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Yours
Truly in a Swamp by Leonard
Earl Johnson **
Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans From Berlin to Faubourg Marigny
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Maya and Koma Nohara (her first of three husbands) were in Berlin in the Spring of 1945, "When the Russians arrived, uneducated peasants washing their potatoes in our flush toilets!" Nohara held the job of press attaché at the Japanese embassy. During the war, he published often, in both German and Japanese, "Telling tales of the Thousand Year Reich." They were taken prisoner and shipped to Moscow, "Where we were ordered to write in praise of postwar Russia." Through charm and courage they got themselves moved to East Berlin, and from there, in the days before The Wall, they drove a truck through the checkpoint to West Berlin, where Maya became a contributing editor to the Berliner Anzeiger; and Nohara was founding editor at Der Insulaner. Widowed, in 1949, Maya made the acquaintance of Nobel Prize winner Willis Lamb and his wife Ursula. The Lambs sponsored her immigration to America, where she worked for the Swiss Embassy, in Washington (her parents had been Swiss nationals). She moved to New Orleans following retirement, and married an offshore oilrig worker, named Hackett. Maya told those stories in a 1989 interview, conducted in the now, also, gone Kolb's German Restaurant, and on the walk back to her Faubourg Marigny home. Maya died in 1999, at 85. Third husband James followed her by a few weeks, at 74. For years, the two held December birthday parties, "For me and the Christ Child," Maya would say grinning. A glass of red wine, to Maya, "the Christ Child," and all three husbands! ______*______ Howard Stern also left New Orleans at year's end. The airwaves at KKND promise "more local sounds," in 2000. "Good riddance," you say? Maybe. Stern could be gross, and (worse) boring, but he could also be refreshing air in stifling self-righteous times, like Princess Di's demise; and when alerting us, in the dark days of the Twentieth Century's twilight year, that Clinton's Impeachment was about sex and power. In nearby Faubourg Treme, with no local Howard Stern alerting us, two shotgun houses from the Storyville Jazz-birthing red-light district that flourished along Basin Street, between 1897 and 1917, were torn down. Sexual illusionist who would rather forget Storyville quietly squashed preservationist efforts to save the buildings. The site was razed to make way for a seafood processing freezer. New Year's Eve, a mid-morning Millennium Mass of Resurrection, complete with Jazz Funeral and Second Line, was held at Saint Augustine Church, on Saint Claude Avenue. Celebrated by pastor in African robes Reverend Jerome LeDoux, SVD; Alvin Batiste Quintet; Saint Augustine and Saint Monica Choirs; Mayor Marc Morial, Councilman Troy Carter, Treme Brass Band, and a congregation of thousands marching to Saint Louis #1 Cemetery, then second-lining back through the French Quarter. Strangely, it doesn't seem so odd saying "2000". Not nearly as odd as the nervous nation's Y2K survivalist awakening to a new century facing long diets of Spam and Perrier. In New Orleans, we all awakened in 2000 to a warm new day (if not Millennium), after Christmas Week's bitter cold (below 40 is cold). At Squalor Heights, my tall bedroom windows look out over slate roofs marching toward The River. Two windowpanes frame perfect three-dimensional five-point cardboard stars, plucked from the discarded Christmas Tree that now sits in our courtyard awaiting questionable coastal erosion duty. (Inquiring Faubourgundians want to know, will Christmas Trees save Governor Foster's Millennium Port from a twenty billion dollar watery grave?) The stars are golden in the early light, and came to New Orleans aboard ships from China. The sun is just up and soon the windows will be flung open, raising those stars higher than any recycled Christmas Tree's top on the Louisiana coastline. ____*____ Can you believe there was no football game in the Louisiana Superdome this New Year's Day? The explanation: championship games elsewhere. So? Supposedly, The New Year's Game in The Dome resumes in 2001. Baffling, isn't it? I know little about football. Really don't know which end points forward. Which reminds me, once, on the beach in Rio, amid hundreds of soccer ball games, I watched two street urchins examining an American football with that exact same, which end points forward, look in their eyes. ____*____ Councilman Roy Glapion also failed to reach the year 2000. "The Coach," as those who loved him knew him, will reign posthumously as King of Zula, on Carnival Day, 2000. Larry Potts, Julia Street merchant/art dealer, and companion of Saint Roch Street Metropolitan Community Church pastor Dexter Brecht, also failed to make the New Year's cut. Neither did Robert Theobald, the onetime New Orleans consultant and futurist, once sought for his predictions by ironically named venues like TIME, back in the days of such fellow prophets as R. Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McLuhane, both of whom preceded him in unpredicted deaths. In New York City, Quentin Crisp passed; and in Arlington National Cemetery, Faubourgundian John Horn Foster was inurned. To them all, a toast, a thank you, and a longtime remembrance.
Copr. 2000, Leonard Earl Johnson
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