's website. I'll let Poppy Z. Brite describe it:

The food was mostly quite good, though the atmosphere and service left something to be desired. We were seated directly across from the single most retarded piece of artwork I've ever seen in a dining room: a big, colorful, not terribly well-executed painting of eight Uptown-looking women seated at a restaurant table, all dressed to the nines but baring their breasts for the artist, all with real, three-dimensional Mardi Gras masks glued to their faces. We couldn't stop snickering at it throughout the meal, which I'm sure speaks volumes about our maturity or lack thereof.

Yep, it's a pretty freaky painting, one that other diners in the vicinity couldn't stop sneaking looks at and talking about, which pretty much puts us all in the category of highly immature creatures. The conclusion most of the women I talked with came to is that the breasts on the women in the painting were simply the fake plastic ones people will don for Mardi Gras sometimes. The men were just staring and smiling - one man nearby said it was a portrait of a ladies lunch that proved to be too risque for the ladies pictured, so the masks were plastered onto their faces on the canvas.

The viewing of this picture happens to coincide with some reading I'm doing about breasts, and the following bit in the introduction could have been written for Dan, me, and our fellow diners last night, not just straight men:

...among the straight men I know there is not one, no matter how polished, tweedy, intellectual, fusty, or geriatric, who doesn't go instantly stupid when I divulge the subject of my book. I may slip into high-minded mode with clinical phrases like "breast obsession" or "breast fetishism." I may share my interest in breast evolution or breast fixation across cultures. The men listen patiently, and then ask: Will there be pictures?

Ms Seligson, next time you get that question, send those men (and women) to Vizard's on Magazine, and get yourself a new afterword for your book. The reactions to that picture could make for some great writing. Or, at the very least, a good laugh.

Oh, and damned if I missed this great video. Gawd bless dat wacky Cajun Boy.
_____________________

Update, 3:26 PM: Hey, why am I giddy 'cause it's rainin' out? Maybe 'cause it'll be raining on the NBA's Jackson Square par-tay. What goes around, comes around. And next time, fellas, don't go choosing your locales for bashes based on whether or not they showed up in K-Ville. Rent out an Algiers ferry, like the one in Deja Vu. The possibility that it might be blown to bits on the river is simply part of the fun!

One Mo' Time, 4:46 PM: Sheckrastos pointed out in the comments that I did an inconsiderate loser bit with my Jackson Square comment and failed to take into account the fate of the retailers on the Square such as himself. Mea, mea culpa, sir! I guess I will need to buy out your store now to make up for the gaffe. Let's all pray that the skies part over the Square this weekend.

I saw some of this last night and found it fascinating. It also put some of my family history into perspective...

Cliff actually reminded me it was going on in one of his last posts:

African American Lives on PBS should be shown in every inner city school. It’s the best program I have watched in a long time. The lesson to be learned from this program is that you can't beat the feeling of knowing where you come from. It's empowering. My only wish is that somehow we could do this kind of thing on a large scale. Maybe Barak can try to fund this when he becomes president. This program has inspired me to make an attempt to find out my own lineage. I think I have a good idea of where to start. I just need to get pass the obstacle of not having all the information Katrina took and not having a PBS budget to travel to all of these small towns. Maybe Dr. Gates will read this and hook me up.

These words of his tugged on me for a while, because, fact of the matter is, my great-grandmother on my mother's side did a lot of genealogy research way back when. I can only speculate as to what the mindset of my GGM F. was when she embarked upon her searches - perhaps it was in partial reaction to her first marriage, which, by all accounts, was hell on wheels. She was already working her tail off as a nurse and raising two girls while dealing with all of it.

Or, perhaps, it was simply her hobby...

All of her work centered around doing some of the traveling that Henry Louis Gates did, mainly to Valdosta, Georgia, and doing a LOT of letter writing in the pre-Internet, pre-cheap long distance phone calling days. It established a direct connection to a private who fought in the Revolutionary War. It established, even further back, a direct ancestor amongst the signers of the Magna Carta. And, most importantly, it gave us some documentation that should have been of no surprise to my mother and me when we were looking through three boxes of old family pictures and papers to find stuff Mom wanted to use for my granddaddy's eightieth birthday album.

It was a transcript of a will, dated from the turn of the nineteenth century, from an ancestor of ours bequeathing his slaves, named only by their first names, to various family members.

My mother was initially shocked, "We owned slaves!" she said, looking at me with wide eyes.

Yes, we did. And it wasn't that long ago. I felt, and still feel, pretty awful knowing that, but overall, I'm glad that I do know. And, to aid anybody who is doing what Dr Gates is doing - and what Cliff should, by all means, have the money and the time to do - the name of the family my GGM did a lot of her research on is Keels. If anybody needs more information, contact me directly: liprap2@netscape.net.

There was a time in our history when we treated people as property, and we have not fully let go of that time. If we had, then most of these folks who are searching for their past would not still be wandering about like motherless children and grasping at percentages of European genetic material in their DNA to constantly have to re-present themselves to the willfully ignorant and the disgustingly bigoted as people fully worthy of consideration and acceptance as fellow brothers and sisters. Most of the people in this country are still treating anybody with African ancestry as that indistinct "Other".

This documentary series ought to be shown in every school. Period. Because if it takes everybody who is "white" ('cause sometimes you don't know unless you go digging) to start doing a quasi-mandatory FOIA of sorts and own up to having these kinds of documents in their possession (and they are out there), then the past can help empower us all and start getting it all out on the table - the good and the bad, the ugly and the gorgeous, the amazing and the awful. Not to mention the fact that in the end, darn near all human history begins in Africa, "the cradle of humankind" (see Megan Smolenyak's video here). It reveals another big way in which people's prejudices are nothing more than constructs of power - one group of people over another - that have no basis in facts or science.

And hey, maybe if we can do it here, it can show many, many others the way ( or a way). It will hurt at first, but it will only help in the long run.

Okay, FINE. I'm posting for a third time in the same day once again. I heard this on WWOZ on the way to pick up the little guy from school, and, as Dan is fond of saying, I just thought I'd share.



Eat your hearts out, those of you with mere brass balls. Ha!

Recent comments at Adrastos' concerning the sick picture of two even sicker people who just happen to be city officials:

Me: This picture is horrific. And one of the best of the nola.com comments was somebody saying that she/he'd like to bring some inappropriate comments to the nola.com webmasters' attention: all of the comments on the picture.

Incidentally, the little guy found the rocket launcher gun that came with his Buzz Lightyear doll and shot me with it this morning. The Walking Id's latest idiocy shows me that some kids never grow out of those impulses. God help us all.

Jeffrey: With all due respect, if you can't laugh at this picture what can you laugh at?...I mean, am I supposed to make sure everyone understands that playing with guns is irresponsible... and that the mayor and police chief are engaging in an idiotic glorification of the violence they are charged with combating... and that heavily arming a metropolitan police force in this fashion is in and of itself disturbing?

Becuase... you know... duh. I didn't realize we were all in kindergarten all of a sudden.

Me: I really think the joke is on us. Meaning, we need to get the Walking Id and Chief "Patrol Alone for Sixteen Hours" Riley out of City Hall. Period.

And that's the truth. For more on why, check Maitri's comparison.

Update, 2-14: oooh, City Hall is saying that the picture was taken out of context. And nobody will be buying a Photoshop excuse if it comes up. So the Times-Pic editors didn't go with the pictures the mayor's office sent 'em of NOPD officers handling their weapons correctly and using their new resources to help this city. That's their right. The one picture that ended up in print has simply illustrated what many in this city already know - that this overgrown child is not (and has largely never been) acting in this city's best interests.

"What the hell is this? This is horrible. Come see this!!!"

Curious, we looked up. She was gesturing to a fellow waitress, who was taking her time. She took her time explaining it to us curious diners.

"It's a picture of the owner with Barack Obama here. And somebody attached this sign beneath it and misspelled both his name and Hillary's name. I mean, come on!!!!"

"Yeh, if you're gonna support a candidate, at least spell his or her name correctly!" Fellow Waitress said as she passed by.

"It drives me nuts," the first waitress said. "I was out at a place on Oak Street Saturday, and somebody wrote in chalk on the sidewalk in front to 'Vote for Bark Oboma'. A friend of mine was out there when this Tulane student was writing it on the pavement, and he corrected her on the 'Oboma' part, so at least she tried to chalk in an 'A' over the second 'O', but still..."

"Lemme take a look at it," the woman at the table next to me said as she slid out of her seat. I followed and saw that "Barack" was "Barak" and "Hillary" was "Hillery". Two conflicting messages were written on the envelope stuck to the wall.:

This man's Barak'n my world!
Vote Hillery!

"Oh, hey, I'll correct it!," the woman said. "You got some extra paper and a colored pen?"

"Yeah, sure!"

"Wait...never mind, I found some right here!"

More discussion followed at the sorry state of spelling and grammar as well as punctuation amongst the English speakers and proofreaders of this country. Everything from billboards to TV ads were criticized, not to mention da local paper.

"Whoops!" the woman doing the corrections said. "I need another piece of paper. I gave 'Barack' an extra 'R'. And I'm a writer, no less!"

" 'Barrack' Obama?" I hooted. "There's a pro-war candidate if I ever heard of one! Ha!"

The new sign was taped under the picture.

"Anybody want anythin' from the store?" a large man asked the diner employees.

"Yeh, a million dollars!" Fellow Waitress yelled.

I walked over to the jukebox and put on "London Calling", "I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl", and "Your Cheatin' Heart", 'cause I still had thoughts of this broad in my head. I went back to reading about urban planning and wondered if some of what I was reading about was what was ultimately causing us to lower all our standards.

And I'm not simply talking about spelling and grammar... I'm talking about the possibility of working for something better without having it usurped by "the market economy".

"That was more fun than a movie, and much cheaper!" the writer woman said to me as we were leaving the diner.

"Kind of sad, actually," I said. On many levels, was what I meant. The movies cost too damn much. The stories in most of the movies offered are such crap.

And comparing life to the movies is a sad comment on life.

Woohoo! The New Orleans blogpocheh's numbers have reached 300, according to our chief compiler, Mominem. Yashir koach, everybody! Robert Crumb would doubtless snarkily say:
Uhhh, that would be "Keep on bloggin'. " And your feet don't HAVE to be that big here, but it helps.

Looks like this member of the NOLA blogpocheh inadvertently set the background for the recent Bordeaux Street bust of Chinese nationals passing military secrets to their home country. China's been busy, indeed. And, for those folks who "wish he'd gotten away with it", well, Klaus Fuchs was a nice guy, too.

And I second E - Lolis Eric Elie definitely came to the public housing hijinks table waaay too late. His last few columns seem to be making up for lost time on many fronts, actually. To look at it another way, they might be a nifty device to keep these issues in the public eye - which would necessitate checking out further columns of Elie's to see if he'll follow through. I'm not holding my breath, however - if things get really bad and he sharpens his criticism to a fine point, his writing may end up buried in the Saturday editions. Which can only mean one thing: before you go out on Saturday night, read that day's paper for the real news. It could well give you more reason to drink (not that anybody in this town needs a reason...).

Oh, and mazel tov to Terrance Simien and Terence Blanchard on their Grammy wins! Blanchard's A Tale of God's Will is an excellent album - his "Wading Through" is haunting melody with a hint of "It Ain't Necessarily So" wafting over a musical re-creation of flood waters that need to be overcome in order to ensure survival. That's the one that sticks in my head the most.

The one that I've been trying to wrap my head around, however, is the case of Amy Winehouse. She won five awards, tying Lauryn Hill's numbers from ten years ago. For a few moments there, she was absolutely speechless on getting Record of the Year for "Rehab", then she regained her composure, thanked her record company, her publishers, her musical collaborators, her parents (hugging her mum at her side) and dedicated it to her husband (her "Blake incarcerated") and to London. You gotta love the spunk and the attitude, not to mention the working-class London accent. I do hope she is happy and healthy, because she is one of these folks who is fully conscious and respectful of jazz history: "She was totally knocked back that Tony Bennett was calling her name and she kept calling to her dad because they're both huge fans of the crooners of that age."

And hey, if you don't believe me, check her "Moody's Mood For Love". She made a classic her own.

Great ability...and some good songwriting.....with a touch of a punk attitude...




...can make for some good stuff.

Trouble is, she's living the life she writes of in her songs much, much too hard (and people wonder about her beehive...). Amy, madame, we'd all love to tell Ron Jeremy to "f--- off", but nobody really needs excessive amounts of drugs or alcohol in their system to do so.

The biggest problem with sad souls such as Winehouse, is, once again, this idea that the only way to be "authentic" in writing and performing tough is to live even tougher. And women have the hardest time trying to balance themselves on that fiber-optic-thin tightrope. In some ways, it's just as hard as it was forty years ago (!) because the media scrutiny has made it impossible for celebrities to develop outside of the public eye unless they remove themselves nearly completely from the scene as Lauryn Hill did shortly after winning her Grammys. But there's another element to all this that hasn't gone away (and is also why it blows my mind that it happened forty years ago and is still happening), and Linda Ronstadt commented on this recently:

I felt that I was artificially encouraged to kind of cop a really tough attitude, you know, because rock 'n' roll is kind of tough and it was a, quite an identity crisis that women had. You know there was Janis Joplin...she was really funky and she wore a see-through blouse and she was actually quite literate and (a) quite shy and lovely person, but you know she had to be really a red hot mama, drinking...Southern Comfort and being drunk and kind of slobbering or whatever it was you were supposed to be doing.

Who else could you put in this group of women performers? Lucinda Williams comes to mind. On the country and western side of things, Jeannie C. Reilly had a lot of talent and really wanted to be the next Loretta Lynn, but the success of "Harper Valley PTA" railroaded her into a cleaned-up version of rock rebellion and had her in a miniskirt for the rest of her performing days. Less talented but hyped-all-out-of-proportion celebs let themselves be pushed around by this nearly insurmountable force at work in popular music and its ever-present adjacent media engine.

What I really want is for somebody like Marshall Chapman who has been through hell and back as a singer/songwriter (a woman told to slow down by Jerry Lee Lewis, of all people... ) to tell this London girl she doesn't need to pull a "Leaving Loachapoka" and go "ninety miles an hour with her hair on fire". Really, she doesn't.

She just needs find another way to be who she is without being a holy terror to herself. Because, God bless her, she is quite capable of giving as good (and as bad) as she gets. Amy, what you've got ain't so bad. Don't give it away so easily and horribly.

Yep, every once in a while, when I get to feeling a little melancholy about being here, I actually open the paper and take a look:

Everybody needs to make it their Life's Work to teach at least one kid to say, 'WHEE!' And mean it! - Jill Conner Browne

And there on Mardi Gras Day on the St. Charles parade route awaiting Rex was Cooper Manning, in a typical Carnival scene. He was standing on a ladder behind his three young children with wife Ellen below, wearing a New York Giants No. 10 jersey in honor of Eli. They had just returned from Arizona after seeing the incredible victory by New York in the Super Bowl and celebrating with the Manning family.

Someone asked him why he didn't go to New York for the ticker-tape parade honoring the Super Bowl champions and his MVP brother.

And then came a not-so-surprising reply from a born-and-bred Orleanian. He said he couldn't live with himself if he didn't get home "to see at least one real parade."

The kind that throws beads. - Angus Lind

Two streetcars collided head-on at Canal Street and North Gayoso at 8:17 a.m., injuring 23 people, according to a Regional Transit Authority spokeswoman. By 9:15 a.m., the last injured passengers were being loaded into ambulances, and both streetcars had been removed from the scene....

Lonnie Daw was operating streetcar No. 940, and suffered neck injuries. Richard Garrnett was driving streetcar No. 933, and was cut in the head. The remaining injured were passengers, who suffered cuts, bruises and back injuries, Cook said.

From a nola.com commenter:
Well I am sorry to say for the mistake and we truly did not meant to offend anyone. The correction on the two drivers names are as follows:

Clarence Ray Nagin, Jr.
Kathleen Babineaux Blanco

Oh, what can I say? It's still my kinda town.

Sorry to brag, but...

I have a new toy:

...and just when I think I have the bestest husband in the whole wide world, who actually brought me something I asked for from the fire sales at the CompUSA that's closing in our area and said, "Happy belated birthday!", he says, mostly seriously, that I need to start putting advertising on this beloved blog to help cover the cost of the thing.

Oy vey. Has it really come to this? Well, if you check the sidebar, I guess it kinda has. And no, I am not going this route...unless somebody wants to pay me for writing about risque Carnival throws. Anyone? Anyone?

*crickets chirping*

Didn't think so.

I'm thinking I should have gone into more serious endorsement of some of our local winners who are now part of the local Democratic Party Exec. Committee in their district. Mazel tov to Karen Gadbois and Kim Marshall! I only wish I coulda voted for ya, but I'm not in your district. I wish I'd been able to put Oyster over the top, but I'm a registered independent (sniff).

I am getting restless. At least some of our long overdue rent checks have arrived, so maybe I can finally get going on the glass grind in the back shed. I certainly hope so.

Update, 7:51 PM: And then I read what Athenae has just posted.

"...it's not just about... them assuming you're a loser. It's that the only way we can assign value to an occupation of which we've not heard before, the only way we can understand it, is to find out how much it pays."

That's kind of what some family gatherings are like for me. About the only folks in my family who have some appreciation of what I'm doing are my mom and, possibly, my mother-in-law.

What this is, however, is different. My husband has never read this blog, but he sees how important it is to me to be doing it and to be reading the work of others. Some of this is an attempt to get me to find what I love and have it provide some sort of benefit aside from better mental health for me and a demonstrated ability to make connections and kinda sorta influence people. Plus, I have complained high and low at times about how much being mom at home can have me feeling as though I'm driving the crazy bus and the brakes have been cut.

Where do I go from here?

Important elections coming up! Go with this guy's voting advice. It's a momentous occasion that there are even recommendations coming from that neck of the virtual woods that don't run along the lines of imbibing Rodeo Lawyer beer, firing Les Miles, or just generally being an enlightened advocate of burning the Saints' black pants. Oh - there is that bit at the end about burning the condos. Really, folks, you don't need to do that, since foreclosure happens.

Important job openings with the Inspector General of New Orleans' office need to be filled! Head here for more information.

Important source of many, many Mardi Gras pictures: Sophmom's latest post. Poor lady had to experience Mardi Gras vicariously through Nola.com's ParadeCam at her place of business. Next year in New Orleans! Another few good pic sources: Michael Homan, Howie Luvzus, and dsb nola, as well as Jeffrey's Ash Wednesday/clean-up time post.

Important reviews of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations show on New Orleans, which aired this past Monday, can be seen at AshMo's, Clay's and Pistolette's. Almost makes me wish we had cable or satellite TV. Oh, well...we'll just have to drop by Les Halles the next time we're up in Nu Yawk and give the place some of our bidness. And, if we see Monsieur B in this area soon, we'll be paying for whatever he imbibes as well. L'chaim!

Important ton of bricks on my head:

The last time I did any glassblowing whatsoever was February 14, 2004.

It was the first and only time I've brought my son into a hot glass studio, and he made himself at home, even at the tender age of 14 months or so. It was the studio's first-ever open blow day, and anybody with skills could step right up to the bench, grab a pipe, and gather out of the furnace. When we came to visit, my former glassworking partner almost all through college had just taken ownership of the studio and we were dropping by to say hello and take a mini-vacation from the NYC rat race. Rows of chairs facing the hot shop were set up in the gallery while a small team of workers busied themselves for over an hour making a blown glass heart with sculpted hot bits of glass that were brought over to the gaffer and transformed from molten honey into a leafy vine that snaked around the heart. I put my name into the raffle for a drawing for a pair of hot glass shears, and was elated when I was chosen. I still have those shears, which I fully intend to use someday when I have my own table torch.

After seeing this masterpiece being worked on for such a long length of time, I jumped up there and popped out a hollow-footed wineglass I'd made two of for my wedding. When Dan had taken a drink out of one of them in mid-ceremony, a splash of wine had become trapped in the foot and kicked back on him when he tipped the glass back a little more. Got a nice giggle from him under the chupah!

I'd warned the people there it was going to be quick, and it was - fifteen minutes. Blink and voila! there was the glass. Dan told me later the toolmaker who had come for that day to donate the tools for the raffle and sell some more was really surprised and amazed. Hey, I aimed ta' please, and I figured the crowd there was waiting for their turn to step up.

My former partner in glass certainly stepped up to the ownership and management of the public access studio for many, many years. When I walked away from the shop that day and went back to full-time mommyhood, she kept on keepin' on with a very hard, stressful job. Having taken a few years to recover from a similarly stressful management of a production studio and gallery, I had a good idea of what she was going through. It can become your life, your blood, your baby. The source of great pleasure and satisfaction, as well as the fount of much cussing, kicking, and screaming, just 'cause stuff happens.

I received an email from the studio that the place was shutting its doors after many years. I immediately gave my friend a call and heard the relief in her voice. For personal reasons, she'd made the decision to close up, and it was absolutely the right decision. I am very, very happy for her and wish her well. I certainly hope she never looks back, which can be easier to say than do...but I am confident that she will keep her mojo workin' no matter what she does.

Best to family and friends, Ms S, and I cannot tell you how much I wanna make it to the closing party!!!!

And yes, I have not used the shears on any materials such as paper or plastic. They are being saved for glass and glass only. I'm keeping my promise on that.