pt at large

A Dark And Stormy Night

Thursday night, February 25, 2010, 9 PM

The walls of my 100-year-old house shuddered. That got me out of my chair in a heartbeat. Freight train gusts of wind were barreling up the hilltop on which I live. Branches flew from trees. Untethered items in neighbors' yards tumbled and clattered across lawns. Windows rattled. The velocity of the wind forced its way through the ancient window jambs, its cold breath on my face as I stared into the black of night.

Nothing good’s going to come of this, I said to self.

Twenty minutes later, a muffled clump from front of the house.  The ancient 60-foot fir tree that’s stood guard for the house since the early 20th century had been uprooted and toppled in a gust that teased 60 mph. The sprawling tree caught the wires of the utility pole across the street and pulled it down in a WWF smackdown.  Thick black cables twisted around the tree’s limbs. The Christmassy smell of fresh fir belied the scene of destruction in the front yard.

6:30 AM Friday - remains of the fir tree are bulldozed off the street. New utility pole had been replaced before dawn.

The blowy bullies from the northeast wracked the hill for three more hours. I stood transfixed at the windows watching stately cedar and fir trees genuflect to the wind. I prayed and held my breath. They weigh tons. They were under siege.

Those trees, which have been nothing if not kind purveyors of shade to neighborhood children and protective homes for all manner of wildlife, including squirrels, blue jays and other anti social types of winged and bushy tailed vertebrates, were fighting for their lives.

By midnight, the blasts relented. No more downed trees. My psyche, however, still trembled. I hadn’t felt safe within the boundaries of my own four walls, my own home.  I can relate to farmers in Kansas and residents of the gulf coast who’ve felt utterly helpless in the face of the elements.

It’s said that a man’s home is his castle. Nothing is said that it’s indestructible.

New Rep's "boom" a bust

boom
Play by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb
Directed by Bridget Kathleen O’Leary. Sets and props, Jarrod Bray. Costumes, Jennifer Guadagno. Lights, Chris Brusberg. Sound, Matt Griffin.
Downstage @ New Rep
Arsenal Center for the Arts,321 Arsenal St. Watertown
through March 13. Tickets: $25. 617-923-8487

boom is a bust. The New Repertory Theater production currently running at the Arsenal Center for the Arts has a hellsapoppin’ pace that makes if feel like several TV sitcoms stitched together to make a 90 minute show. There’s the battle of the sexes part, the end of the world part, the science gone tone deaf-part, and the superimposed play within a play part.
 
In the play’s foreword, new artistic director Kate Warner says, “...the script deals with the determination of the scientific pursuit of the truth, and because what may seem impossible in terms of challenging scientific reason can hit faster than a comet. If we take these truths for granted, then we risk losing our ability to interpret our history and divine its hidden messages and all it represents in both arts and sciences.”
 

Well and good, Kate, but this theme gets highjacked by the frenzied pace of the dialogue and the frenetic style in which it’s delivered.

From left: Scott Sweatt, Zofia Gozynska, and Karen MacDonald in “boom.’’ (Rob Lorino, Boston Globe)

 A geek’s advertisement on Craigslist for a night of unbridled passion is the starting point for the play. The young scientist is convinced his data predicts the end of the world is imminent within hours. Jules desperately wants to attract a young female with whom he can cohabit in his underground apartment cum laboratory/bomb shelter, and make children to repopulate the planet once the comet he predicts devastates the world as we know it. 

Jo, the young woman he attracts is as problematic for him as the comet he fears is about to snuff the earth. Jules the scientist might be gay and can’t get out of his head. Jo the budding journalist is whip-smack smart and can’t find her inner Eros (“Have you invited me here so I can find a story that makes you think that a random act of sex will make you feel hope in a decaying society?”). Both of them view sex as radioactive.
 
Writer Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s intent is to make a screwball comedy aimed at stodgy academic scientists who are slow to accept a fellow scientist’s data predicting catastrophe subtexted with the question of whether a socially inept man and an emotionally damaged woman can connect when the stakes are so high they trump their individual needs. Fine in theory.
 
The snappy, clever dialogue between them is non-stop. After thirty minutes of this, I’m ready for shifts of pace, of mood, of combative intensity. They never come till near the ninety-minute mark. By this time, it looks like Mr. Nachtrieb’s ready for a comet ex machina device to end the show.
 
The fact that the play we’re witnessing is actually a carbon-dated interactive exhibit set in a museum eons after the earth-snuffing occurred seems forced.
 
Barbara is the ditsy curator of the exhibit, which, ironically, seems to be in its last day of operation for reasons never clearly stated. The sound effects are terrific for the space-ship like console she operates at the side of the set to stop and start the action in this diorama drama, but this is not meant to be a cartoon.
 
Karen Macdonald is grand as the off-the-wall curator, who appears to be here for comic relief. Like Jules, she’s is battling forces she cant overcome. As good as she is, Macdonald’s role as scene jockey detracts from any emotional momentum the play strains to achieve.
 
Scott Sweatt as Jules and Zophia Gozynska make the most of their roles but in this reviewer’s opinion could have been directed by Bridget Kathleen O’Leary to employ a less one-dimensional interaction with each other.
 
I left with the impression that boom's world ended not with a bang, but a yawn.

Mardi Gras in Mamou, Louisiana: Tradition Lives on with the "Courir"

Mamou Courir de Mardi Gras
Mamou, Louisiana
February 16, 2010

A lot of things come to mind when I think of Mardi Gras…beads, trinkets, parades, floats, but not costumed horsemen riding half skunked down the main street of a small southwest Louisiana town. This is the kind of Mardi Gras you’ve never seen, let alone imagined. Masked horsemen, chickens, centuries old customs, Cajun music and dancing all come together when the one main street in Mamou, 50 miles northwest of Lafayette,  is shut down on Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras.
 
Pre-Lenten revelry has been going on in Europe since medieval times. Catholics used the occasion to party down before a 40-day period of abstinence leading up to Easter. The Acadians brought these traditions with them from France and made them their own when they migrated to southwest Louisiana.
 
The Mardi Gras "courir" (run) is one of them. Let the good times roll, hell - why not let the good times gallop. In Mamou, from early morning till late afternoon, teenage boys and their fathers and even some grandfathers saddle up their horses and ride through the Evangeline Parish countryside begging for food for a communal feast before Ash Wednesday.
 
As when the Mardi Gras revelries were first celebrated, men carry on the tradition of wearing costumes that lampoon authority figures (popes, bishops, nobles, the educated class) and masks to protect their identity and add to their sense of anonymous abandon. This was the only day the country populace could act out without reprisal and they made the most of it. Conspicuous consumption of alcohol added to the merriment and was a big draw for the men who participated. Read on. It still is.
 
By late afternoon, the riders have scavenged their way through the countryside. The prizes are live chickens, which would have been used in the communal gumbo in earlier times. When the sound of hoof beats echoes down 6th Street late on Fat Tuesday afternoon, the whole town plus a boatload of tourists are treated to a show.

Not that we’ve been idle while we waited. A Creole band has been churning out zydeco at one end of the street, a Cajun band has been cranking out two-steps and waltzes at the other. Coolers full of beer are footstools and sidewalk seats. The iconic Fred’s Lounge has been jammed since 10 AM. The usual army of lawn chairs is spread out at each end of town around the bandstands– a flatbed truck wired for sound.  There’s dancing in the street. The sun is shining. Perfect strangers strike up conversations.

 
“You’re in Coon Ass country,” a burly man wearing a Harley Davidson leather jacket tells me as we share a beer. This is one of those ethnic terms that are better uttered by a member of the group than a Yankee like me, but used here, it’s a term of endearment, of pride of membership in a rural society and culture that has spawned an event like the courir, not to mention music, food, and a way of life that are known around the world.
 
The clackity-clack staccato of steel horseshoes rings closer. The crowd edges back to the sidewalk. So would you if you saw over fifty well-oiled men in colorful home-made costumes and varying levels of control of themselves and their horses heading your way. The horses are excited. The horsemen are half cocked.

Whoa! They’re standing up on their saddles! One of them is attempting a handstand. Chicken feathers are flying. The Capitaines, in charge of the wild bunch of cavorting cowboys, order the crowd to stay clear. One Capitaine, identifiable by his purple cloak, uses his horse to block an inebriated kid from riding his horse up onto the sidewalk. Music from the flatbed is blaring. Riders, hailed by their friends and family – whoop it up, stand up in their saddles, fall off, get back up and try again.
 
By now, riders, their faces painted, hair tousled, are dismounting, showing off their prize chickens and roosters (who get a reprieve since the gumbo is now made the day before and for $5 you can get a bowl at the American Legion Hall nearby), pose for photos, occasionally offer their chickens a swig of beer and pour it over one another to cool off in the late afternoon heat. Before long, the riders dismount and beg women (quite willing women, I might add) to dance. These guys may have fallen off their horses while attempting handstands on their saddles but they can still dance to the beat on terra firma.  
 
My traveling companion, The Dancing Belle from Baton Rouge, has organized a spectacular tour, Lake Charles to Lafayette to New Orleans during the past six days. We’ve eaten in rootsy local diners and danced in friendly dives. We’ve seen parades in Spanish Town and Southdowns in Baton Rouge, the mighty Bacchus Parade in New Orleans, and now the tradition-laden Courir de Mamou.  
 
This is the way, deep in the southwest prairie, to finish Mardi Gras. Nothing fancy. Just pure Louisiana history and the people who keep living it.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Here comes the show!

At the sound of hoofbeats, the crowd starts to back out of the way... The Capitaines (in purple) can keep the enthusiastic riders off the sidewalks but can't do much when they fall off their horses while attempting headstands and pirouettes!
   
 
Santa Claus stands on his steed, the band plays on, and spectators get close-ups of riders and chickens.
 
 

Friendly Harley bikers who trekked 50 miles to see the courir;  pt and the Dancing Belle.
 

Photo opps galore...
 

and Mardi Gras spectators are part of the spectacle.

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A Creole Courir

 

Lost outside Mamou, we drive into a predominantly black neighborhood. Horsemen and wagons full of people are gathering for their own courir ride. When I ask for directions, a rider stops to chat. "What denomination are you?" he asks. "Most people 'round here are Catholic, they're helpful. If you tap someone on the shoulder and say, 'I'm hungry,' they'll feed you. That's the way it is in this part of the country, it's not like this everywhere, but it's like that here."  In a dozen trips to SW Louisiana since 2008, I've witnessed that friendly attitude everywhere.

There are two courirs going on in Mamou, Creole and Cajun.

 

One arriving at one end of Main Street and one on the other end.

Costumes, masks, buses and wagons filled with families,friends and lots of music... 

 

and four wheeled steeds...

 
and of course, prize chickens...

Mom, the proprietor of Mom's General Store on this street says, "People have been partying around here for days. I'm closing tomorrow for the rest of the week."

Why two celebrations, I ask. "Black and white parades have been separate for years. They have their own music, we have our own music, they’re friendly and might come down here later after their parade. We tried to make a parade together in past but didn’t work because the cultures were too different so went back to separate parades."  No matter, everyone is having a damn good time.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Fred"s Lounge
 

as steeped in Mardi Gras tradition as the filé in the gumbo
 
 

Fred's Lounge was one happening place for revelers all day long ...

and everyone wanted to get in the picture when pt at large began shooting.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Louisiana Mardi Gras: New Orleans Bacchus Parade

Sunday, February 14, 2010
Bacchus Parade
Napoleon Street, New Orleans, Louisiana

 

If you’re from up north, I don’t know if I can explain a Mardi Gras parade to you. Maybe this is what they mean down here when they say “Let the good times roll” because once a Mardi Gras parade gets going in New Orleans, trucks bigger than Mayflower vans, twenty feet high, as wide as the street, and as long as a box car roll down the main streets with shock and awe on their minds, the best kind of shock and awe.
 
You don’t have to tell a New Orleanian how to get ready for a parade. Parades pass through New Orleans as often as weather fronts. Other than a hurricane and the occasional winning of a Super Bowl, Mardi Gras parades are the biggest systems that will pass through the Crescent City all year long.
 
First of all, it appears that the whole town lines the 3.7 mile parade route. I would say that the only people who stay home are the elderly and the infirm except I saw people fitting that description on Napoleon Avenue where we took up a place with thousands of our new best friends waiting for the Bacchus Parade to get rolling.
 
People think nothing of showing up in the morning for a parade that begins in the evening. Parades are one part revival meeting, one part civic activity, one part Christmas Day, one part New Year’s Eve, one part Fourth of July, and a huge scoop of the indefinable but palpable essence of this town you just have to witness to grasp.
 
Needless to say, the seasoned spectators have a game plan. Arrive early to plunk your lawn chairs down. If you leave for a while to stroll around or find food or the nearest port-a-potty, your stuff will be there when you return.

Then there’s the matter of staging because when the crowd gets twenty deep, no way you’ll see anything but the top ten feet of the floats. That’s why you bring stepladders and planks to set up your own little bleacher back there so you and your kids can see everything just dandy.

While you wait, you eat, you play, you drink, you talk about stuff with the people standing around you. Men played quarterback in the street throwing footballs to their kids, frisbees flew in the air, skate boarders glided by on the asphalt. And smoke from the BBQ people camped out on the neutral ground sent faint whisps of charring meat, hotdogs, boudin, gumbo, jambalaya, crawfish and anything else for dinner they could load up in their makeshift carts. Who needs amusement rides to have a carnival atmosphere?

Anticipation was as thick in the air as the smell of the food on the grills. This was the Bacchus Parade and Drew Brees was the parade king - an unnecessary designation since the New Orleans resident, fresh from knocking off the Indianapolis Colts in the Super Bowl, was for the moment the emperor of the state.

 Dusk. 7:15 pm. A rumble from way way down Napoleon.  A sea of people, like a massive herd of antelope on the savannah, freezes for a moment and perks up their ears, More rumbling. Put the food down. Gather the kids. Station yourself on your “spot.” It’s on!
 
The next three hours are one humongous Technicolor blur. It’s dark. The only light comes from the leviathans on wheels, crawling earthbound comets that illuminate everything in their wake as they ponderously make their passage. Krewes have spent months designing and decorating their floats. During their reign on the floats, they’ll have as much attention focused on them as they’ve ever had in their lives. They’re in no mood to rush the moments.
 
Every time police and parade handlers push the crowd back to widen the roadway, the enormous, amorphous, bead-eating amoeba blob of humanity fills it back in.
 
Dozens of snappy, blaring, rat-a-tat-tatting, high-stepping high school bands in spiffy uniforms fill the space between the towering floats. There is insanely enthusiastic cheering. This is not the time to be cool. Retired teachers, college students, seven-year-olds, accountants, sanitation workers, grandparents, and tourists yell to the bead and trinket throwers on the floats.
 
The trinketeers have different styles. Some lean down from the upper deck of a float to drape beads, Mardi Gras coins or stuffed animals into the hands of supplicants, some zero in on receivers way back on the sidewalk, others just grab great gobbing heaps of beads and heave away like GIs throwing candy bars to starving citizens of a city they’ve liberated. This rooting, tooting procession goes on for hours.

For a Yankee, this is HEAVEN.

 

Napoleon Street two hours before parade begins...the Bacchus Parade is one of the biggest of the season.

      
 

Heeeeeeere comes the parade!

 

King of Bacchus - Drew Brees, riding with his wife atop the float designed to look like a Roman chariot. According to The Baton Rouge Advocate (2/15 edition),Brees threw 10,000 black and gold footballs, along with the usual beads and doubloons.

 

 Dusk descends, the parade goes on. 

 
  Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Spanish Town Parade: A James Joyceian Sketch

Saturday, February 13, 2010
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

SpanishTown Parade Sketch, a pure unadulterated james-joycean ramble...

everything is loud and lasciviously playful or XXX, tons and tons thousands and thousands of beads and throws of all kinds, frisbees, stuffed animals, straw hats, bead necklaces long short oval dice square oblong every color in rainbow and a few not normally seen by the naked eye flying from floats, in lazy arcs, set shots, bullet passes, or handed down to beseeching supplicants with a good plea or a baby in their arms, blaring music dancing in the street and a lot of wiggling, mostly families and grown ups in the area around state house grounds which offer great spot to party up with coolers grills blankets, float comes down the street men women children hands in air yelling throw me something mister or catching the eye of one of the throwers, some of whom are on the lookout for people way back in crowd and do their best Drew Brees pass down field to thankful spectator way downfield, lots of yelling laughing squealing with joy at capturing a big set of beads the rule is you can never ever have enough beads, Egyptian pharoahs and queens went to the valley of kings less decorated than some of the spectators decked out in layers with necks royally encircled with a hundred necklaces of the finest plastic China can manufacture, astronomical numbers of beaded necklaces rain through the sky on the parade route, the route itself would have been confused by the Spanish conquistadors for city streets covered in gold, beads overhead underfoot on lampposts and tree branches a frenzy of beadiness grips the population, excitement but no unruliness, only sunniness, people handing beads to little kids, beads crunching underfoot, people sitting on sidewalk in chairs they toted in hours before and enjoying the hooplah and anticipation before the parade which is considerable since part of the day is to absorb the vibe suck it in turn off the tv live in the Technicolor moment of baubles flying though the air with the greatest of ease, all ages all colors head through Spanish Town then right for the heart of the business district where streets are narrower, parking lots and serious partiers with portable coolers being trolled around like roller boards at OHare. this Mardi Gras stuff rules.

 

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Spanish Town Parade: 'Saturday Night Live' on Wheels

Saturday, February 13, 2010
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

The Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade is Saturday Night Live on wheels, refreshingly and bodaciously politically incorrect. Any parade that leads off with a brigade of thirty outlandishly decorated lawnmowers propelled by thirty equally outlandishly dressed pushers who stop intermittently to perform choreographed maneuvers to music doesn’t take itself too seriously. This brigade is one of the only presences on foot. The rest of the parade is made up of more than thirty floats pulled along by semi tractor rigs.

This is not the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. Half the people lining the route hours before show time at noon are costumed up and partying. Pink, purple or red wigs, not to mention the occasional lampshade decorated with a fleur-de-lis, adorn heads, faces are painted, long feathery boas slink around necks, hats defying description adorn spectators, signs begging for “throws” have been painted and are ready for hoisting to attract attention.

Cars and trucks buzz into the city like bees to a hive. They’re fender to fender on the Mississippi River levee a few blocks from the parade route. They fill up every side street and lot within two miles. And they keep on coming. Every demographic in the census book is here.

Up north, people might bring a lawn chair and a couple of cans of brew to a parade. Down here, people come to the parade with coolers, picnic tables and chairs, along with boxes and bags to cart home their anticipated haul of beads.

Kids from LSU are doing shooters and engaged in general merriment. The beds on some of the pickup trucks double as grilling stations, stereo entertainment centers, and on at least one, a port-a-potty relief station.

Floats awaiting drive time park on side streets, LOADED with beads and other “throws.”  Their sound systems threaten to shake the leaves off the magnolia trees. High fiving “Krewes” with brews assemble on the fifteen-foot high floats and josh with bystanders.

My companion compliments a fellow wearing a flamingo pink and grey conservatively tailored suit for his fashion statement. He offers her some beads, and, "By the way, would you like a vibrator to go with them?"

I told ya, these guys from Spanish Town care not a whit about political correctness.

Spanish Town’s a quirky place. A mix of doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs, teachers, artists, writers, actors and college students, it dates back to 1805. Baton Rouge was owned by Spain and wasn’t part of the Louisiana Purchase. By 1810, the residents made enough noise to become part of the United States. In the past thirty years, the neighborhood with its narrow streets and shotgun houses has kept to itself and developed its own mythology. It’s adopted the aesthetically maligned pink flamingo as its emblem, asserting that ‘bad taste is better than no taste at all.”

The people in Spanish Town like thumbing their noses at authority. This year’s theme, XXXPress It, celebrates its 30th year of funky parading. It’s naughty and saucy without being vulgar, a refreshing romp of political incorrectness.

The very first parade in 1981 featured a bunch of people banging on fruit cartons up and down a few streets in Spanish Town. The handful of marchers had so few beads that receivers ran ahead to the next block and gave them back to the throwers so they could keep pitching them.  

Today it will rain beads, plastic hail from the heavens. Baubles unnoticed underfoot will pop like dry eggshells as the crowd surges around oncoming floats.

The resourceful stand on stepladders and brandish signs like “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” - becoming ideal targets for the Drew Brees types who love hurling beads prodigious distances in great looping arcs to the stepladder diaspora.

Men, women, and children shout, “Throw me something, Mister!” their arms outstretched in supplication to the krewes on the rolling altars joyously heaving “throws” to the masses.

You have enough beads when their weight around your neck renders you immobile or the box you’re pitching them into weighs as much as one of the tires of the tractor trailers hauling the floats.

This part of Louisiana is normally a friendly place. Today, it’s one big happy family.

Before the parade...

  

The parade route...

  
 



   

 

 

 

After the parade...

 

 
Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Louisiana Mardi Gras: Southdowns Neighborhood Parade, Baton Rouge

23rd Annual Krewe of Southdowns Parade
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Friday, February 12, 2010

This year's theme: "Southdowns is really cooking!"

The Southdowns Parade on a chilly Friday night before Fat Tuesday, February 16, was a gentle, merry-go-round affair that wound its way through the suburban Baton Rouge Southdowns neighborhood. No need for crowd control. Set up the grill, invite friends from other areas of town for a cookout, and have a little party. Watch the parade from your porch, car port, or front yard.

We were invited to a house party on the parade route. My companion’s sister said that her sister in law’s daughter was having the party. Without so much as lifting the phone, she was sure we would be welcome to join them. Does that help you understand how things work down here?
 
Everybody knows everybody else. When we get lost heading for the party, a fellow calls from his driveway, “Who you lookin’ for?”
“The Dorniers,” we answer.
“ Honey, you know where the Dorniers live?”
A response from in the house.
“Is she the one with the blonde hair?”
Another response from inside.
“Turn around, go down three blocks, it’s the house with a big porch on the right just before the run-down house.”
 
I am convinced that if we’d been stranded there, the fellow would have invited us to park on his lawn, help ourselves to whatever was on his grill, and watch the parade from his yard.
 
Five minutes later we’re in a festively decorated house filled with assorted kids, parents, grandparents, friends of friends, and distantly related relatives. Everyone is helping themselves to jambalaya and homemade cookies and socializing.
 
An hour later, we’re outside searching for a good viewing spot for the parade. Music is blaring from nearby, a twenty something co-ed starts to dance in the street. The spirit of Mardi Gras obliterates my New England diffidence, my feet start moving to the beat as if I were born within sniffing distance of etoufée roux and there we are dancing together.  “I saw him first!” she shouts and introduces us to her friends.
 
For the next hour, between begging for throws and cheering the tiny floats and Scottish bagpipe band, we’re yakking it up with fifth year LSU senior Brittany and her friend Lillian, who invites us to her house two blocks away for drinks after the parade. Have I mentioned how friendly this place is?
 
Brittany, my new BFF, tells me about her student teaching experience and her desire to teach fifth or sixth graders. If her energy at the parade is poured into her career, she has the makings of a good teacher. A figure dressed in black leaps off one of the floats and drapes Mardi Gras beads around my companion’s shoulders and shouts, “Aunt Rebecca?! I didn’t know you were in town!” and wraps her in a bear hug.
 
Brittany and Lillian now consider us “local celebrities” and put on a show of sticking by us to get more beads.
 
The floats are pickup trucks and makeshift trailers sponsored by insurance companies and local businesses and full of costumed kids and adults. Beads are thrown. People scamper for them. Kids squeal with delight when something lands in their hands. High school kids run up and down the parade route with their friends.

This is the most sedate parade we will see. People haven’t worked all year on these floats the way the creators have with the mountainous floats that lumber down St. Charles Street in New Orleans for two weeks before Mardi Gras. But they love them every bit as much.

The last float cruises past us. We decline the invitation to party with Lillian and Brittany. The night is young and there’s a good R&B band playing at Poor Boy Lloyds’ till 10 pm. Time to go dancing. 

 

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

What's dat? Snow in Baton Rouge??

What da heck is that?? The first measurable snow to fall in Baton Rouge since 1973 began fallinig in Baton Rouge in the predawn hours of Friday, February 12. Schools closed for the day.

According to the local meteorologist, there have been 17 measurable snow events in Baton Rouge since 1892. Lots of schoolchildren were rousted out of bed by their parents to witness the falling snow. If they slept in, there was a good chance they’d have to wait another ten years to see the white stuff.

Like a big pot of gumbo, it didn’t last long. By late morning, the snow had melted, although temps were expected to drop back down to the thirties tonight.

The latest costume for watching the next Mardi Gras parade tomorrow? Long underwear. Green and purple and gold, of course.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Mardi Gras in Louisiana: Often Imitated, Never Duplicated

Most people from the outside world assume that Mardi Gras happens in New Orleans on Tuesday, February 16, the day before the Lenten season begins on Ash Wednesday, and then the state goes back to normal. As far as I can tell from three visits to the southern half of Louisiana in the past year and a half, there is no normal here - this part of the world marches to its own drum.

Mardi Gras parades, dances, and house parties have been going on in cities and towns like Baton Rouge, New Roads, Iota, Mamou, Houma, Crowley, Opelousas, Lafayette, Breaux Bridge, and every other city and town from New Orleans to Lake Charles since the beginning of February. The first official 2010 Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans was held on January 6. That would be around 40 days before Fat Tuesday. You get the idea.
 
Mardi Gras in Louisiana is huge. Bigger than New Year, bigger than the fourth of July, bigger than a moon landing. State and city offices and schools close down tight. Larger cities like Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Lake Charles have specialty stores devoted to Mardi Gras paraphernalia - beads, costumes, wigs, masks, feathers, boots, hats, body paint, and, ummm, Mardi Gras panties (see the story about the Spanish Town Parade).

Residents around here have been planning what to wear and what to cook for this Mardi Gras ever since they recovered from the previous one.

Think of merry-go-round, ferris wheel, and roller coaster and you get the order of magnitude of parades around the state. The Southdowns Parade in residential Baton Rouge, the Spanish Town Parade in downtown Baton Rouge, and the Bacchus Parade in New Orleans were those three orders of magnitude.

A fourth, Mamou's Courir de Mardi Gras, celebrated deep in the Louisiana countryside is a day long equestrian tradition that ends with scores of masked men galloping down Mamou’s packed main street clutching chickens. There is no known amusement park ride to which this event may be compared.

Coming up… a photo essay about each parade.

Below, a famous party store in Baton Rouge. Your imagination (and your pocket book) is the limit.

 

 
Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Poor Boy Lloyd's: Comfort Food, Southern Style

Poor Boy Lloyd's Seafood Restaurant
201 Florida Street
Baton Rouge, LA 70801-1719

The corner of Florida and Lafayette in Baton Rouge is where the “southern” meets the “comfort.” That’s where people have been sitting down to eat at Poor Boy Lloyds for over fifty years.

The menu is short and sweet. Standard breakfast dishes - eggs, pancakes, French toast, and omelets fill the bill for the breakfast customers. I would rise at dawn some morning to try the shrimp omelet with grits and biscuits. But the menu opens up considerably at lunch.

My companion, a Baton Rouge native,  turned to me yesterday as I came in after parking the car and solemnly announced, “We have a problem.” I thought the lunch line closed or they decided not to cater to a Yankees today.

“There are too many good things to order,” she said, then lit up like a Christmas tree.

Traveling with this woman is easy. Her solution. Order everything. We dined on the Thursday specials of chicken and dumplings and shrimp and sausage jambalaya, plus a deer sausage Po-Boy, with assorted French breads, salads, and home made apple crunch. Straight ahead southern cooking, with just enough spice and seasoning to say "Louisiana."

"No matter where you sit in the small restaurant, you can hear owner Fred Taylor, stationed behind the cash register, joshing with the men and flirting with the women. 

“Where you from?” asks Fred.
“Texas."

“You poor thing,” answers Fred followed by a cannoball of a laugh.

Fred at the register (at right)

He’s been the boisterous heart of this operation for the past twenty-seven years. “This is the oldest restaurant continuously doing business in Baton Rouge, “ he says with pride.

In a former life, Fred laid off a thousand people in the days before oil went bust around here. After 23 years managing personnel in the oil fields, he found himself on the receiving side of a pink slip in 1985. He and his wife decided to reinvent themselves in the restaurant business, found the for sale sign on Poor Boy Lloyd’s and found a new life.

When it came time for lunch today, Poor Boy Lloyd’s was the unanimous choice.

What’s not listed on the menu is the fun you can have eating here. The place is humming at mid-day. The personnel, from the line cooks to the wait staff to the front counter staff, have been together for years. They’re playful and efficient. The fact that they’re enjoying what they do is as important an ingredient as the butter in today’s special of crawfish etoufée and my companion’s fried shrimp po-boy.

Miss Mary has been authoring the food from the kitchen for years.  “I’m thinking about retiring,” she says. It’s after 2 pm, the lunch rush has subsided and I’ve pulled up a chair next to her at a table near the order counter to compliment her on her tasty etoufée roux. Her legs ache from standing for so many years but the gold rim around her front tooth sparkles as she grins proudly and tells me exactly how she makes it.

Another Miss Mary has been making desserts from scratch here for 37 years, ten years longer than Fred has owned the place. “I broke him in, “ she says impishly from behind her big framed brown glasses. “I used to manage a restaurant near here and when I left, all my customers followed me.” Taste her lemon ice box pie, Mississippi Mudd pie, or pecan pie and you’d follow her anywhere yourself

Shrimp and sausage jambalaya

Mary number three has been working the counter for seventeen years. “Where you from?” she asks when she sees my Mardi Gras beads and jingle scarf wearing self taking photos all over the place. Before you can say “Drew Brees,” Mary has given me a hand lettered “WHO DAT?” sign to welcome me to Baton Rouge.

These small, south Louisiana restaurants have a vibe all their own. People from down here take it for granted. For a Yankee like pt at large, it’s as endearing as all get out.

“People who came here after Katrina say that the place reminds them of New Orleans,” Fred says. For me, the place makes me feel right at home. That’s about as good as it gets.

 

Owner Fred Taylor takes a turn at the order counter. The Baton Rouge police are regular customers.

 

Crawfish Etoufée, one of many of cook Miss Mary's specialties.

 

Poor Boy Lloyd's is on the route of the Spanish Town Parade and was jammed on parade day, Saturday, February 13, 2010.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

The Saints Go Marchin’ In, New Orleans Rejoices

Who Dat? Well, I’ll damn well tell you. The New Orleans Saints, dat’s who. But you’d have been living under a rock not to know that, wouldn’t you?

How much did we need the New Orleans Saints to come marchin’ in? About as much as we need to breathe.  We’ve been choking on disheartening news about health care, Haiti, the deficit, car bombs, floods, and senseless murders.

When CNN began covering the Saints Super Bowl victory parade in New Orleans around 5 pm Tuesday night, they got hooked. Sometime after the parade began to be televised, someone in CNN headquarters realized this was a national event. They surrendered to the Who Dat Nation. They went for the whole muffaletta.

There was non-stop coverage for more than two hours, the kind of coverage normally reserved for death, or tragedy- the kind that consumed the networks in this city in 2005. Someone at the controls realized this was the perfect bookend to that tragic story.

Wolf Blitzer was smiling. New Orleans native Donna Brazile brought her Saints parasol to the set and tried to coax Wolf into a little second line hoofing. Mary Matalin and James Carville. Louisianians both, interviewed celebrants from the governor down to Chef Paul Prudhomme from their spot on the parade route.

Carville said, “There are 1.7 million people who live in greater New Orleans. It feels like a million of them are here tonight.” Other CNN reporters tried to be heard over the joyous throng along the 3.7 mile parade route. They simply gave up and let their microphones relay the bon temps rolling down St. Charles Avenue.

Black, white, young, old, there they were, ten deep along the route, hanging from street lamps, screaming from balconies, tears of joy and laughter rising from the deepest part of their guts. Since 2005 and Katrina, they’ve know their share of pain. loss, uprootedness. Now it was time to say, ‘We’re back!” “We survived!” “We’re gonna make it!”

If you tuned in, you’d have witnessed an entire state whoop, holler, and cry with joy. Their team, a metaphor for a city trying to rebuild after being blitzed by Katrina, pulled one of its bootstraps up in its effort to overcome the devastation visited upon it in August 2005.

The New Orleans Saints had come from the “Aints” to the champions of the football world. How good did that feel? I’ve been to Louisiana twice in the past year. I can tell you there’s not a diner, eatery, bar, bistro, or family business that does not have Saints paraphernalia someplace visible on the premises. And it’s been there from the lean times to the now party times.

The parade celebrating the Saints winning the Super Bowl was gumbo for the soul. The Saints coach built up his team with the kind of players who want to be there, want to work together, and, you have to understand, feel like part of the New Orleans rebuilding process. Their city loves them for that.

New Orleans Saints, the underdog, the wonder team, the team whose foot fit perfectly into the glass slipper in the high couture closet of the National Football League was out to party with their people. Unlike Cinderella's, their party would last long after midnight.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

MUD, Directed By Louisa Richards, Former pt Student

Every so often, a review gets lost in the "in progress" folder. I finished this one while wating for a plane in the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport en route to Chile.

MUD, written by Maria Irene Fornes

Presented by The Factory Theater
Directed by Louisa Richards
Set designer Tim Baumgartener, Lighting designer and  Producer Greg Jurkiewicz
Stage Manager and Producer Sarah Simons
September 8, 2008


When the lighting technician rushes down from an unseen perch above the seats to give you a hug that’s rare enough. “Mr. Tamburello, I knew that was you,” she says with a big grin. There was Louisa Richards, all grown up, now in the thick of Boston’s thriving theater scene. “I’m directing a play here at the Piano Factory next month, I wish you would come!”

 
So here I am sitting in one of the tiny Piano Theater’s fifty seats watching a production of Mud, written by Maria Irene Fornes and directed by a young woman I knew as a nine-year-old kid with a big smile and outgoing personality.
 
At that point in our lives I was the director and she was one of the actors. My job was to be sure that by the time she left my class, she’d be better prepared for her immediate future in the fifth grade and her ultimate future, where she’d carry a bit of what she learned from me out into the wide, wide world.
 
Well, here she is, directing her own show and doing the same thing with her actors as I did with the kids in her class - challenge, nurture, cheer, give insights into themselves, and occasionally light a fire under them.
 
MUD takes place in a rural, perhaps Appalachian, town in the 1920s. The ensemble Louisa’s chosen to play Mae (Janelle Mills), her brother Lloyd (George Saulnier III), and townsman Henry (Bob Mussert) find the visceral cores of their roles.
 
Against all norms of the day Mae is trying to learn to read and perhaps set out from the village that seems to embed its populace in amber, insulating them from life outside the town line. Henry, with whom she gets involved romantically, and brother Lloyd, represents the uneducated narrow mindedness of townsfolk, fearful of moving away from the comfort of the small lives they lead. Threatened by her desire. They disparage Mae’s attempt to stretch out of her comfort zone.
 
Fornes’s raw dialogue deftly represents clashes of will and the nearly virulent sexual stereotypes prevalent at the time. Janelle Mills’s portrayal of Mae’s struggle against prevailing norms, from her body language to her character’s lines, is deeply realized and gripping.

Director Richards has leveraged her Bachelor’s Degree in Performing Arts at Goddard College, advanced training at The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, including the Advanced Directing Program, to leap into Boston’s fertile theater scene. She’s been involved in acting, producing, and directing in the area since the early 2000s.

The best part of the play for me took place in the first row of seats to the left of the stage. There was Louisa Richards silently mouthing lines she’d rehearsed with the cast. She was radiant with excitement as she let go of the work and watched the actors do what she had helped them find in their roles. And there I was, a few rows away, watching Louisa fly on her own in the wide, wide world.

Note
Louisa Richards will direct Limonade Tous les Jours by Charles L. Mee at The Arsenal Center for the Arts Black Box Theater April 1- 4 and April 8-11, 2010.

Big Sam's Funky Nation: One Anthem, Under Abita, With Funk For All

Big Sam’s Funky Nation
Johnny D’s Uptown Restaurant and Music Club
17 Holland Street
Somerville, MA 02144-2730

Thursday February 4, 2010

Sometimes a really good thing suffers if it is only that really good thing, with no variation,  for a whole set. The night might have peaked at the twenty minute mark but it was a mighty peak indeed.

 Big Sam’s Funky Nation barreled through Johnny D’s last night. Sam’s Funk Train left the station at about 7:40 and careened around the last corner at 9:20 pm. Think of James Brown as a large man performing with a big assed brass slide trombone and you get the general idea.
 
When he gets going on that ‘bone, Sam’s notes can shake the shutters of any joint he plays. He didn’t waste any time telling the full house that this was going to be a participatory event. Even in places like JDs, getting Bostonians, even Somervillians, to get up and shake their booty requires more than good-natured browbeating from the bandstand. Once you go ahead and ask for it, you gotta go full tilt to get’em off their seats and onto their feets.
 
Well, Sam’s tight band - trumpet, lead guitar  (New Orleans icon Walter "Wolfman" Johnson) and bass guitar, and drummer - applied the muscle from the get-go. Within one New Orleans minute the dance floor filled up with the damndest assortment of people I’ve ever seen on the floor at the same time. Ball capped college kids, gray ponytailed hippies, down dressed middle aged brokers from the suburbs, and one mom and her eight year old daughter all fought for some wiggle room.
 
If they needed any further motivation than the pulsing funky chicken rhythms, there was Big Sam struttin' twistin’ turnin’ whooping shimmy shakin' moon walkin' who datting on the bandstand.
 
“We need everyone on the dance flo’ gettin’ low,” Sam says in the middle of the second song. Well, you could have shot a laser beam across the floor and not hit a living soul. There was this multi-generational crowd down on their haunches. Even Sam seemed amazed at the transformation. Clearly, this crowd had been saving up their funkatude for a while. Sam was the lighting, the dancers were the clouds, and Johnny D’s the rod. BAM!
 
The man is a 235-pound hydroelectric plant. Each song is about ten minutes long. By the end of the second number Big Sam was Big Sweat. So were many on the dance floor.

As talented as the big man is, the show began to seem like one unvarying rhythmic song after another. The solos became longer as the other members of the band took a breather. The dancers tended to lose steam during the extended solos.

What was needed was a change of pace, maybe a ballad that a bunch of sweaty dancers could use to get close or a funky version of a Professor Longhair song. This was the kind of music that prompts free styling. Most of the dancers were on their own groove. But after a while even the most die-hard funky chickeneer needs a change of pace.

Big Sam’s Funky Nation would come across as more diverse if they could have more than one national anthem.

Photo by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

Mona Lisa Mysteries: Embrace Them

 Dear Giorgio Gruppioni,

I understand that you, Silvano Vinceti, and a group of other Italian scientists want to dig up the remains of Leonardo da Vinci. You want to see if his skull is intact and create a reconstruction of his face and compare it to the face of his Mona Lisa.
 
You speculate Mona Lisa may be a self-portrait in disguise. Why would this be important?  It used to be enough to speculate about the reason for her koan of a smile. And who she was and why he painted her. Isn’t that enough?
 
I have as many theories as the next person about why Ms. Lisa is smiling. She said yes and drank a big glass of Valpolicella because she’d been nervous about sitting for you, Mr. Big Time Artist. Her tomatoes were the envy of the neighborhood. She was flirting with you. She had a fabulous bowel movement relieving her of constipation an hour before she sat for you.  She was amused that you kept dripping paint all over the place as you tried to get the flesh tone of her face just right. I could go on.
 
Why would it do the world a favor to determine that you were a narcissist and decided to paint your self-portrait while in drag? We’ve got reality up the wazoo. The world needs a rich ration of mystery.
 
Not the kind of mystery that impedes the discovery of cures for cancer or the common cold. But the mystery of that enigmatic smile. And what about Stonehenge? And did a UFO really land in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947? And how did it occur to humans to use fire instead of fear it?
 
I know. You have your own list.
 
The French apparently have a more laid back attitude about the search for an answer. They nixed an Italian request in 2004 to unearth Leonardo’s tomb at the St. Hubert Chapel next to the Amboise Castle.  

The French get that sometimes the question is more interesting than the answer. Scientists from a country with a mysteriously leaning tower that should by any reasonable observation fall to the ground tomorrow ought to know better.