pt at large

Christmas In The Tropics

Dispatches from Key West: Christmas In The Tropics

If you’ve lived your entire life in New England, chances are you haven’t been attired in a T-shirt and shorts as you’ve been admiring the houses in your town twinkling with Christmas lights. You haven’t passed porches festooned with Yuletide decorations and wondered whether you applied enough sunscreen to your limbs that morning.
 
Whenever in my lifetime I’ve heard Christmas time lyrics like “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose,” Jack Frost has truly been doing his job.
 
I'd be dressed like an L. L. Bean commercial, gloves, boots, a scarf, something on my head to prevent losing 30% or more of my core temperature. I could see my breath. Sunscreen? Does Nanook of the North worry about sunscreen?
 
 Cognitive dissonance the week before Christmas in Key West, Florida. Every time I hear a Christmas carol on the radio or in retail store I have the vague sense that the people down here in Key West had made a dreadful mistake in their civic planning. And the men and women wearing red Santa Claus hats with the white bunting are dressed for a costume party with a December theme.
 
A Yankee’s Christmas spirit is apparently linked genetically to arctic temperatures. Inflatable Frosty the Snowmen are usually plopped on ground that has the density of permafrost. They aren’t propped against palm trees.
 
Back up north, when the inky blackness of a near solstice night is illuminated with strings of colorful lights strung along porches I’m observing it from the comfort of my heated car, not coasting by on a bike with the warm breath of the tropics evaporating my perspiration.
 
People in this southern outpost are highly evolved. They get the metaphor that is Christmas. Santa doesn’t need to shed his puffy red coat and black boots for a tank top and sandals down here. He still soars stratospherically over the aurora borealis from the North Pole with those tiny reindeer.
 
After several days, I start to enjoy seeing Christmas decorations hanging from southern streetlights and storefronts and porches. Palm trees trimmed with Christmas lights are quite pretty. And you don’t have to haul them to the dump after the New Year.
 
Witnessing Christmas season in Key West transforms the geographic lens through which I've been filtering the experience. Jack Frost can nip at my nose. I can still smell chestnuts roasting on an open fire. All I ever needed for that was my imagination.
 
We all follow our personal North Stars to arrive at our own versions of Bethlehem at Christmas time. No matter where we are, Frosty doesn’t melt, Santa doesn’t sweat. All we need is the right frame of mind and it will be  “Merry Christmas to All and To All A Good Night.”
 
 

Dispatches from Key West: Part 1

Desultory. That's the surprising word I'd use to describe the general level of activity on Duval Street in Key West, Florida. There just wasn’t much juice in the wires here at 6:30 on Sunday night, December 13.

Of course, nothing compares to Fantasy Fest, Key West's annual mardi gras, that I witnessed the last time I visited the Conch Republic. Key West lived up to its reputation as a let the good times roll capital. Upwards of 60,000 people who flocked here from October 23 to Halloween October 31 could attest to that.

I returned to this carefree little island to see what Key West looked like when shiny glass beaded necklaces weren't being flung from every balcony in Old Town, and men and women were wearing clothes, not their birthday suits, as they paraded down Duval Street during Fantasy Fest.

The musicians in this town are seasoned pros. On a short stretch of lower Duval you can hear rock, blues, country, country swing, reggae, and the occasional folkie. They get the patrons rocking and the bartenders busy. Tonight, the musicians are working at it but the patrons lack their usual reciprocal energy.

A great band, The Mojitos, is belting out samba, salsa, blues, cha cha, meringue, and rumba at Sloppy Joes from 5:00 to 9:30 pm. These three guys, guitar, conga, trumpet, were alive, but all they could do was get some of the patrons to wiggle in their seats.

Fat Tuesday, not much going on inside. Fogarty’s and Flying Monkeys Saloon, calm.  Big Uns, “buy one get one free, no matter what you damn well want,” exhorts the shill to the passersby on the sidewalk just outside. The guitar hero on the little stage is cranking out some serious Led Zeppelin. The peanut sized gathering assembled at the bar is more interested in the pro football game on the plasmas. Matter of fact, the pro football games at just about every establishment have as attentive an audience as the live music in town.

Hog's Breath saloon, an acoustic guitar balladeer had the crowd in his hand. I expected rowdier music from the biker bar with a few bad-ass Harleys parked by the door. But looking at the bright side, the audience was into it. So much for assumptions.

Cheeseburgers 7:30 pm. I’m one of the only patrons. It’s a very long haul to Hawaii, but that’s where most of the other Cheeseburgers eateries on the planet are situated. That explains the grass skirts on the waitresses.

The guitar and bass player at The Lazy Gecko, An Island Bar, is doing justice to Jimmy Cliff’s “Stir It Up.”  Good energy from both sides of the bandstand. A pleasant surprise.

The guitar player at Irish Kevin’s has the crowd energized by covering each and every song the patrons want to hear. This is more like it. A small spark, a little heat from a tiny pile of kindling. The embers are doused when I tuck into Virgilio's and find I am an audience of one at 10:00 P.M.

Music is the mainstay attraction at most of these bars strung together elbow to elbow on this street. Oddly enough, there is way more listening than dancing. My speculation: most of the patrons are used to hearing live music at indoor sit down concert venues. They wiggle in their seats, they cheer, sometimes they talk to their friends over the music - but they don’t dance. More research is required. Stay tuned.

Maybe it’s too early. Time to pack it in for the day. Check things out tomorrow night.

No matter what is transpiring this sleepy night, Key West is still one of the best destinations to let it all hang out in the continental United States of America. Great eateries around every corner in Old Town. Tourist sites like the Hemingway (as in Ernest) House, the Shipwreck Museum, The Butterfly and Nature Conservatory, drop dead gorgeous white sand Smathers Beach, reliably spectacular sunsets at Mallory Square, people watching galore, fabulous music and balmy 80 degree tropical weather day after day after day. This is Jimmy Buffett country. 

Duval Street is sitting on its haunches this Sunday night. Except for nuclear war, Key West is generally immune to the outside world. Have the long fingers of the recession stifled the activity all the way down here in the southernmost tip of the United States? pt at large will dig for an answer.

Next dispatch: taxi drivers and innkeepers weigh in on the fortunes of Key West.

Toulouse-Lautrec at Boston MFA: Disappointing Dollop

CAFÉ AND CABARET: Toulouse-Lautrec’s Paris
At: Museum of Fine Arts, through Aug. 8. 617-267-9300, www.mfa.org

Look, the guy died from alcoholism and syphilis. It took him 36 short years to burn his candle down to the wick. But what a tall, brilliant flame was cast by such a diminutive, bedeviled artist.

Henri Raymond Marie de Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa (1864-1901) was a misfit from birth, born with a congenital deformity that stunted his growth (to a height of about 4 1/2 feet), disfigured his legs, and gave him a world of pain. Absinthe took care of the pain. Hanging out with dance hall girls and prostitutes took care of more worldly needs. And gave him colorful subjects to fill his canvases and posters during Paris’s “belle epoch,” the giddy final decade of the 19th century.
 
 The Boston Museum of Fine Arts is currently hosting a canapé of an exhibit that barely does justice to Henri’s talent. France has produced a ton of world-class artists. Few of them had the bold signature style of Toulouse-Lautrec. His lithographs captured the racy seediness, the earthy debauchery, of one of Paris’s most bohemian districts, Monmartre.
 
In a subculture of eccentric artists, dancers, writers, poets, prostitutes, and showgirls, Henri’s dwarfish appearance and prodigious artistic output was a match. Talented and alienated, he would never fit into the aristocratic society into which he was born. Give him a brothel or a dance hall, voilà, he was in his element - and could document it with an unerring eye to skewer and romanticize at the same time.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s signature works were the commercial lithographs he created for the Moulin Rouge and other popular nightclubs and performers in Monmartre, Using flat colors similar to those on Japanese woodblock prints that were popular in salons at the time, his posters often featured one or two main figures, slightly caricatured with the subjects’ mannerisms or attire, and emblazoned with text he designed to add wallop to the piece.
 
There are only two of these in this petite exhibit in one of the museum’s hallway. “Aristide Bruant in his Cabaret,” (1893 lithograph printed before the lettering and background details were added) gives you a whiff of his genius. A solitary small 1891 oil and mixed media painting,"At the Cafe La Mie," gives one the idea of his style.

With a title of “Café and Cabaret: Toulouse-Lautrec’s Paris,” you expect more than a scanty appetizer. ( A review in a Boston newspaper gave the impression of a much larger presence of the artist's work.) Half a dozen smaller examples of his work just don’t do justice to the artist. Toulouse-Lautrec created an estimated 737 canvases, 275 watercolors, 363 prints and posters, and 5,084 drawings. Why, then, devote one measly hallway to his output?

Credit the museum’s curators for including several oils and lithographs done by his contemporaries in the exhibit that by comparison underscore the uniqueness of Toulouse-Lautrec’s art. It’s a shame the Museum of Fine Arts gives Henri such short shrift.

Photos by Paul Tamburello- handheld camera, no flash, available light, somewhat fuzzy, my apologies, Henri... I wish I could say it  was the absinthe.

Harry Callahan Exhibit at MFA Makes Your Day

 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
465 Huntington Avenue
617-267-9300
Boston
Herb Ritts Gallery
Harry Callahan: American Photographer
November 21, 2009-July 3, 2010

Harry Callahan (1912-1999) was a major figure in 20th century photography. The tidy little retrospective of his work at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts shows why.

Of all the “ists” you can apply to Harry Callahan’s photographic style, formalist floats to the top of the list. Whether his subject was his wife Eleanor, landscapes, architecture, nature, or inventive darkroom technique, the results are a combination of a dispassionate eye and an unerring sense of composition.

The exhibition of 43 photographs spanning Callahan’s long career does a great job of highlighting the breadth of his interests and the brilliance with which he pursued them. Pretty good for a guy who began taking pictures when he was a shipping clerk in the late 1930s.

The photos are grouped according to Callahan’s interests named above. Several architectural color photographs appear almost banal compared to Callahan’s work in black and white.

Callahan’s darkroom sensibilities are apparent. Glance around the gallery and you’ll see plenty of prints using high contrast paper. Others are deeply toned photos, grays and blacks, almost gothic with the paucity of light emitted from them. A series of close-ups or Eleanor is followed by a grouping of her as a speck of light in a nocturnal shot or a reclining figure in a sprawling field.

The nude studies of his wife Eleanor have an air of detachment about them, as if he were more interested in composition than flesh. Eleanor’s body was wonderfully mature and un-sylph like. The way he prints the nudes of her force you look at them as abstractions or designs. His overexposed 1953 composition of her on a rumpled sheet, if rendered in oil paint could easily be classic Goya. Her complete comfort in front of the lens hints at the trust built in a 60-year marriage.

His willingness to try new techniques (double exposures, sometimes printing a pinup from a girlie magazine over an austere landscape or building, and use of a flashlight to produce effects on his prints in the darkroom) endeared him to students of Rhode Island School of Design where he taught from 1961 to 1976.

We are awash in a world of color. Callahan's photographs show us how much can be achieved with just two: black, white, and the tones of gray in between.

Photos taken MFA
gallery by Paul Tamburello: hand held camera, no flash, shaky hands, lots of reflection from ambient light splashed all over the glass on the frame, give viewer an approximation of Callahan's work.

The Camellia Grill: Sunny Side Up in New Orleans

The Camellia Grill
626 S Carrollton Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70118-1008
Mon, Tues, Wed, Thurs, Sun 8:00 AM - 11:00 PM
Fri, Sat 8:00 AM - 1:00 PM

The food's a good reason to eat here but the real star of the Camellia Grill is the floorshow.

This retro little diner with the Greek Revival architecture could be a museum piece. The pink walls were stylish around 1950. The two connected horseshoe-shaped granite counters and 28 bolted to the floor green vinyl topped stools haven’t budged since the place opened in 1946.

A mean customer named Katrina closed it down on August 29, 2005. Its reopening in 2007 was a sign that New Orleans was bent, not broken. Next to the Saints winning a Super Bowl, this was one of the best stories in town. It’s a destination for locals and tourists alike.

 The favorites - giant fluffy omelets, cheeseburgers, “freezes,” pecan waffles and pies live up to their accolades. What you don’t expect is that your sense of well-being will be fed while you eat.

 After a few minutes, you realize you’re in an interactive environment - not the techie zeroes and ones kind, but the give and take human kind that crackles with repartee between the counter men and customers, the occasional song, and as much banter as you can muster to match the delightful goings on behind the counter.

  This morning, Marvin, a slightly built man with the playfulness of a modern day Flip Wilson, is running the show on our side of the Grill. A walking bundle of energy, his wit is sharp as one of the knives next to the grill. He occupies the place as thoroughly as the aromas of ham, toast, and bacon.

 Right now he’s running a blue-plate streak of antic, imaginative riffs with a string of customers. Things get quiet for a minute then and a syncopated bom ba da bum bum, bum-bum clatter of a metal spatula on one of the hot grills freezes forks halfway to the customers’ mouths.
 
There’s Marvin shouting “Aaattentionnnn, everyone!” He leans back theatrically and cups his hands around his mouth for effect. “We have twooooo birthday people in the house…” Seconds later, he leads the 28 bemused patrons in a hearty rendition of Happy Birthday.
 
One of the six cooks, who’s been efficiently ham and egging, seemingly oblivious to Marvin’s antics, turns from the grill and shouts, “Now you've got to dance,” and damn if this middle-aged guy doesn't get up from his ancient green topped stools and twirl his wife around the narrow space in front of the counter. Cheers erupt. This is New Orleans in full.
 
There’s Marvin observing to no one in particular, “Monday's the most important day in the week. Get Monday off to a good start and you're gonna have a good week!” Lord knows, he might say the same thing on Tuesday. With his cadenced elocution he might as well be in a pulpit. You’re listening to the gospel according to St. Marvin.
 
After a few minutes, you feel your core beginning to lighten up, your shoulders let go of that tension you didn't realize was there, and you begin to giggle, for god’s sake.
 
There are no order pads. Marvin, without looking back at the grill, shouts commands in Camellia lingo. Four cooks in front of a long line of fryers, grills, toasters, blenders, pots and pans are whipping up eggs, frying sausage, pouring pancakes and blending freezes. There’s hardly a clue they’ve heard him but everyone’s order appears within five minutes.
 
"I think everyone needs a little magic in their lives," Marvin shouts to a Tulane student sitting with her boyfriend.
 
"That's why we came here!" she fires back. I’m telling you, before long nearly every customer becomes a bit player in this daytime soap opera known as Camellia Grill.
 
"What's goin' ooonnnnn… as Marvin Gaye used to say," Marvin croons to a new customer. Camellia’s is serving soul food, all right. More than your appetite is being fed.
 
“What's the yellow liquid in that container,” I inquire. "Sweet-as-silk, richly-satisfying buttahh," Marvin declares. "Be careful. We had to call the butter police about a week ago, told 'em to butterize a customer who used too much of it at (he uses his finger to point as he counts aloud one two three four five six seven eight nine stools from where I sit) stool number nine. They started butterizing the guy at stool ten. We had to save him and point out the guy who was sitting where you are at stool nine."
 

All this repartee gets perfect strangers feeling like they’re in an exclusive club. That includes the father and mother from New Jersey visiting their daughter sitting next to us.

Ashley and her Tulane roommates were shopping nearby a while ago and stumbled upon the Camellia. Dazzled by the floorshow that came with the food, they decided they'd found the place to eat till they graduate. And the perfect place to take visiting parents. By the time the bill is delivered, we’ve shared tips on other great places to eat.

 Tell me the name of another place where you can come in and ask Marvin or one of his cohorts to charge your cell phone and have them do it and sing you a song when you're about to check out. (I saw this, really.)
 
"This is the place," Marvin playfully sings out, " we give you the love rub, we give your tummy a love rub." Psyches, too, Marvin.
 
The  pink walls are hung with black and white photos of the grill's history. Most of them are of the waiters, past and present, who’ve worked the Camellia Grill for decades. Marvin’s been there since 1992.
 
Later, a native New Orleanian tells us that Henry Thervalon worked at Camellia Grill for nearly fifty years. His son was a superior court judge, but Henry was better known. "When they sold T-shirts, they charged $10 more when Henry signed one," he said. I tell you, I would have paid five bucks more for my pecan waffle and my companion’s out of this world fluffy sausage and cheese omelet if Marvin had signed them. 

There are mountains of great food served around this town. There’s only one place you leave with a lighter heart and an ample serving of what makes New Orleans one of the special places on this good earth. Its name is the Camellia Grill. 

 We're in New Orleans for two more days. Guess where we're having breakfast tomorrow.

Photos by  Paul Tamburello

The Maple Leaf Bar: Dive In

Maple Leaf Bar
8616 Oak Street
New Orleans, LA 70118
Open 3 PM - 4 AM 7 days a week. Live music every night. Some pretty interesting conversation, too, if you get there before the  music gets cranking.

There are venues in New Orleans you just have to see. You’ve gone to New Orleans for the brass bands, the second line marches, the out of the way bars with great music, the out of the way eateries with funny names and great food, the hospitality, the waitresses who call you “ Beau,” a look at the Big Muddy- the Mississippi River, a walk down Bourbon Street with its mix of the gaudy, the commercial, and the few real deal places still standing, the lovely homes of the Garden District, the old wooden clang clang street cars with people’s elbows poking out of the open windows in the heat of the afternoon, and to breathe the air of the Big Easy.

 
Your first few visits probably don’t include the museums, unless you consider any bar or music joint built before 2000 antiquities. You want to see some real dive bars. You know, the funky ones, the ones everyone will ask you about when you return home.
 
They’re up there in ‘shrine’ status, places to be venerated, get plastered in, danced to within inches of your life in, become besotted with great music in, rub elbows with as wide a mix of America as you’ll find at a really good dive in. Which is what Zagat, for god’s sake, lists the Maple Leaf Bar as in its section about New Orleans - not the other stuff, but the ‘top dive’ part.
 
Which is why we searched for 8316 Oak Street on our handy StreetWise map and hauled down St. Charles Avenue to S. Carrollton in search of this mythical place somewhere in the Carrollton District. Two thirty in the afternoon is not an ideal time to visit a dive bar. But if it’s your last full day in New Orleans, you go to just see the place, to bookmark it in your memory, advance scouting for your next trip.
 
It was the usual 86/86 afternoon, 86 degrees F, 86 % humidity. Two steps into the darkened open doorway, the sweet smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke was the first sign that we’d entered dive territory. The second was a firm voice coming from within. “We’re not open till 3:00.”
 
That would be from the bartender, Jeff, slowly organizing for whoever would be sauntering in a half hour later.
 
“Look, we’re from Boston. We can’t come back later. We’ve heard this is one of the best bars in town. Mind if we just take a peek, you know, so we could at least say we’ve seen the place when we get home.”
 
 
A man with the grayish three-day growth and T-shirt piped up. “Sure, come on in.”  A  worn, L shaped mahogany-stained bar that's felt the weight of thousands of elbows comes into focus as our eyes adjust. Ancient overhead fans, ruby red pressed tin walls, cement floor, oh yeah, Tennessee Williams would have been right at home on this side of the Maple Leaf. Hank follows us into the other side, a narrow room painted a glorious bordello scarlet, with a worn wood dance floor and small stage against the street end.
 
 “That’s an image of James Booker lying over the stage there,” Hank says in a tone of voice that suggests I should know the name if I know a damn thing about New Orleans music. I nod.

I find out later Booker's storied career, including a stint in Angola Penitentiary for heroin possession that derailed possibilities for mainstream recognition, blossomed when college students rediscovered him in the 1970s. The eccentric rhythm & blues piano man became a New Orleans fixture in places like Tipitina’s, Snug Harbor, and The Maple Leaf Bar, which opened its doors in 1974.

Even at 2:30 in the afternoon, I can imagine the room jamming with blues, funk, R&B, rock, zydeco, jazz, and jam bands that play there seven nights a week. What I didn't know was that the Leaf hosts poetry readings, birthday parties, weddings, potlucks and the occasional wake. 

On the way out, Hank, who had warmed up amiably as he saw we were true believers, shows us photos that line the wall behind the bar of The Krewe of O.A.K., a neighborhood New Orleans Mardi Gras krewe that starts and ends its parades at the Maple Leaf.

Since 365 days is far too long to wait for Fat Tuesday, the The Krewe of O.A.K. hosts a mini Mid-Summer Mardi Gras at the end of August. A wildly decorated golf cart parked outside a neighborhood saloon is a sure way to find where the paraders have stopped for refreshment. Costumes for the midnight ball at the Maple Leaf are described as, ahhh, unconventional.

Sure enough, there is Hank as Krewe of O.A.K. King in 1989. Looks like he’s having a grand time. Well that he should.

Hank Staples, I discover while writing this story, is the proprietor of the place. And O.A.K. stands for ‘outrageous and kinky.” Like a true New Orleanean, Hank knows how to make the good times roll.

 Below, Hank and Jeff, reflected in window, relax before The Maple Leaf's 3:00 PM opening. It appears to be a badge of honor, worn with a pride rooted in a deep sense of neighborhood, that this stretch of Oak Street hasn't felt the need to change its 1950-ish sense of style.

Photos by Paul Tamburello

The Lake Ponchartrain Causeway: A blue water odyssey

^{The Lake Ponchartrain Causeway, an engineering marvel that bridge afficionaldos must experience}

“Boooring and unscenic” the Louisiana native said. “And why would you want to cross the Lake Ponchartrain Causeway when we can get from New Orleans to Baton Rouge much more directly on I - 10?”
 
Whoa! I’m a bridge man. I still get a jolt thinking about my first sighting of the Brooklyn Bridge and my slow touristy walk across it from Brooklyn to the city a few winters ago.
 
The Ponchartrain Causeway is the longest highway bridge over water in the whole wide world. It’s 23.9 miles long. The gigantic lake is more like an inland sea, 630 square miles, forty miles wide, and wow, who wouldn’t want to drive those twenty three miles north and south over the heart of the lake.
 
“There’s nothing to see but water,” she said.
 
“Exactly! That’s the point! Sort of like magically driving over water,” I reason as I headed north from The French Quarter in New Orleans.
 
Twenty minutes later, the enormous lake appeared. Two parallel spans, 80 feet apart, with two lanes each, whitewashed in the noon sun, stretched straight out to the vanishing point.
 
Ten minutes later, my passenger was dozing. I was snapping photos and thrilling to the ka-thunk ka-thunk ka-thunk rhythm as the tires traversed the pre stressed concrete panels on the road, held up by 9000 concrete pilings.
 
Metairie on the south shore was receding in the rear view mirror; Saint Tammany Parish on the north shore wouldn’t come into view for another fifteen minutes.
 
Clipping along at about 60, ten miles per hour less than the limit, so I could snap photos in the brilliant midday sun, I was mildly disappointed when the north shore, Covington and Mandeville, appeared on the horizon. After a lifetime of driving over terra firma, surrounded by forests, pastures, brick and mortar cities, and clapboard hamlets, driving over terra aqua was otherworldly.

When British mountaineer George Mallory was asked in 1923, “Why climb Mount Everest?” he responded, “Because it is there.” The Ponchartrain Causeway Bridge, the world’s longest bridge over water was there. Well...

 An estimated 30,000 cars cross the Causeway Bridge every workday. I’ll bet I had more fun than any of them.

Photo by Paul Tamburello, holding camera out window at 60 mph. Not recommended techique for amateurs.

Whiskey River Landing: Flooded With Music

Dancers in Louisiana will drive through hell and high water to get to a good shindig. We were driving through a flash flood ten minutes after we left one in Henderson.

Geno Delafose and his French Rockin’ Boogie were probably still playing back there. The place was jammed when we left around 7 pm, since we’d heeded the warning of locals that during the rain, four wheel drive was the best bet to climb the steep, muddy levee road we drove down to get there. We heaved a sigh of relief when our rental Chevy sedan slippy slidey-d up to the top of the levee, the lights from Angelle's Whiskey River Landing disappearing in the mist. Little did we know.

The rain pounding on the car roof was deafening. The wipers lashing at full speed gave split second views of the road before the windshield blurred again. It was pitch dark. We missed the turn for Interstate 10. A few minutes later, the road looked more like a bayou. The headlights played atop black water rolling over the flat country road stretching before us. The only evidence or the road’s location was light from a loose string of houses stretching to our left and right. It's unnerving when your car suddenly feels like a pleasure craft.

 
Our previous reassurance, a trickle of cars coming from the opposite direction, meaning the road ahead was manageable, had stopped. The car behind us, a Jeep, turned off and headed back. There was no way to tell whether the situation was better where we’d been or where we were headed.

The front of the car was pushing a bow wake. I opened the door to check the height of the water. Dumb. One inch below the doorsill. The terrain was flat. No high ground visible. We were making about two knots. Louisiana’s annual rainfall is 59.74 inches. It felt like most of that had fallen in the past hour.
 
The sweat from dancing for three hours in Henderson, somewhere back there in wilderness, had evaporated, replaced by the sweat from a sense of impending danger.  The tone of our voices as we plotted our course was measured. Panic would be useless. Not uncalled for, but useless.

How long before water would seep through the doors? How long before it would drown the engine? What then?

Water gurgled underneath the car. After twenty tense, slow-mo, surreal minutes of driving through a nightmare, we reached higher ground and found our way to I-10 and Baton Rouge. It took three days for the rental car to dry out. The car’s grill was clogged with flotsam. My nerves were shot. It was worth it.

Monday through Saturday Whiskey River’s an overgrown fishing shack sandwiched between a thirty-foot earthen levee and the shore of the Atchafalaya Swamp, the largest river basin in the continental United States. Come Sunday, it’s the Taj Mahal of Creole music.

It’s Cinderella trading in her glass slipper for jeans and a pair of cowboy boots - and her pumpkin carriage for a pickup truck. The hell with the Ball. She’ll find plenty of princes to dance with in the tumbledown flat-roofed addition/dance hall that juts fearlessly over the swamp.

(Below, the early crowd dances to music provided by the band preceding Geno Delafose. The Atchafalaya Swamp is visible through plate glass windows right behind the stage.)

The best Cajun and Zydeco bands in the universe find their way there from 4 pm to 8 pm.  Day of rest?  Nope. This is holy rolling rapture, as close to a religious experience as you’ll have rhythmically moving your body around with a partner of the opposite sex in playfully pagan ways. 

 

Geno Delafose brings something special to the music. Two tall Texans told me they came all the way from Houston to hear him play. After every song, friends and admirers pushed up to the bandstand to say hello. Delafose, neatly pressed shirt and jeans, big cowboy hat making him seem seven feet tall, greeted everyone with a genuinely appreciative smile, then cranked up another song. His energy is as vast as the swamp behind the dance hall.

 
Hundreds of pairs of booted feet were pounding the bejesus out of the plywood dance floor. College students, businessmen, farmers, cowboys, accountants, tourists, carpenters, you name it, of every race and age stood around the worn dance floor or leaned against the bar that runs the length of the place, which was packed.
 
Energy pulses through the place, People smile, laugh, hug. Most are regulars, “Where you from?” they ask. When Boston is the answer, eyebrows arch as if to say ‘What do Yankees know about zydeco?’ My companion, born in Baton Rouge and apparently secretly raised in a dance hall, and we do a pretty good job of answering the question on the dance floor.
 
Whiskey River Landing was rebuilt after having its roof torn off by Katrina in 2005. Louisianans would sooner go without grits than without dancing.

The Atchafalaya Swamp is visible through a plate glass window behind the stage. Paneled wood walls are pinned with posters. Groups cluster around folding chairs and small tables, many of which are topped with a pail full of ice and bottles of Abita Beer.

When I stepped outside between rainfalls to photograph the place, egrets were beginning to roost in the swamp. And Floyd LeBlanc, whom I'd interviewed the day before in Breaux Bridge, came out to show me where he set up his duck blind for the little business he had going on after WWII.

 Next time I go to Lafayette, I'm renting a pickup truck with four-wheel drive, a good stereo, and a rudder.

Photos by Paul Tamburello

Synchopated Creole Thunder

Short of sex, there aint nothing as powerful as a pressed-together-sweaty-zydeco dance with a woman who channels the music as if your two bodies were having a particle physics convention.

It felt like Andre Thierry, zydeco king accordion player from Lafayette brought everything with him in his band’s van except the snakes and the crawfish. The Louisiana music blasted through the dance pavilion like syncopated Creole thunder. The joyous accordion, guitar, bass, drums, and wash board frottoir set the two hundred dancers packed under the tent to vibrate like tuning forks in the densely humid August afternoon. This was hollerin’, hip shaking, who cares about anything except the eight beat here and now zydeco nirvana.
 
The air was thick with perfume soaked perspiration, smoke drifting from the grill, and music from just this side of heaven. The crowd had been dancing for nearly four hours, the band had lifted off with the refracted energy, everything felt slippery, clothing stuck to dancers, sweat ran like rain off bodies and nobody gave a damn. These were the last two dances and everyone concerned had one thing in mind. Totally incinerate every last molecule of dance energy and leave it smoldering on the dance floor.
 
Neurons and synapses locked in the eternal moment my partner and I touched. Every molecule locked and loaded. After sixteen beats the five six one twenty five pounds of her was molded against me like a second skin. Scent of her brown hair in my nostrils, her breath hot against my neck, her arms pulling me tight, corporeal fusion underway.
 
The preceding three and a half hours of dance was a launch pad for this one glorious fit yourselves together, become one eight count organism doing everything but mitosis on that dance floor, her Molly Bloom smiling eyes saying Yes, I’m loving this, Yes, keep it going, and Yes, I did, body parts emulating call and response, the thigh to thigh contact that had the charge of sex the sweat of sex the uninhibited moves of sex but no sex, this was a sex no sex dance, a yin yang dance real and fanciful, intimate and distant, we dance independently but totally in synch, defying Newton, tucked into the same space at the same time, “What’s your name?” she shouts as music ends, "You’ve got the best firepower I’ve felt all day!” She’s still feeling that dance as she sips her coffee this morning, jesus that dance was special, I wonder what would happen if we dance again.
 
And Im thinking that dance was a gift, a present the day after blowing out a few score candles on my birthday. This was going to be a good year.

Key West: Masquerade March at Fantasy Fest 2009

Fantasy Fest in Key West is the grandmother of all Halloween celebrations. It’s wacky, spirited and light hearted but not for the faint of heart. If you’re opposed to nudity and risqué antics, better trick or treat somewhere else. If you’re open-minded and want to experience it, plan ahead because the town’s lodgings are booked months in advance of the last week of October.

Back in 1978 a member of the Tourist Development Association wanted to add a spark to the dry tinder of the town’s autumn economy with a festivity before the tourist season began in earnest. Thirty years later, Fantasy Fest has the wallop of Mardi Gras in New Orleans and the sizzle of Carnivale in Rio de Janiero. Ever heard of a bonfire?

While the rest of the town remains in business as usual mode, Duval Street becomes ground zero for ten days of intense partying. From the Goombay street fair and Coronation of 2009 Fantasy Fest King and Queen on Friday October 23 to the “Fat Lady Sings” Tea Party on November 1, every day is filled with entertainment.

Ordinary diversions like the wet T shirt, Home Made Bikini contests, and Toga Parties and originals like The Third Annual “Pinking of You” Decorated Bra Auction, Captain Tony’s Party in Plaid, the 27th Annual Headdress Ball (this year’s theme was Hedonistic Heroes and Vexing Villains with Prizes for Best Headdress), Dress In White Night, and The 9th Annual Living Art Airbrush Expo (using the human form as a living canvas for artistic expression). Then there’s the Dungeon of Dark Secrets and Fetishes, hmmmm.  Straight, gay, or somewhere in between, there is something for everyone. And everyone is having a good time.

 pt at large returned to Key West the day before the Friday October 30 Masquerade March, a clothing optional promenade of Disneyland proportion. Good idea.

The tropical sun ricochets off bleached tombstones as over a thousand paraders and spectators home in on the front gate of Key West Cemetery. Where else would anyone begin a Halloween March? It is 5 P.M. 

Marchers with a drink in one hand and camera in the other yak it up and admire each other’s attire. Gallons of body paint, pounds of sequins, yards of taffeta, not to mention latex, leather, and lycra, have been deployed creatively.

Key West has issued a giant permission slip to participants to dress up (or down) as vampires, vixens, villains, pole dancers, kinky kings, naughty nurses, tooth fairies, monks, gladiators, sailors. Wizard of Oz characters - the list goes on. 

Fantasy Fest spins straw into gold when an amalgam of levity and nudity commingles as accountants, teachers, librarians, lawyers, idlers, retirees, engineers. layabouts, - whoever- shrug off the fetters of convention and load up on body paint, Halloween costumes and an insouciance that’s contagious.

One woman walking topless down Main Street USA would end up on the evening news. Hundreds of undraped men and women walking over a mile from the cemetery to Duval Street during Fantasy Fest cause nary a ripple in Key West.

Before long, I’m looking people up and down and saying, “You look fabulous!” and snapping photos. This is a parallel universe.  These people haven’t become unhinged, just liberated for a few hours from the norms for the rest of the known world.

Look around. See men and women who’ve been getting mail from the AARP for years. They look their age and egads are they whooping it up.

Someone in the crowd remarks that some participants would be better off with their clothes on. NO, I say, This is democracy in the buff. What makes this festival fabulous is that people with soft, flabby, too big, too small bodies are flipping the bird to the conglomerates that fill glossy magazines with images of airbrushed perfection. And aren’t ashamed to bare it all right next to the hard bodies.

Free punch and beer are served along the route on tables outside neighborhood guest houses and inns en route.

Mardi Gras beads, flung by celebrants on balconies and porches, rain down and end up in tree branches, phone lines and in the hands of the happy.

No one appears intoxicated. I haven’t heard one catcall or crude remark.  The drag queens are sassy. Everyone is jovial.

When a knot of people forms up the street, you know a spectacularly painted body or cleverly designed costume in the middle of it.

“Nothing is free in Key West. Don’t rely on inaccurate self-exams. Have one here from an experienced hand!” shouts a man wearing a box with two chest-high holes carved in it. He’s drawn a crowd and a several women accept the offer, much to the delight of the crowd.

By 7 PM, thousands of people have descended upon Duval Street, where several blocks have been cordoned off. Music pours from bars and saloons. Merriment prevails.

Masquerade March is a good-natured bawdy spectacle so far outside the pale of ordinary celebrations it defies explication. 

I’ve never seen such light hearted displays of flesh and costumery, refreshingly void of self-consciousness and filled with laughter and joie de naughtiness.

I know where I’ll be trick or treating next October.

Key West Fantasy Fest: Thursday October 29, 2009

How does a town whose norm is living with its hair down celebrate? It lets its hair down and takes off its clothes. This, my dear friends, describes the general aura of the 30th Annual Villains, Vixens, and Vampires Fantasy Fest in Key West, Florida.
 
“If you look down and see confetti and peanuts, you know you missed the parade,” my college buddy host said, shaking his head at my decision to miss the event, one of the best parties on the planet. But I’d spent two great weeks crewing on, Skate, his Valiant 37 sailboat, from Fort Pierce to Key West. Leroy Thomas, the fabulous zydeco accordion player I’d heard in early October at the Café des Amis in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, was playing in my turf on Saturday. I wanted to be there. It was time to go home.

The American Airlines agent at Key West International Airport fished a Fantasy Fest brochure from her bag to show me what I would miss by leaving on Friday October 23.

The event brochure’s claim “Mortals beware… Fantasy Fest is calling all Villains, Vixens, and Vampires! Sink your teeth into ten days of tantalizing temptations, and outrageous events that are sure to leave a bite mark. There are over forty Fantasy Fest events that will quench the thirst for excitement, bizarre, and the provocative,” and the agent’s smile did register. But I’d seen a bit of the town, how good could this party be?

Three days later, during a daylong cold rainstorm at home in a suburb of Boston, I booked a flight to Key West. It was time to throw confetti and eat peanuts.
 
I bang away this missive from below deck on Skate, moored in Garrison Bight, one of the harbors that surround Key West. It is midnight. And hot in the cabin. We’ve just dinghied back from town and I’ve witnessed enough levity to float the Goodyear Blimp. I need to write about it.
 
It is Thursday night October 29. The skids have been greased with events going on in town since the day I left. Key West is an eccentric piece of real estate to begin with. Fantasy Fest slingshots it into the stratosphere.
 
Events have been going on day and night inside the saloons on Duval Street. Outside, however, is the place to be. Everyone going anywhere is out here tonight. It is about 80 degrees and humid.
 
I don’t have the inclination to compose in orderly paragraphs. Every circuit breaker in my mind accustomed to the norms of decorum in New England is blown. In the spirit of this southernmost town in the US of A, I excuse myself and go with the first draft.

There are hundreds of nearly naked people roaming around here. Men and women are walking up and down Duval Street with decorations on every anatomical appendage they were born with. There seems to be one rule. Genitalia regalia for women should (operative word) be covered by a triangular patch the size of their triangle. For him, a thong or breechcloth or a toga or a leetle towel or silky kiltie to conceal the family jewels. 

Exposed flesh is not a requisite. Many costumes are elaborate. Captain Morgan swashbuckles down the street. Mary Poppins skips. There are far more spectators than participants. Everyone is having fun. This is the French Riviera with a sense of theater.

The first few minutes of walking down Duval Street I felt like a paparazzi trying to snap photos of near naked celebrities. The epiphany came when I pointed my camera at an oncoming Eve. She stopped dead in her tracks and offered a saucy pose. A photo? Of course!

Couples, groups, and individuals (un)dressed for the occasion expect attention. Inhibition? Naahhh. That’s why they’re here. Confined to a wheelchair? Charge the battery!

Women wearing body paint and a smile sashay down the street. In my next lifetime I want to become a body paint artist and live in Key West. Want a photo opp? Ask and the subject obliges with a smile. Want to get in the photo? Sure thing. Hand your camera to another photographer and put your arm around the obliging subject. A swarm of photographers of both sexes flash away.

 
Beauty standards are blown to the wind. Shapes, sizes, colors, and ages are in parade mode. Couples from twenties to sixties strip down or costume up. Some would never grace the pages of any cheesecake or beefcake magazine and that is the glory of this. The street belongs to these revelers as much as to the centerfolds.
 
As an astute observer I can say that major impact factors are carriage and attitude. Give me an “I own this street” fifty year old whose body shows signs of gravity over a slouchy twenty something firm body. If you’re out here in all your glory, you don’t want to walk the same way you’d push your cart down aisle six of the Winn Dixie.


People showing off their costumes in Captain Tony’s take photos of each other. There’s a wet T shirt contest at Sloppy Joe’s but the best action is right on Duval Street. Stay in one place for an hour and you’ll see every damn partier in town.


This place is all lighthearted attitude.  Have lots of public nakedness and things can get complicated. The only thing complicated in Key West Fantasy Fest is which nearly naked person to admire.
 

Nudity is often associated with pornography. During Fantasy Fest in Key West, being near naked is an art form, lighthearted entertainment, and good old-fashioned fun. You’d think eyeballs would fall from their sockets from the strain of leering. Doesn’t happen.

When Key West cuts loose, it drifts with a playful sensual sense of fun and flaunting. This has to be seen to be understood. Luckily I am here to report this to you.

 
You don’t have to have a gorgeous body. Attitude goes a long way to improve whatever gifts nature has given you. Out of the way Margarita-ville, here comes Attitude-ville.

The good times are just beginning, three more days to go.
 

The Radio Kings

The Radio Kings at Sally O'Brien's in Somerville,MA
October 27, 2009

There are two things you can be assured of when The Radio Kings hit the bandstand. They’ll surprise you with the breadth of their catalogue and they will play music that begs you to get up and dance.

Last Tuesday’s gig at Sally O’Brien’s was a case in point. Brian Templeton and Company - Mike Dinallo/guitar, Andy Plaisted/drums, Dean Cassel/bass and Templeton wielding guitar and mouth harp, got into a first set groove that veered from swing to blues and ballads.

I’ve known The Radio Kings as a killer blues band that covers Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Slim Harpo and adds their own originals. Tonight they went country, with grit and finesse. When they play a song by Luke the Drifter, a pen name Hank Williams used early in his career, you know they're inquisitive, adventurous, and willing to stray from the well trodden path.

Perhaps incongruous to country-averse listeners or listeners of higly commercial playlists on country radio stations, this genre is a rich source of dance music. The handful of dancers tonight polished their moves in country swing, west coast swing, two step, and slow hold-her-tight ballads.
 
Templeton can croon and growl then pick up his harmonica and stake out the boundaries of the song. Dinallo, innovative and playful, takes up where Templeton left off. Veterans Plaisted and Cassel keep the train on the tracks with steady drum and bass beats.
 
The Radio Kings are right at home in Sally O’Brien’s in Somerville and Toad in Cambridge, two of the best funky neighborhood bars in the area. The regulars respect the music, and the great beer and ale on tap in both places is as rich and varied as the music performed there.
 
First set partial list:
“Hello Trouble” - Hank Williams
“Lovesick Blues” - Hank Williams
“Six More Miles” - Luke the Drifter, (early Hank Williams pen name)
“The Shelf “(Hard To Love Somebody When You Can’t Love Yourself} - Brian Templeton
“Run With The Blues” - Dave Clarke
“Can’t Go On Without You”-  Fats Domino
“Nervous Breakdown” -  Eddie Cochran

 

Key West: Treasures, Trinkets, and Trash

Gentle readers, that summarizes the southernmost town in the USA, Key West, Florida. Forget that it’s Hemingway’s adopted hometown. It is now a tiny retail carnival town aiming for the lowest common denominator to people who’ve come from afar to reduce fractions. This gloriously decadent island winks, blinks, and hardly ever blushes. It’s a ton of fun.

The epicenter of Key West is Duval Street, a 3/4 mile stretch where the sacred and profane spill into each other with worldly insouciance.

On a post-lunch perambulation, I'm hailed from a darkened doorway by a lovely black woman in a paperclip bikini who promises visions of tawny sugar plums if I venture inside. It is 3 PM. My sweet tooth notwithstanding, I decline with a smile and an air kiss, both returned, by the way.

Across the street, a high-end Coach store flashes a wanton display of plush leather and fashion accessories like a retail store gone wild.

Voluptuous mannequins with postage sized bikinis ogle passersby from tiny storefronts.

And shapely girls at The Bull are ogled by enthralled tourists.

T-shirt and knick-knack shops elevate tackiness to an art form and punctuate every block. The best T-shirt logo, at least the best one I can write into this public blog is “Key West is a drinking town with a fishing problem.”

Bars flourish in this town in which the thermometer has been stuck on 86 degrees for several months. Music blares from Sloppy Joe's, and Cowboy Bill’s Honky Tonk Saloon, and the The Bull and Whistle Bar, where clothing is reputedly optional on the roof deck.

Out of the obligation for journalistic verification, I climbed to the third floor and observed well-formed nakednesses at the bar and lying Cleopatra and Caesar style upon chaise lounges one sunny afternoon. Key West is definitely laid back.


St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the oldest in the Florida diocese, its whitewashed exterior shimmering brilliantly in the afternoon sun, seems to tolerate the frivolity. Sooner or later, penitents may enter to make amends.

An evening stroll down Duval Street is short on nuance and long on neon. Whether you’re straight, gay, or somewhere in between, there’s a seat at some bar for you. Downstairs at The Bull and Whistle Bar, it could be all in the same place. Music pours out of bars and spills into the street, a not too subtle siren call enticing you inside. Not that most of us need much of an invitation.

Parade is the default mode for Duval Street. On any given night, straight piped earsplitting Harleys, bicycle rickshaws, tiny electric glorified golf carts masquerading as mini cars, and ancient convertibles with babes of all persuasions throwing trinkets advertising girlie bars and pole dancing establishments cruise up and down.

This is a Noah’s Ark kind of town. Observe long enough and you’ll see all the species of the known earth: tourists, locals, all manner of certifiable characters, street people, teens with the ubiquitous skate board, shills in front of strip clubs, and very few kids under twelve.

One or two humongous cruise ships are usually docked here. I wonder what the folks from Iowa wearing shorts, white socks and walking shoes make of all this. It’s either Gomorrah or Eden with a guilty conscience. I imagine it might be like walking around a zoo with no bars between the visitors and wild creatures.

Say one thing about Margaritaville, everyone seems to get along. My first night in town, the captain brought me to Mallory Square, THE place to be at sunset in Key West. The seaside bar at Ocean Key Resort and Spa is jammed with patrons, their eyes on the horizon and hands cupping beverages. Great music from a live band hones the edge of the anticipated sunset.

“Have a beer!” A jovial middle-aged couple with enough beers on their table to start a game of checkers offers me a cold one. The sun sets, a million pixels pulse from scores of cameras. And the band plays on.

By the wee hours, Duval keeps humming with the hardiest partiers. By daylight, the whole spectacle begins anew. It never gets old in Key West. More than a few pilgrims have declared this paradise and never left

In case you wonder, there are museums, art galleries and quaint architecture to be seen in Key West. You just have to get Duval Street out of your system first.

Photos by P. Tamburello.

Mallory Square photo courtesy of http://www.sunsetcelebration.org/

The Bucking Toilet: En route to Key West

When’s the last time your toilet acted like a bucking bronco?  Leaving aside that time you hoisted way too many margarita’s, it would be the last time you were attempting to sit on the throne as it was rolling through the swells in the ocean. Like the bronco, the waves are unpredictable. You immediately grasp the reason the “head” in a sailboat is so small.

With no reins to hold onto, you get leverage with your feet against the wall in front of you to keep from pitching forward in your yawing, rocking, rolling, little bathroom on Neptune’s ceiling, then stabilze yourself laterally by pushing against the walls with your arms while doing your level best to ease the release button on one or both of your nether sphincters. 

Your adventure has just begun, matey. There’s the matter of filling and flushing the little apparatus. Since, aside from the accomplished captain,  I am the only crew on this beautifully maintained Valiant 37  blue water sailing vessel, I live in fear that I will, in a careless or flung-around moment, apply too much pressure and break the little intake lever under the pump in/out handle. It does not require a nautical engineer to figure the consequences.

There are many no-no’s aboard a sailboat. Over my ration of grog on the second night out, I confessed my hyper level of concern while operating the ingenious contraption.

Tangle the jib lines? Forgivable - as long as you can untangle them before they’re needed next. Leave a fender over the side after you’ve exited the dock? An embarrassment to the captain, who scoffs at passing boats who’ve been negligent, but tolerates it since I’m on board for only two weeks and will learn fast. Screw up the propane stove? Not good. But, there are always canned goods. 

Render the head inoperable? As the captain, a college buddy who decided two years ago to chuck it all, buy this classic-design sailboat and become a ‘live aboard,’ said, ”That is a walk the plank offense.”

Presently in Marathon Key, 200 miles from where we began six days ago in Fort Pierce, FL, we are about 40 miles from our destination, Key West, FL. The plank has remained stowed.

 

LSU: Hold That Tiger

Louisiana bleeds purple and gold. From September to bowl season, the collective psyches of the citizens of  Louisiana appear to live and die with the fortunes of the LSU football team.

In my twelve day road trip from New Orleans to Baton Rouge to Lafayette to Lake Charles and back, nearly every gas station, market, restaurant, bar and grill pledged allegiance to the LSU Fighting Tigers. Caps, mugs, inflatable tigers, pennants, and t-shirts dangled from hooks, hung on walls, and surrounded cash registers.

While using the Internet connection in the Lafayette, Louisiana, Days Inn lounge I was startled to hear a whoop from the office around the corner. A moment later, Miss Sondra, the usually composed desk manager, apologized for the outburst when she realized I was present. It wasn’t embarrassment that flushed her face. The game was on the line against Georgia. If a  sixty mile shout from Lafayette to Baton Rouge would help, Ms Sondra was gonna shout.

Her loyalty is permanent. She informed me of the large purple and gold tiger tattoo over her right sho ulder blade (which I didn’t ask to see to satisfy journalistic curiosity).

During lunch at Poor Boy Lloyd’s in Baton Rouge three days later, the three plasma TV screens played endless loops of the game’s final moments as Louisiana State University defeated Georgia 20-13. 

The LSU campus in Baton Rouge

The Louisiana State University football stadium in Baton Rouge is on the scale of a Mayan Temple. Even considering the sprawl of the 650-acre, 250 building leafy campus on the banks of the Mississippi River, its footprint is monumental.

Mike is a major attraction. He is the sixth tiger to reside here since 1936.

 The only thing the fans left home was Mike VI, a two-year-old 300-pound Siberian-Bengal tiger who lives in mini-savannah captivity in the shadow of Tiger Stadium across the street. When full grown he’ll close in on 700 pounds. During this reporter’s trip to the campus, a continual stream of intergenerational admirers visited Mike.

Mike's penthouse across the street from Tiger Stadium

Speaking of streams, while two undergraduates and I were admiring him from one of the viewing arches that surround his compound, Mike turned his tail to us and puckered up a certain sphincter. An arch of fine golden droplets sparkled in the late afternoon sun and covered us with Mikey-ness. Perhaps  this is Mike's way of inducting Yankees into the Tiger fold.

 

To quote an LSU web site, "Eight nights a year, Tiger Stadium becomes the fifth largest city in the state of Louisiana as over 92,000 fans pack the cathedral of college football to watch the Tigers play.” It is the sixth largest college stadium in the country.

Immense and meant to impress by sheer weight of concrete and steel, cathedral would be the appropriate term.

Since 2000, the Tigers have a record of 49-7 at home. Visiting teams think of Tiger Stadium as ‘Death Valley.” Tickets for Saturday’s game against Florida are being scalped for one grand apiece.

Most ticket holders would rather live on close rations for a week than give in to the temptation to sell.This Saturday, number 4 ranked LSU faces number 2 ranked Florida. It’s a safe bet that every one of the 21,000 undergraduates and tens of thousands of boosters will pack Tiger Stadium.

Game night at Tiger Stadium

One alumnus informed me that LSU has a reputation as the biggest college tailgate community in the country. Twenty thousand, with or without their tailgates in tow, traveled to the game against Washington in Seattle in September. Is the word fan derived from the word fanatic?

Photos, except night shot of Tiger Stadiium above,  by Paul Tamburello

From cradle to dance hall in Southwest Louisiana

 
When’s the last time you saw six-year-old kids on the dance floor? Or little girls or boys being whirled around the dance floor in their daddy or mommy’s arms?
 
If you lived in Louisiana that would have been last Friday or Saturday night at Randol’s in Lafayette or Saturday afternoon at The Coffee Break in Breaux Bridge.
 
Music and dancing is a huge way of life in southwest Louisiana. Who needs Arthur Murray when you can learn from everybody in the dance hall?
 
Friday night, a young brother and sister alternated sitting in the dining room with their parents and grandparents and skipping hand in hand to the dance hall in the next room.
 

The Cajun band Jambalaya (which played in the Lowell, MA Festival a month ago) kicked out one joyous song after another, all in Cajun French. Some kids sat on one of the wooden benches that surround the hall, visible through the glass partition between the dance hall and the dining room, and watched the adults styling to the music.

A shy blonde eight-year-old girl was busy taking digital photos of every couple that passed by - until her grandfather leaned over, took the camera out of her hands, and led her around the floor in a waltz.

On Saturday night, a pair of six and seven year olds stole the show. Got right out there and did their version of waltzing and two stepping. Adults applauded the two kids as if they were contestants on Dancing With The Stars. They beamed with the attention.
 
Earlier that day at The Coffee Break, the children who came to the Pont Breaux Jam, the weekly Saturday 11 AM to 2 PM celebration of Cajun music, were treated royally. While little brother was being danced around to the Cajun music by his dad, little sister was getting an impromptu waltz lesson by one of the men who’d come in from the Café des Amis.
 
Maybe that explains why places like Café des Amis in Breaux Bridge, Angelle’s Whiskey River Dance Hall, McGee’s Landing, and Pat’s Fisherman’s Wharf, all in Henderson, and many more places throughout the parishes of southwest Louisiana, are so popular.
 
If there’s a zydeco or Cajun band on the stage, you can bet there’ll be a roomful of men and women working up a lather two-stepping, waltzing, and slow dancing for hours at a time.
 
Music and dance are the glue that holds towns together all over southwest Louisiana. Some day, these little shavers will grow up to be the adults teaching their own kids to dance at Randol’s or The Pont Breaux Jam, or a facsimile thereof. 

Floyd LeBlanc: A Cajun Original

Practically all the regulars who come into The Coffee Break at noon in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, know Floyd. A handful of them who’ve been dancing since 8 AM at the Café des Amis drift in here to listen to more Cajun music. Floyd doesn’t miss much when it comes to fun. He was dancing with as many women as he could fit on his dance card at the café.

He certainly didn’t miss a chance to dance with my pretty traveling companion. That’s when he found out we were out of towners.

“I hear you’re from Boston. Ask me anything about Breaux Bridge you want”, he says and shakes my hand with a solid grip.

“Well, let’s start with the Café des Amis. How long has that place been having dances on Saturday mornings? “

“I’ve been coming here for around 12 years since they began the Saturday dance”, Floyd says. “You know, the place used to be a funeral parlor in the early 1900s. They made caskets on the second floor. Did you see the hand crank rig overhead when you walked into the café? That’s how they got the caskets down from the second floor. Did you see the church across the street? The caskets went from there to the church for burial in the cemetery next to the church. Pretty efficient setup. “

Floyd’s a natural born story teller, After listening for fifteen minutes I could tell that there are three things that Floyd appears to love, dancing, women, and living by his wits. He’s been married 55 years to his second wife. He’s flirtatious, rambunctious and, if the stories he tells me are true, a bit of a rascal.

“I was born in Breaux Bridge and raised in Henderson Levee”, he says, and begins to tell stories. Life was hardscrabble when Floyd got out of the Air Force as a twenty year old. No ready resources, no problem. Floyd began running his own card game and playing pool for money. I get the impression he could size up a mark in a few seconds. Beneath his easy going smile is a man completely aware of his surroundings.

In his gambling days, I believe Floyd would have been capable of beating you into the ground if that was the best way he saw to recoup his money, or get the hell out of a place fast, if the odds of getting it were too long. The fact that he’s 83 years old doesn’t mean this is any less true. He’s about 5’9” tall, maybe 160 pounds and hard as nails. His weathered face has the map of Acadiana etched into it.

Like many men from here, Floyd can read the Atchafalaya Swamp in Henderson like a book. “I bought me a shotgun with my winnings and got into the duck business”, he says.  “I carved a duck call out of wood, set up a blind about a quarter of a mile into the swamp right where Whiskey River Landing is now. I’d call in the birds from my duck blind, shoot them down and row out in my pirogue to get them. People in their cars on the levee used binoculars to see how many ducks I shot. I sold the ducks for $1.50 each.”  His eyes twinkle as he talks and reads my reactions.

Supply and demand doesn’t depend exclusively on money. Floyd had a constant supply of ducks. “I bartered for gas, meat, and occasionally for favors from women," he says with a sly grin, leaving me to guess exactly what that barter worked out.

After Sunday mass in Breaux Bridge, Floyd says he stationed himself at a gas station across the street. Two fingers from a passing car, he handed over two ducks from his morning hunt. Four fingers four ducks, and so on, at $1.50 each.

In time Floyd got a steady job, worked on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico for 13 years. For 21 years after that he signed on with the city of Lafayette, was in charge of maintenance and the town’s electricity.

“I’ve been gone from there for 21 years and the lights are still on, Either I did a good job or they didn’t need me,” he says with another impish grin.

About twenty men and women in the Coffee Break’s next room are playing fiddles, guitars, and triangles and singing traditional Cajun music and here I am listening to the life and times of a Cajun original. I’m not leaving till Floyd gets tired of talking.

“I had my first dance when I was 12 years old, “ he says. “Went to a dance hall in Henderson and watched from a balcony on the second floor. I saw an older woman who looked good and asked her to dance. She said ‘Do you smoke?’ and I said why. ‘Give me a cigarette and I’ll dance with you’, she said.

Floyd pauses a moment. “I said, ‘you wait right here and don’t move.’ I got a cigarette and got my dance with that older woman. (Pause). She was 14.” We both laugh.

Floyd’s father spoke French, his mother French and English.  He went to school when he was five. If he spoke French in school, he got a whipping.

Listen carefully and you’ll still hear thick Creole Cajun spoken around here. It’s certainly kept alive by the songs the players in the next room have been singing all morning and by one woman who sang lyrics to me as we danced in the café this morning.

Floyd married his first wife before he entered the Air Force. He settled in with her in a house next to his mother in law. “She was a bitch,” he says.

One day I told my wife we need to move. She said no. I took off my wedding ring (here he begins to mimic removing his ring) threw it in the wastebasket and said I’m gone. And he was.

When it comes to cards and pool, Floyd calculates the odds. When it comes to women, right from the age of 12, he made his own odds. Floyd first saw the woman who became his second wife at the Catholic church service in Breaux Bridge.

“She was very pretty. I saw her again at a social event and asked who she was and where she lived. I asked a friend to drive me to her house. She was sitting on the porch with her family and walked out to see me in the car. That was it. We’ve been married 55 years.”

The entrepreneurial spirit spreads throughout his family. Floyd helps his daughter run a bed and breakfast place in town, gets on a tractor and mows the lawns of the two houses his son-in-law built nearby.

Floyd’s one of those people who are good at whatever they take on. “I took up golf when I was thirty-seven,” he says. “Been shooting my age since I was 75.”

The jam session is winding down around 1 pm. “Gotta go see the boss,” Floyd says. I don’t know whether that’s an honorary title or whether there’s a power sharing arrangement in the LeBlanc household but I do know that there haven't been many dull moments in Floyd's life.

New Orleans: Donna's Bar and Grill

New Orleans is famous for neighborhood bars where you can hear great music played by local musicians on a postage-sized stage. Some of these places serve unbelievably good food from tiny kitchens. Some people call them dive bars. I call them major attractions.

Drove to Frenchman Street in Faubourg-Marigny  in search of said attractions. Nothing doing for us in Snug Harbor, or The Blue Nile, or Dba's. Not the kind of music to inspire a trip to the dance floor. Might as well be looking for the Lost City of Cibola.

On the way to Frenchman Street, I had happened to look down St. Anne Street to North Rampart several blocks away and saw the dazzling site of the Louis Armstrong Arch.

The arch may not look like much in broad daylight but at night its illumination is as bright as Satchmo’s smile. And a terrific photo opportunity. My travel companion, a Louisiana native who knows the turf, directs me to North Rampart Street so I can salvage the night with some great photos.

 I stand on North Rampart Street’s neutral ground to get a good shot of the arch. Behind me, I hear strains of some funky blues. Must be from a nearby apartment. Whoa! It’s coming from that dimly lit building across the street. Little sign over the doorway  - Donna’s Bar and Grill. Peer in. Live band! Blues! Dance music!

Hustle across the street waving wildly. “Lock the car! We found our dive bar!” I rave.

The next hour and a half approximates a little slice of heaven on earth. Our saxophone savior, Les Getrex and his trio of electric piano, bass, and drums rocks us in the arms of Gabriel with ultra danceable rhythm & blues, swing, and down ‘n dirty blues. Condensation drips down our bottles of cold Dixie beer. No point in wasting time sitting down while St. Les is blowing.

Between songs, Les starts a Q and A with the patrons, “Where y'all from?” The answers astonish. Along with the two twenty-something girls who came from the neighborhood, the answers were Milan, Kentucky, Phoenix, Hawaii, Philly/Atlanta/LA, and Boston. We aren’t the only pilgrims to have found this place.

There’s more. Every Monday night, chef/owner Charlie Sims puts out a table of free red beans and rice and BBQ chicken after the first break. This happens to be Monday night. You’ve heard the expression “died and gone to heaven.” That would apply to us.

Charlie and his wife Donna have owned the place for 17 years. “After a while you want to give something back, “ Charlie says when I see him peering out of a pass through window into the kitchen. “I’ve been doing the Monday night feed for the past 12 years.”

Donna’s went dark for a few weeks recently when 74 year old Charlie was hospitalized with a stomach ailment. The bar re-opened Thursday through Monday when his son stepped in to help keep the doors open. Charlie returned recently to run the business and keep putting out the Monday night dinner.

Donna’s Bar and Grill turns out to have a storied past. I’m not especially religious, but for a place with this much soul I’m praying Charlie, and Donna, stay healthy for a good long time.

Chef/owner Charlie Sims

Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, City-Wide Garage Sale

The biggest draw on a Saturday morning in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana is the zydeco dance from 8 AM to noon at the Café des Amis.

That is unless you happen to drive over there on the day of the annual Breaux Bridge Citywide Garage Sale.  To say this is a popular event is understatement in the extreme.

Bargain hunters, browsers, and people looking for a good morning’s worth of entertainment piled into town from every town within fifty miles of Lafayette parish.   

No wonder. Garage sales, yard sales, neighborhood sales, and parking lot sales were happening on every street leading into Breaux Bridge and peppered in areas around the entire city.

Merchants along Main Street and Bridge Streets set up merchandise on tables on the sidewalks in front of their stores. Oh yes, and an flea market with more than 40 vendors flourished in Veteran’s Park at the intersection of Berard Street and Martin Streets.

Food? This is Louisiana, honey. Nothing, including funerals, happens in Louisiana without food. We’re talking red beans and rice, BBQ pork, po-boys, funnel cake, and home made lemonade to go along with all American burgers, dogs, and snow cones.

The sidewalks are full of friendly chatter. A woman passing a couple having lunch at a table squeezed onto the sidewalk outside the Chez Jacqueline Bar and Restaurant stops in her tracks, leans over and asks the name of the food on a diner’s plate, “That’s cous cous, Charlene!” she says to her fellow shopper. “I’ve heard of it and never seen it!”

This kind of easy camaraderie bubbles along all over town. The teenage girl in front of Glo’s Fashions sells chess pies that her grand mama, who happens to own the store, made for the sale, and shyly tells me the ingredients. People who've never met exchange opinions about sale items arranged on the sidewalks.

Breaux Bridge has morphed into a village shopping mall. You could probably walk up to a resident’s house and bargain for the rocker on the front porch. On sale are antiques, collectibles, lamps furniture, dishes, embroidery, plants, glassware, purses, bows, pottery, antique tools, and anything no longer held hostage in someone’s attic, cellar, or garage.

The best thing about this citywide garage doesn’t cost a cent. It’s the feel of an America in less complicated, less polarized times.

The range of  political views held by the people walking around town might be narrow but it's there. Probably lots of sons, daughters, fathers or mothers from this parish are serving their country in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The sunshine and massive array of merchandise for sale has neutralized the sharp edges of politics. For this one morning in America, the differences of opinion are secondary to finding a good deal or an item you just found out you couldn't live without . Maybe we ought to consider having a nation wide garage sale.

New Orleans: Music for the soul

Like the Mississippi River, music has a profound effect on New Orleans. Walk far enough through the various neighborhoods of the city and you’ll hear just about every kind of music. Take an evening stroll down Royal Street or Chartres Street and the streets crossing between and you’ll hear violinists, accordion players, guitarists, and someone playing a reed or brass instrument.

Walk down Bourbon Street and you’ll hear country, R&B, rock and roll, and Top 40 at decibel levels that you feel in your rib cage. There’s a good chance you’ll see a ragamuffin brass band playing for tips at the corner of Bourbon and Canal Street. Bourbon Street is delightfully and shamelessly vulgar. We’ll leave that for another story.

Dive bars abound. Good ones. Probably hundreds of ‘em. Street buskers like Brother Hank Bartholomew and blind Snooks Eaglund hang out around places like the Café du Monde.

Snooks Eaglund, harmonica legend in New Orleans

Snooks plays for money and pride. Brother Hank for Jesus. One minute he’s blowing some very funky gospel tinged trumpet and the next he’s sounding somewhere between Al Green and Marvin Gaye.

After enjoying Brother Hank’s performance just beyond the edge of the café’s outdoor patio, pt at large walked over to drop some green into the man’s hat - and was offered a CD to take home as a memento. Hank says the proceeds of his work go to his church, and youth and educational programs. I believed him and parted with $20 on the spot.

Brother Hank’s quiz about whether I believed in Jesus was from the heart, not an act of a street hustler. My response satisfied him that I didn’t need saving then and there. I can work it as I play his CD when I’m on the road to Lafayette.

New Orleans: Died and Beignet-d to Heaven

Café du Monde
800 Decatur Street
New Orleans, LA 70116

The Original Cafe Du Monde Coffee Stand was established in 1862 in the New Orleans French Market. The Cafe is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It closes only on Christmas Day and on the day an occasional Hurricane passes too close to New Orleans.
The Original Cafe Du Monde is a traditional coffee shop. Its menu consists of dark roasted Coffee and Chicory, Beignets, White and Chocolate Milk, and fresh squeezed Orange Juice. The coffee is served Black or Au Lait. Au Lait means that it is mixed half and half with hot milk. Beignets are square French -style doughnuts, lavishly covered with powdered sugar. In 1988 Iced Coffee was introduced to the cafe. Soft drinks also made their debut that year. (from Cafe web site)

Ask anyone who’s been to New Orleans about food to try when you visit New Orleans and right up there with po’ boys, muffulattas, gumbo, and crawfish cakes will be a beignet from the Café du Monde.

As with the above exotic items it helps if you have no idea what to expect and you’re willing to try them because that’s one of the reasons you packed your bag and headed to this version of Paris in America.

A rare slack late afternoon moment...

So you find the café’s green and white striped awnings at the edge of the French Quarter and have a seat in the cavernous, covered outdoor patio - the ubiquitous fans whirring high overhead, tourists and locals chattering away inside, and the rest of the world parading down Decatur Street outside, your own little everyday Mardi Gras Parade.

Soon, a waitress swoops over to your French bistro table with the retro green vinyl seats and chrome tubular frame, and sets down a little plate with three delicate looking square pieces of slightly browned fried dough covered with a mountain of confectioner’s sugar. They’re puffy, delicate looking, and you still have no idea what’s in store for you.

At the advice of your travel companion, a Louisiana native, you drape a large napkin over your lap before picking one off the plate.

First surprise, they’re warm! Just the right heft between a cloud and a doughnut. Open mouth, bite off a corner. Notice a cascade of powdered sugar dropping to the table and onto your lap. Feel your taste buds do a jig and holler “Hey, we’ve never tasted anything as softly tender warmly sweet airly-textured - ever!”

Your companion laughs. Says you look like one of those milk commercials, a big white mustache over your top lip. 

Well. The rest of the natural world recedes for the next five minutes as you devour, in slow chewy mouthfuls, these warm little nuggets. By the time you’re done you’re not sure whether you should go to confession or a Laundromat. 

White powder is all over your face and fingers. You’re aware you’ve had a peak food experience that borders on rapture. Oh yes, somewhere between bites you’ve sipped a cup of New Orleans famous cafe au lait but somehow it doesn’t register.

As you get up to leave, you notice that underneath nearly every one of the fifty little white composite round table tops is a dusting of confectioner’s sugar. You visit the rest room to hose down your face and hands .

The remnants of the taste of those beignets has vanished. The memory, ahhh, that’s another story.

Goin' To New Orleans: Tipitina's

TIPITINA'S

501 Napoleon Ave.

New Orleans, LA 70115
September 27, 2009

In the words of Fats Domino, "I'm going to New Orleans….". Yes, pt at large has landed at Louis Armstrong International Airport and his priorities are in order. At the corner of Napolean and Tchoupitoulas Streets is Tipitina's, going strong with a rainbow of musical styles for the past 32 years.

Are we having fun yet?

For music and dance, this place is a mecca. The Sunday night Fais do do (link) brings in a a crowd of people from around the block to around the country.

Bruce plays, dancers twirl.

The ages of people who are two-stepping and waltzing around Tipitina’s well-worn wooden dance floor range somewhere between Tulane students and Grandma Moses.

pt and Grandma Moses

The legendary Bruce Daigrepont revs up his diatonic accordion and cranks traditional Louisiana Frenchmusic with original Cajun and Zydeco material. Everyone who is capable of standing upright is on the dance floor. Abita beer flows from the taps at the chest high mahogany bar. Backed by a fiddle, bass, and drums, Daigrepont has been playing the Sunday Fais do do from 5:00 to 9:00 pm here for nearly sixteen years.

pt at large and Bruce Daigrepont

The bust of Professor Longhair in entryway to Tipitina's is a bronzed pedigree of the beloved place. Longhair, born Henry Roeland Byrd, all but invented the rolling rumba boogie-woogie, blues and southern R&B feel of  the music in this town. He wrote Mardi Gras music for the Tchapatoulas Indians and his own brand of dance music. The former neighborhood juke joint was named after one of Professor Longhairs songs.

Professor Longhair and friend

In 1977, says the burly fellow who took our $7 cover charge for the evening, Tipitina’s was formed from the 501 Club and Longhair, an African American, was given an ownerships share and became one of the first integrated dance clubs in New Orleans.

Performers as disparate as Dr. John, the Neville Brothers, the Meters, Cowboy Mouth, the Radiators, Galactic, Better Than Ezra,  Wilco, Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, Lenny Kravitz, Bonnie Raitt, James Brown, Widespread Panic, and Stevie Ray Vaughan have made music here.

Dancers with spectacular spins and moves made up right on the spot share the dance floor with people who’ve never danced a two step in their lives. As the night progresses it isn’t at all unusual to see one of these high powered dancers take a newcomer by the hand for a turn around the dance floor.It's just the kind of shared exuberance Dr. Longhair wanted his music to inspire in people.

Life Friendly Gardens: Feed Them Love, Not Chemicals

Summer is still splashing around in Watertown. Several of the gardens listed in the Life Friendly Garden Tour last weekend happened to be within walking distance of my digs on Oliver Street. It's inspiring to see how many ways there are to create a garden, large or small, with familiar or unique plants, sculptures, outdoor furniture, or even objects cast away by others, that results in an aesthetically pleasing, even whimsical, space.

Don’t expect to see bags of Scott’s Turf Builder or spray bottles of Round Up on this tour. The Life Friendly Gardens Tour in Watertown today was a showcase of how to garden without using toxic chemicals (see sign at left surrounded by big red finger plants called Amaranthus).

The mini landscapes surrounding several of the 14 houses on the tour within walking distance of my house were impressive. I’m good at growing grass, a few hardy shrubs, and two beds of pachysandra, which, as you know, require the maintenance skills of a sodbuster.

Knowing and accepting my limitations around anything requiring green thumbery is an asset. No longer do I view creative landscaping and plants that appear to be ready for a photo shoot for HG TV with malaise and a sense of insufficient imagination, an utter lack of what George H.W. Bush labeled “the vision thing.”

A walk through these gardens has the same effect on me as it does on their creators. Sort of an earth bound “Tranquility Base.” One gardener calls her space an "urban patch of solace" after a long day’s work. Another calls hers a “healing garden, healing first of all for me, the gardener, who finds infinite renewal in its ever changing beauty through the seasons.”

Entrance to Sharon Bauer's "Healing Garden" at 62 Pearl Street, Watertown (click Life Friendly Gardens Tour above).

Gardeners, like artists of any stripe, enjoy showing their work to fellow gardeners or oooh and ahhhhh types like myself. Cutting in flowerbeds, adding rocks, stones, and outdoor sculpture, tiny hand constructed pools complete with goldfish, and finding the right plants that will flourish in your environment requires patience. Some of the gardens on the tour have been in process for years.

These folks share tips and information. There are no proprietary secrets in this group. They’re eager to give ideas to the neophytes and share cuttings or little starter pots with anyone who asks.

They’ve got Farmer’s Almanac mentalities and plant flowers that will bloom from spring to late fall. Never a dull month in their gardens.

One enthusiast on the tour lived in a large two family house that had been neatly divided into four compact condo units. Where you and I might use their shared, untended, shady back yard as an excuse to pave the whole thing and make a bigger driveway, this gardener saw as an opportunity. Armed with abundant enthusiasm and a vision of Versailles, she got the agreement of the other three owners to have at the bedraggled plot.

 The result is a shade garden (left) chock full of several kinds of hosta and shade loving flowers plus funky, colorful little garden sculptures plonked around the shady stuff - “an urban perennial shade garden,” she says.

The son of one homeowner made a small rock lined pool and filled it with koi (goldfish) and comets and topped it with lilies that Monet would have loved.

The same gardener, Sharon Bauer, printed a pamphlet for visitors. “Wild flowers flourish around the edges, providing food for humans and animals.  Milkweed attracts Monarch butterflies. Goldfinches flock to evening primrose seeds, mockingbirds to pokeweed berries. The pin cherry tree next to our driveway volunteered from a seed dropped by a bird, and now catbirds enjoy a feeding frenzy when the cherries are ripe. Bees love goldenrod.  Plantain heals bee stings. Motherwort, yarrow, red clover, nettle, chickweed, lady’s thumb and many other 'weeds' provide good medicine.”

Henry David Thoreau, legendary naturalist who lived in nearby Concord, MA, would have been right at home in this intersection of random acts of nature and conscious acts of gardener. Maybe this is what he was thinking about when he said,"Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."

Homeowners like pt at large are shocked, perhaps enlightened, that many so-called 'weeds' can be part of a colorful little ecosystem in the same company with impatiens, nasturtiums, black-eyed susans and day lilies. All a true gardener needs is space.

Vines bearing Mucat grapes cover back porch

The Chemical Use Reduction and Education Task Force (CURE) that sponsored the tour is a project of the Watertown Citizens For Environmental Safety (WCES), which is committed to educating the public about the dangers and safe alternative solutions to chemical use in the house and garden.

Today was a tour de force that showed beauteous gardens can be created without the aid of pesticides. Imagination, patience, and a good work ethic will do it just fine.

Photos by Paul Tamburello

John's Tailoring: Thimble Tradition Thrives

Whether a mom and pop operation, a one-man/woman show, or a whole family, there’s something special about an owner operated business. Teeny little Watertown, weighing in at just 4.2 square miles and 32.000 people, is a hotbed of familial entrepreneurship.
This is the second installment in this series.

There are a few essentials to be stored in everyone’s contact list. You need a good plumber, a good electrician, and of course a good doctor. It may not be a life or death matter, but everyone occasionally needs a good tailor.

Nestled between several unassuming storefronts on a short block on Mount Auburn Street is John’s Tailoring. The small, pinkish neon “Alterations” sign that blinks in the front window is just enough to get your attention. In good weather, there’s a rack of clothing outside the door, enough of a hint so you notice the “John’s” sign over the door.

It registered enough so that when I tore a favorite but quite banged-up pair of shorts earlier this year, I brought them there with high hopes of getting them back for another season of yard work and painting.

The narrow space inside was a throwback to earlier era. Nothing fancy. Plainly painted and lit, it resembled the kind of unassuming watchmaker or tailor or small appliance repair place I visited as a kid.

Racks of women’s clothing line the walls all the way to the back of the store. The one nod to the 21st century is a small LCD TV mutely playing in the corner.

Toward the back stood a woman next to a sewing machine that looked strong enough to repair a tank tread. It’s festooned with a rainbow range of spools of thread. Pincushions seem to be everywhere.

The woman brushes back her short brown hair to inspect what I’ve brought in. “You will see where I fixed but it will do what you want,” she smiles reassuringly and hands me her card.

Here we have Ugur Eskici, owner of John’s Tailoring. Ugur’s road to Watertown is a classic immigrant story. Future father-in-law arrives in Watertown from Harput, Turkey and opens tailoring business. Son follows. Son returns to marry sweetheart in Turkey, brings her back to Watertown. All work in family business. Father dies. Tradition is carried on by family.

The original John of John’s Tailoring was Jan Eskici, Ugur's father-in-law, who operated a successful business on Pleasant Street for more than 25 years. His company specialized in stitching together pre-cut clothing supplied to them by Johnny Appleseed's (now known as Appleseed’s), a Beverly, MA company founded in 1946 that specialized in high quality women’s apparel.

When the building they rented was sold eight years ago, Jan and Ugur looked for a smaller place. “We saw the ‘For Rent’ sign, liked the location and the size, and here I am,” she said. It’s Ugur’s baby now, all on her own.

Women’s clothing, wedding dresses and prom dresses are a specialty but she’ll tackle anything she thinks she can do successfully.

Ugur is one of those people who knew exactly what they wanted to do when they grew up.  She didn’t have to go farther than down the stairs to find her role model. “Every day when I woke up, my mother was sewing for her customers. I learned everything from her. She was the best tailor!” she beams.

Perfectionist tendencies and an ingrained work ethic are paired in this family like a needle and thread. “I don’t want to do it and make bad job,” she says in her new second language, “Better than money for me, you know, I don’t want to do it and just like get the money and bad job, I want to try to do good job.” Don’t you wish everyone felt that much pride in their work?

A darker side of immigration is that it’s often prompted by persecution. Ugur is Armenian, as is her husband. Many of her forbears were wiped out in the Armenian Genocide. It wasn’t pretty. Scars must still linger. She lives somewhere safe now.

 “I want to stay my whole life in Watertown,“ she gushes. “ I love it here. I don’t want to go anywhere else, just here. The people are good quality and they tell their friends about me.”

Right on cue, in walks customer Laurie Kahn. The two exchange warm greetings.

“I needed some alterations done and my teenage daughter Anna said, ‘Mom, you’ve got to this place I found. The lady’s great there!’ Anna’s best friend found this place and she told my daughter about it,” the Watertown film-maker explains.

This is the kind of small business that puts the meat on the bones of a small town. People seek services that are professional in quality and personal in spirit. We spend enough time in big-box stores. We write enough checks to NStar and Comcast. We like paying for an artisan’s quality work or an owner operated diner and thinking that our money will help support someone’s family.

Money is important but what really makes Ugur Eskici tick is looking at the job she’s finished and realizing she’s just the kind of tailor she dreamed of becoming back in Harput around the same time she learned to walk.

Tab Benoit: Louisiana Bayou Champion

12th Annual Rhythm & Roots Music and Dance Festival
Ninigret Park, Charlestown, RI
Labor Day Weekend, September 4-6, 2009

 Tab Benoit is a stealth activist. There he was Saturday afternoon on the Workshop Stage at the Rhythm & Roots Festival singing “Sac-Au-Lait Fishing” and before you can say Lake Ponchartrain he’s saying, ”We’re losing an acre of wetlands in Louisiana every hour, dying from salt water, the Mississippi is being choked, we need to rebuild it the way it was in 1929.”

Benoit talks the talk and walks the walk. In  2003, the Houma, LA resident formed the “Voice of the Wetlands,” an organization promoting awareness of coastal wetlands. He was featured in the IMAX film “Hurricane on the Bayou.” Originally a documentary citing how a major hurricane could impact New Orleans if the wetlands weren’t restored, it became a grim reality while still in production when Katrina devastated Louisiana and New Orleans. The IMAX production is stunning and scary. I've seen it.

“I’m invited to sing at the G20 Summit Meeting in Pittsburgh. They think I’m gonna play. Well, I’m gonna give a workshop!” Benoit said. He's armed with facts. You gotta love a man who uses his guitar as a sledgehammer.

Music and activism cut a path from Woody Guthrie to acts as different as Tracy Chapman, Sting, Bob Geldof, Bruce Springstein, John Lennon, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

Tab Benoit is in good company.

Rhythm & Roots Festival:Dance, Listen, Dance Again.

12th Annual Rhythm & Roots Music and Dance Festival
Ninigret Park, Charlestown, RI
Labor Day Weekend, September 4-6, 2009

If you had a zydeeelicious bone in your body, and if you didn’t have an excuse, like, you were getting married or your house just burned down and your car with it, I know where you were last weekend. The 12th Annual Rhythm ‘n Roots Music and Dance Festival in Charlestown, RI.

Spectator umbrellas and tents at rear, seated audience in front of Main Stage (center), and 4000 sq.ft covered wood dance floor at top right

Thousands of music lovers thronged to sun splashed, sprawling, Ninigret Park to hear some of the best zydeco and Cajun bands in the land play their hearts out. Dance-aholics headed for the two huge,  covered dance floor pavilions and sweaty-wet two stepped and waltzed all day long and well into the night.

There’s something about the Red Bull jolt of a zydeco band that cancels out muscle fatigue. You head for a seat to take a breath after a zippy two-step, an accordion starts up on the bandstand and you turn right around and scan the floor for a partner. Trust me, you don’t have to look far.

Variety abounds. It ain't nothing to see college aged girls dancing with silver haired gents or AARP women dancing with men young enough to be their grandsons. This is one of the only places in the dance world where age is just a number.

A few bluesy and country acts were booked, but for the most part you were listening to the crème de la crème of bands straight out of Louisiana. And to prove how sweetly insidious zydeco has become, a few homegrown bands from New York and Rhode Island/MA got thrown into the mix.

Listeners arrive early to stake out territory on the one-acre grass as close as possible to the outdoor Main Stage. And there are rules. Spelled right out in big print on the second page of the free program. As in “No standing in front of the Main Stage. Standing is permitted at the sides.” And “Sunshades, Umbrellas, etc. must be at the perimeter of the concert area. Please do not block the view of others.” It’s environmentally conscious, too. “Help us RECYCLE by disposing of trash and recyclables in designated containers.”

Louisiana musician Tab Benoit plays on the Main Stage

No rowdies, either, unless you count over-energetic people on the dance floor.  For the record, I saw only one clearly intoxicated person from 1 P.M. till I left at 10 P.M. The festival is extraordinarily well thought out. Need first aid? To find the Lost Child Center? Lost and Found? 24 Hour Security? It’s all clearly marked. Staff members were visible all day long.

What kind of a festival would this be without merchandise to tempt you? African baskets, hand crafted jewelry, beads, fragrances, T-shirts, and my personal favorite, a “temporarily air brushed tattoo” parlor are lined up on one stretch.

Ethnic and regional foods along with all-American homemade ice cream are on another section. Pulled pork, seafood chowder, red beans and rice, blackened shrimp, Greek and Thai foods, and vegetarian stuff - they’re all here. 

Another convenience, all food and beverages (including beer and wine) must be purchased with script (dollars called “bayou bucks”) sold at Food Ticket Booths. The music vibe is strong. People chat like NBFs in the occasionally long lines. One couple danced in the line waiting to dig in to regional food at Chili Brothers. The man would have been me.

 Music pouring from the Main Stage is amped via seriously large speakers into one huge, 4000 square-foot, wood floored tent, Dancers occasionally step out to watch the band play. Another band plays directly to dancers on the floor of the Red Hook Ale Brewery and Newport Vineyards Dance Pavilion several hundred yards away.

 I stumbled upon Cajun dancing in 2006.

“Do you dance?” Chris Ash, fiddle player for The Magnolia Cajun Band asked me after I’d interviewed her for a feature story for the The Dartmouth-Westport (MA) Chronicle.

Within a Lafayette minute, she had Dewey Balfa singing on a tape in her home office and I was learning the two-step. “I think you’ve got it,” she grinned, “We play next month in Seekonk, MA. Come on over and dance.”

Cedric Watson & Bijou Creole play at Red Hook Dance Ten

I did show up for that dance - got hooked then and there. Which is why it wasn’t a stretch to drive two hours each way to dance, eat, and dance some more for nine hours today. If you have that zydeelicious bone in your body, this kind of music and dancing is worth driving alot farther than that.

Rhythm ‘n Roots Music and Dance Festival Bands
Great Big Sea(Sun) • Hot Tuna(Sat) • Asleep at the Wheel(Sat)
Jerry Douglas Band(Sun) • Cedric Watson & Bijou Creole(F/S/S)
Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys(S/S) • Tab Benoit(Sat)
Lee Boys(Fri) • The Travelin’ McCourys(Fri) • The Duhks(F/S)
Mitch Woods & His Rocket 88s(Sun) • Eilen Jewell(Fri)  
Keith Frank & the Soileau Zydeco Band(F/S/S) • Papa Mali(Sat)
Nouveaux Honkies(F/S) • Corey Ledet & HisZydeco Band(S/S)
Big Sandy & theFlyrite Boys(S/S) Preston Frank (F/S/S)
Ed Poullard(F/S/S) • Magnolia Cajun Band(S/S)
Occidental Gyspy Jazz Band(S/S) • Li’l Anne & Hot Cayenne(S/S)
Hot Tamale Brass Band(S/S) • Len Cabral(S/S) • Marc Levitt (S/S)

Want to listen to the concert music? Consider making a donation to mvyradio if you like what you hear.

Ninigret Park Festival Features
Main Stage with Huge Covered Dance Floor • Workshops • On-Site Camping • Dance Pavilion
Dance Lessons Daily • Fun Family Stage • Unique Vendors • Nightly Fais Do Do • Ethnic & Regional Foods
Bike Trails • Swimming Pond • State-of-the-Art Playground • 5th Annual Kids Cajun Academy (pre-register)
Easy access! Just off US 1. Ninigret Park Exit. Entrance half mile ahead.
Minutes from Ocean Beaches & Accommodations

Photos: Paul Tamburello

The Blue Suede Boppers Rock For Tom Taylor

Johnny D's Uptown Restaurant and Music Club
17 Holland Street
Davis Square
Somerville, MA
The Blue Suede Boppers and Tom Taylor
9 P.M.
September 3, 2009

You never know what you’re going to get when you head for Johnny D's but this was a first. A political fundraiser.

You gotta love Tom Taylor. The alderman from Somerville’s Ward 3 kicked off his campaign by inviting The Blue Suede Boppers to put some gas into his drive toward Election Day in November. A ton of his supporters waded into the free food he supplied and the Boppers added the razzmatazz to the event.

Congressman Michael Capuano and Somerville Mayor Joe Curatone supplied the bon mots on Taylor’s behalf. Taylor introduced us to everyone in his family except the dog and to a host of fellow aldermen who’d come to spread the love for him. The guy’s been toiling in the fields of public service for over twenty years. Based on what his brethren said, you’d be hard pressed to find a more earnest public servant. He’s just the kind of guy the late Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Tip O’Neill was thinking about when he said, “All politics is local.”

The Blue Suede Boppers are one of those hark-back -to-the-days groups that specialize in the sound of the fifties and sixties. What is great about them, besides the fact they do fine covers of classic songs of that era, is that several of them lived through adolescence during that period. Real vintage music played by real vintage musicians.

They play rock’ n roll, honky-tonk, rhythm’ n blues, rock-a-billy, and doo wop. This was music to dance to - and in the old days, many a Saturday night the only glow in a car parked on a secluded lover's lane came from the car radio that was playing these songs.

Back then, as musical tastes were changing so abruptly, this was teenager music that adults of the era just didn’t get. It belonged to us then in real time. It belongs to us now with nostalgia bands like The Blue Suede Boppers. We can still dance to it. And we can still think of stuff to do on Saturday night.

The band - electric guitar and bass, electric piano, drums, saxophone - proved their pedigree with some blistering saxophone work and creditable four part harmonies - you had to love the sax man prowling the dance floor wailing on his saxophone then dashing back to the band stand. The Boppers showed versatility when they lit into a version of “I Know,” that had a unique New Orleans rolling rumba beat and the sax player taking up a trumpet and blowing serious smoke in the chorus.

An unexpected treat was the appearance of three members of the Somerville High School Music Program staff, two sax players and electric piano (Rick Saunders the music program’s director), who sat in for the last three songs. The event was a fund raiser for the Music Program, too. Alderman Tom Taylor, bless his heart, has a lot of irons in the fire - he initiated the effort to find funding for the program when he found out it was in jeopardy of folding.

 A fourth guest, Kevin Leppman, one funky trombone player, romped with the style of a veteran second liner. No surprise. Leppman, Saunders, and Bopper drummer Reebee Garofalo are members of The Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band. The band hosts HONK!Festival in Somerville - this year in Davis Square, October 9-11.

Somerville High School students would have been pretty amazed to see their teachers rock out. Good show. Good music. Good Dancing. And any politician who hosts events at Johnny D's and supports high school arts programs deserves your consideration.

Blue Suede Boppers personnel:
Howie Tarnower, guitar; Pam Swift, bass; Mitchell Kossak, keyboards; Dick Lourie, sax, trumpet; Reebee Garofalo, drums.

Partial Playlist first set
“Run Around Sue”
“Rockin’ Pneumonia”
“Come Go With Me”
“CC Rider”
“Kansas City”
“Let’s Do The Twist”
“I Know (you don’t love me any more)”
“Choo Choo Cha Boogie”

Photo: P. Tamburello

Arty Hill and The Long Gone Daddys: Honky Tonk Heaven

Arty Hill and The Long Gone Daddys
Sally O’Brien’s Bar and Grill
335 Somerville Avenue
Somerville, MA 02145
617-666-3589
Open 11 AM -1 AM
Here’s a clue about the vibe of this place - on the “music” tab of their site - that tells you all you need to know.
“NO COVER. Remember your bartender. We hope you dance.”

Question. What’s a remedy for these last dog days of summer, hot and humid, that are sucking the marrow out of Boston’s bones? If you pointed your pony over to Sally O’Brien’s in Somerville last night you’d have found an answer.

Honky Tonk and cold beer. Arty Hill and The Long Gone Daddys were in town for a night of light-hearted, story-telling, twangy, ultra danceable country western music.

Practitioners of the under-appreciated genre of Hill’s Honky Tonk style don’t get to town often. If you’re a dancer, you get ready to ride hard and get put away wet. If you’re a listener, you order a long neck Corona, pretend it’s Lone Star Beer -‘The National Beer of Texas’ - and feel like you’re in a Lone Star watering hole.

My friend Luster says this place and its music comes as close to Galveston as it gets around here - minus people packing guns in the pickup, attitude, and a reason to tell you to step outside. There is zippo pretension to this sweet pub.

Sally’s isn’t a far cry from the Cheers -Where Everybody Knows Your Name - kind of establishment. Friends hang out at the bar for solace, self-expression, and suds. The occasional loner watches a plasma TV on the wall behind the bar with the same sense of contentment he’d have in his living room, sort of like having company without needing to engage them in conversation.

And of course every night there’s the music and people who come here for the release. Short of confession, music is the best way to let go of your sins or at least forget them for a few hours. I guess we could rename this place Saint Sally’s of Somerville.

Arty Hill writes songs that mine heartbreak, longing, love lost, love found, and rowdy-fun-times that come across as two step operettas. You probably don’t have the twang but I’m betting you’ve felt the ups and downs Hill narrates in his three or four minute musical novellas. Hill’s covers of Hank Williams (“You Win Again” and “Lovesick Blues” complete with yodeling!) and Ray Price (“Crazy Arms”) underline how closely his own songs hew to the tradition set by the masters of the genre.

There’s an uncomplicated honesty in Hill’s honky tonk music. No bubble gum, no syrup, and, thank God, no string section - just straight-up intelligent lyrics. In case you’re wondering, this is not the high-pitched, nasal kind of singing and banjo music you heard on the soundtrack of Deliverance. Just Arty Hill on electric guitar, and the Daddys on a standup bass, drums, and a laptop steel. The chain without the saw.

Hill's well-crafted songs, from uptempo "It Ain't Workin'" to ballad "Hall Of Fame Of Nothin'," are layered with that gritty sense of playful energy and survival that make you tap your feet or take a sip out of that longneck in solidarity with the people he's singing about.

There were a bunch of dancers there last night who only sat down because Hill and The Long Gone Daddys took a set break. I was one of them. At the end of each dance, I had the choice of rushing back to write song titles and tidbits into my pad on the bar or staying out on the dance floor. Full reportage suffered a bit.

The term honky tonk, first used in print in an Oklahoma newspaper in 1894, referred to rough-around-the-edges establishments that offered alcoholic beverages, piano music and occasionally women plying the world’s oldest profession, to miners, cowboys, cattlemen, and laborers. The Galveston Daily News used the term honkatonk in 1892 to describe an establishment in Fort Worth. The music in these honkatonks was more upbeat than classic blues and was and still is rhythmically suited for dancing.

Honky Tonk music eventually influenced ragtime, boogie woogie, rock ‘n roll, hillbilly, country, and in turn was influenced by them. It's now in its present incarnation as western swing. You don’t have to be on a road trip through Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, or Montana to hear honky tonk influenced music these days. It seeps into country stations around America.

In case I haven’t made it abundantly clear, if you have a dancing bone in your body, it will begin keeping time when Hill and the Long Gone Daddys rev up the music. If you know how, you'll dance a Texas Two Step, or any kind of swing, or anything else you think you can imagine leading with a partner.

When I asked a woman who was swaying along with the music if she'd like to dance, she smiled, reached for my hand and said, "I don't know a thing about dancing, can we just make something up?" We did just fine, thank you very much, with a bunch of other happy dancers on the Persian rug sized dance floor at Sally O'Brien's last night.

And yes, Sally, I remembered the bartender.

The Long Gone Daddys (based in Baltimore, MD) who played tonight
Standup Bass - Steve Potter
Drummer - Ed Hough

Special guest
Mike Castellana of Framingham, MA, on pedal steel

PLAYLIST first set partial list
Unless noted as ballads, these were all country swing or two step songs  of varying tempos and singularly danceable to anything else you could make up on the dance floor.

“Living On The Road Again” Arty Hill original, uptempo
“Driftin’ In” Arty Hill original with lines like “Every bar’s a harbor when she comes driftin’ in…” mid tempo
“You Win Again” Hank Williams ballad
“White Lightning” ? not verified, uptempo with big time guitar and laptop steel
“Julie Don’t Get Married” slow tempo with Framingham’s Mike Castellana’s pedal steel wailingly weeping all the way through the lyrics like “Julie, wait for me because someday I’ll be free…”
“I’m Thinking It’s Better This Way” Arty Hill, mid tempo
“Church On Saturday Night” Arty  Hill original
“It Ain’t Workin’” Arty Hill uptempo original
“If You See Me Comin’ Around” Arty Hill original, uptempo
“Make My Wishful Thinking Come True”

Second Set: partial list
“Lovesick Blues” Hank Williams two-step with yodeling!
“Crazy Arms” Ray Price mid tempo
“Hall Of Fame Of Nothing” Arty Hill ballad
“It’s All Your Fault” Willie Nelson
“The Race Is On” Arty Hill
“Bar Of Gold” Arty Hill
“Me And My Glass Jaw” Arty Hill
================
The band played on but ptatlarge had an uncharacteristically early curfew.
Try going to http://www.artyhill.com/v3/ or
 http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/ahlonggonedaddys
to hear some audio clips

===============

To be investigated soon: “This place has the best burgers and fries around ” - from a regular patron, who spoke with great certainty.

The Crown Cafe: Belgian Waffle Alert

Crown Café
106 Main Street
Watertown, MA 02472
(617) 923-9219
Hours Monday - Sunday 6 a.m. - 3 p.m.

Waffle lovers, here’s an unassuming place for a very satisfying Belgian Waffle. The Crown Café in Watertown, MA.

The perfectly embossed, round, lightly browned, high-rise Belgian Waffle arrived with several thick twirls of fresh whipped cream and sliced fresh strawberries. The whipped cream was dusted with spice, just enough to give your taste buds a chance to register a familiar taste and another few moments of swirling it around your mouth before the light bulb registers and my dining companion blurts, “Cinnamon!” Subtle and satisfying.

The batter is home-made, says Owner Karren, native of Belmont and Armenia. This little place on Main Street is his first foray into the restaurant business as an owner. He’s been making a go of it for two and a half years, pretty good considering the economy and the competition in Watertown, which could easily be referred to as Dinertown.
.
The shy man’s gentle brown eyes light up as we tell him how utterly delicious the waffle tasted. When we comment on the rich taste of the syrup, he replies, “I make a mix of real maple syrup with commercial corn syrup.” My taste buds say he didn’t scrimp on the real McCoy.

My own plate of scrambled eggs, bacon, and home fries was unremarkable but I’ll return soon for the lentil soup and the falafel wrap with hummus, tomato, and lettuce on the daily special menu.

Allen Toussaint: New Orleans Roots, American Music

Allen Toussaint
Scullers Jazz Club
400 Soldiers Field Rd
Allston, MA 02134-1805
August 20, 2009

Allen Toussaint. You may not know his name. You know his music. Music that was born in New Orleans and grew up in America. 

Perhaps you’ve heard of The Pointer Sisters, Boz Scaggs, The Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt, Manhattan Transfer, Ringo Starr, Gladys Knight and the Pips, B.J. Thomas, Otis Redding, Little Feat, Three Dog Night, Jose Feliciano, Dr. John, Robert Palmer, Sam and Dave, Johnny Winter, The Judds, Lee Dorsey, Al Hirt, Aaron Neville, The Band, Warren Zevon, Irma Thomas, Alison Kraus and Robert Plant? They’ve recorded his songs.

Toussaint produced and arranged for Paul Simon, Patty LaBelle, Paul McCartney and Wings, Joe Cocker and Maria Muldaur traveled to New Orleans to record in Allen Toussaint’s studio.

I knew Toussaint’s name was long associated with New Orleans. I had no idea his musical footprint was so deep.

Last Thursday, Allen Toussaint graced Scullers Jazz Club with a performance that transcended music. A package of dignity, genius, and humanity, he can light up a place as small as Scullers or as big as a few acres at The New Orleans Jazz Fest.

Lights dim. To the stage walks a man in a dark suit, purple and black striped shirt, lavender and rose paisley tie and pocket square. Right away you see the man with the nappy grey hair and salt and pepper mustache isn’t afraid to mix and match in fashion or music.

“All my life I’ve waited for the red light to come on so I could play my music, ” he says after bantering with the audience over our Haavaad Yaad accents. He hasn’t been on stage for more than three minutes and he has us in the palms of his strong key-striding hands.

Toussaint opens with “There’s A Party Goin’ On” and by the time he gets to “You got nothin’ to lose but the blues…” his fingers have pounded or feathered practically every one of the 88 keys on the baby grand.

Toward the end of the song, Toussaint stops, grins impishly at the audience, and says “Your turn…” The surprised silence that ensued for three seconds was the last time this audience would be caught flat eared. “Well,” he says before the next song, “I heard a lot of silence out there when in was your turn.”

He launches into a medley of his songs beginning with “What’s Her Name.” Every time he pauses and nods our way, the audience roars, “What’s her name, what’s her name!” I’m not talking about a subdued, let’s be cool about this, effort, either. This was as unbuttoned Boston as I’ve ever heard. Toussaint kept it up during “Mother In Law” and ‘Working In A Coal Mine” and the Boomer to Slacker-aged salt and pepper audience nailed every chorus.

First, I had no idea he’d penned those songs (and most of the ones that followed) and second, I was blown away by the crowds unfettered collaboration. I mean you practically have to pay a Boston audience to participate in music of any sort.

Maybe part of it is that rollicking sound that’s been called a rhythm and blues rumba crossed with a second line parade. New Orleans’ French, Spanish, Cajun, Caribbean, African heritage is concentrated in Toussaint’s music and he spins it out in his musical centrifuge.

When Toussaint invites tenor saxman Amadee Castenell, a Katrina displaced New Orleans friend who now resides on the North Shore, to the stage for a soulful medley of  “Saint James Infirmary" (Anonymous), “Just Can’t Take It" (Toussaint), “Dirty Water" (Toussaint), and  “Riding On The City of New Orleans" (Steve Goodman), Castanell proves his New Orleans credentials are for real.

“Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky From Now On” (Toussaint) a swampy boogie rhythm ‘n bluesy song with lots of pedal morphed into quotes from Edelweiss, Chopin, a Christmas carol, show tunes, pop songs of his own, Grieg, to “Chattanooga Choo Choo’, “Tea for Two”, Jelly Roll Morton quotes, Irish jigs, Polish polkas -yes, polkas as in “Roll Out The Barrel”! - , “My Foolish Heart” with a New Orleans rumba tempo and back again to “Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky From Now On” all so fast your head hurts from trying to keep up and your jaw is slack with awe and your brain is slapping its knee in joy.

After that, Toussaint settles everybody down again with “So Far Away From Home,” Paul Simon's song built on the architecture of J. S. Bach.

Toussaint often pairs “We Are America, (unknown composer)” a history lesson wrapped in a ballad, with his original of “Yes We Can Can,” (and I couldn’t help thinking of Obama’s campaign slogan) and he does tonight. The piano bench may as well have been a pulpit. The man is preaching what he believes.

When he gets to “The Sweet Touch Of Love,” music used in hot Axe Body Wash commercials, you realize how deeply his music has penetrated the culture.

Toussaint’s “Get Out Of My Life Woman,” a hit by Lee Dorsey in 1966, re-recorded more times than any of his other songs, is an up-tempo song with echoes of Jelly Roll Morton, Scott Joplin, Professor Longhair and the steeped New Orleans tradition. Toussaint’s thin singing voice has never been his calling card but it delivers his songs with infectious energy.

What happened next is spellbinding, and it isn’t even music. Toussaint quietly talks us through a reverie, a tone poem, about childhood trips in which his father packs the family in a 1936 Buick for a trip to visit relatives far far out into the Louisiana countryside. Toussaint remembers his father saying, “You need to know where you came from so you know where you’re going.” His richly detailed, extended description of the trip is filled with a rootsy sense of place and of belonging.

I’ll bet Toussaint has played softly on the keys and retold this story a thousand times and I cant imagine it feeling any more authentic, heartfelt, and spontaneous than it does right now. By the time he sets to playing “Southern Nights,” the song it inspired, my companion is in tears. 

If you’re old enough, you might remember Joel Chandler’s "Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings" which Walt Disney made into the film “Song Of The South.” Toussaint’s final song, “Southern Nights,” is a true Song of the South. 

The audience is on its feet cheering. Toussaint shakes hands with patrons in the first row and doesn’t head back to the piano. Sustained cheering could not possibly have produced an encore that could top "Southern Nights". Allen Toussaint slowly exits the room, shaking hands all the way out.

One vignette: at the merchandise table, Mr. Toussaint, still perspiring, stood up from his chair every time a new person came up to ask him to sign an album or CD.

Like I said, dignity, genius, and humanity.