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YOURS TRULY IN A SWAMP
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Spring is such a lovely season. It is not a time for
death, but the Grim Reaper cares only for irony, and noting for season or grace. On a recent spectacular morning, I joined students from Fisk (Tennessee), Florida State, and James Mason (Virginia) universities, visiting Faubourg Marigny, as Lazarus House Spring Break Volunteers. We gathered at Lazarus House's Garden Club Study of New Orleans' Anne Rice and Rosie O'Donnel Garden, and drove the crooked streets of The Faubourg in a caravan of mini-vans. Our destination the New Orleans Museum of Art, in Spring-busting-out City Park, to see the exhibition, "Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry." The still photographs were powerful, but the film caught our eye. Snippets shot in various haspices of residents, staff, loved ones, hated ones, of faith healers and humanists. It was humorous, touching. It was life's last great drama played out every forty-five minutes, inside a darkened hall, surrounded by Spring. "Spring Break" has changed! In my college daze it meant snowy Wisconsin, or sunny Florida. This Spring day it meant a ride in a white Florida van craning to point out the house where Edgar Degas lived so many Springs ago; and having "Ully" explained (it is a u-turn, and pronounced "you-ly.") George Burns sang in my head, "I wish I was eighteen again / And goin' places I never been..." We talked about Bill Clinton and Monica. "So famous she's known by her first name!" they all said. I told them about a National Public Radio discussion group ( http://www.npr.org click "Your Turn," click "Impeachmeant" ) and boasted of posting this crafted line there: "It is so much posturing on the high road to fascism." They said the line sounded like so much posturing on the high road to a great poem --- my best fans have never read me. A snippet of the hospice film highlighted a man looking not ill, but bedfast with brain cancer. Estranged wife and daughter, with whom he has not spoken in fourteen years, roll their eyes at the news: "The insurance companies like hospice care, at first, because it is cheaper than hospital care. But they will stop paying. They always do. We will have to handle that..." "Not me," said the wife and daughter. We saw a humanist competing with a faith-healer, for the time needed to do their work. "There comes a moment," the faith healer tells the camera, "when we need support and strength to settle the issues we have left. If we wait too long, we will not have the strength." We see the humanist's patient/friend having bad days. Then good days, rejoicing in her belief that she has been cured by her earlier visit from the faith healer. We see the man with brain cancer reconcile with his wife and daughter. In the van that day, returning to Faubourg Marigny, the students laughed and talked about the lady in the film who believed in her faith healer. Some thought the humanist right. Others were not sure faith healing was so far fetched. Me, I just wished I was closer to their age than to George Burns. Faubourg Marigny Books hosted a recent Sunday reception for Faubourgundian performance artist Frank Aqueno, whose New Orleans' preview of his Canada-bound "The Pursuit of Happiness," was canceled, in "artistic dispute" over sound production. New music, "Really old music," Aqueno said, will accompany the show North. And a New York City preview at the Manhattan Lesbian & Gay Center has been aded. Good luck, break an audio file! In other death news, Darrell Chase passed away last month. He was the Faubourg Marigny wit who nicknamed the Archdiocese's architecture-ly challenged high rise, at Royal and Frenchmen, "Saint Mary's of the Holiday Inn." A man loved and missed. FLASH: Rex Reed, at this year's Tennessee Williams Festival, in distant-nearby Vieux Carre', wondered aloud, "What would Tennessee think of the French Quarter today, with its tourists and tee shirt shops replacing the interesting bars and clientele Williams used for inspiration? Where have all those people gone?" From the audience, Faubourgundian scribe Benjamin Morrison intoned, "They have moved to Faubourg Marigny." Let's lift a glass of red for them all, for Spring and life's passing parade. |