“Muse New Orleans”

The Third Thing
Water is H2O
Hydrogen two parts
Oxygen one
But there is also a third thing
That makes it water.
And nobody knows what that is.
- D. H. Lawrence

Spring is a season that sometimes misses New Orleans. This year it came, dallied, left, and then returned. More than once! Weather, that gripping saga of television news and barroom chatter, can blow away festival tents, flood routes home, and take Swamp City temperatures from chilly to hot faster than Monica Lewinsky and her president of choice.

Yes, perfect breezes along our stretch of River are rare, but this Spring they swirled about like the sky in a van Gogh painting - with a New Orleans twist. The winds banked muggy air up and down the streets and rues. Then cold fingers curled through the moist air licking at ankles walking along the levee, reminding us of things to come.

Later, when no one but crazed locals and true-believing tourists are out in Summer's heat, a mythic dance will occur at Frenchmen Street's Café Brazil. The exact dates change, like Mardi Gras. Watch for it. It is called Nickel A Dance, or in the repetitious language of New Orleans, "Dat Nickel A Dance dance." It is open to the public, but no one sells tour ticket packages. In fact, no one sells tickets at all. Cash bar.

Last year, we sat sipping Medicinal Red, gyrating with specific dancers on the dance floor, and swaying aimlessly with music spinning the room like those hot and cold fingers of Spring. Music, thy elfin muse, what a life affirming effect you have. Not to mention the affirming powers of Medicinal Red!

Nickel a Dance is a City treasure, Café Brazil is its vortex. It is a spirited thing - even a spiritual one - like those first Congo Square Jazz Fests. Like jam sessions in the sky. It draws old folks, young people with children, music makers, and storybook fakers. It is not to be missed.

"Nickel a Dance" happens but a few weekends during the time of hurricanes. (Perhaps there is a connection?)

Another well-coiffed Medusa's head has risen. This justwhatweneeded new festival is named, Saints & Sinners - a great, almost swoonable literary gathering (don't worry, literary events seldom overflow Our Fair Swamp).

Saints & Sinners, like "10-fest," attracted fans that were cool, quiet, often charming followers of the mighty pen and the uncorked bottle. Organized by the NO/AIDS Task Force, this new festival lifted its skirts with a pre opening-night party at the Latter Library, on Saint Charles Avenue, and dropped them with a farewell party at the Parade Bar above The Bourbon Pub, on (where else?) "Whiskey Rio." How could a festival so bracketed not work?

A posh affaire, at the Bourbon Street home of AMBUSH, and Rip & Marsha Naquin-Delain, New Orleans' first registered-couple, opened the three day event. The First Couple greeted, Willow Catering catered, NO/AIDS awarded, and drag queens paraded. Some of the scribes - and scribed -splashing about the opening pages of this first annual festival were Dorothy Allison, Poppy Z. Brite, Joshua Clark, Gennifer Flowers, Katherine V. Forrest, James Nolan, Felice Picano, J. M. Redman, Julie Smith, Patricia Nell Warren, and yours truly.

Some one at the bash gave me a handsome long-necked bottle of RAIN VODKA. It is almost a decanter, clear as crystal, sculpted like a giant grappa bottle, and nearly as lethal. Literary moguls Josh Clark, Dave Parker, Alison Raymond, and I carried the elegant bottle to the R Bar, at Kerlerec and Royal, where we met Dean Paschal, the New Orleans emergency room physician and acclaimed author of BY THE LIGHT OF THE JUKEBOX. Paschal spoke of fame having dropped from the heavens, and his right leg twitched as he tried to recall if he'd won a Pushcart or not. This thirty-years-in-the-making overnight success reads six books a week while working in the E.R.

No, we were not allowed to open the vodka bottle, but we opened quite a few others. Paschal left first. L. A. Norma whispered that he might be off to meet Moriya, a doll in one of his superb short stories. The vodka and I went home next. The others were said to be seen leaving the Circle Bar, on Lee Circle, before daybreak. The bottle be mightier than the pen!

The twelfth annual New Orleans Wine & Food Experience sold out its Thursday evening promenade along the shops and galleries of rue Royal. We sipped and strolled from Hanson's to the RHINO art co-op, where Mrs. Michael Dragutsky, of Memphis, was buying a large wrought iron wall sculpture by Kay M. Jaramillo. Across the street, at The Fredrick Guess Studio, Mr. Dragutsky, owner of Cornerstone Cellars, poured his vineyard's Napa Valley Cabernet. Cornerstone Cellars is a small producer (appx. 2000 cs. annually) of Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel.

Dragutsky told Wine Spectator magazine, December 31, 2001, "I like being in the wine business, even from afar." He laughed amiably, listening again (I wonder how many times he has heard this) to the joke about how to make a small fortune in the wine business. "First, start with a large fortune," L. A. Norma said laughing, and taking her third taste. Norma calls this splendid night out, "Slurpin' on Royal Street." You do see very little wine in the spit buckets, she likes to point out, but at Brennan's there were two oysters on each proffered Rockefeller shell. It was Spring, and life was good on the swell's night out. (Buy your tickets earlier next year, sugar. www.nowfe.com)

Bon voyage to John Sinclair. After seven years at WWOZ, he is returning to Detroit for a visit, and then moving to Holland. Good voyage, old salt. May you ever have following Seas.

Sinclair has been a hip legend since the Fabled Sixties, when he became cause celebré over a thirteen-year sentence for possessing two joints (some say it was his poetry). He was sprung through efforts of the great and famous; including nothing less than a recording by Beatle John Lennon. He is opening a club in Amsterdam, where Dutch smoke legally curls the air. John Sinclair is our loss, one true bit of idealized Americana - the free man.

I freely misspelled Andrei Codrescu's name in last month's column, making him the object of Swamp wide café talk. Sorry Andrei.