So Fast the Dance
So Soon the Dawn
Yours Truly in a Swamp
by
Leonard Earl Johnson
***
Reprinted from Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans
***
Standing in line for Ash Wednesday ashes, L.A. Norma said she was giving up counting Florida ballots for Lent. I reminded her Lent runs till Easter. "Good," she stage whispered, "they should be done by then."
Out of town friends were in and out all Season. They came from long ago, when we were doing time for the Illinois Board of Education. And they came from San Francisco's fabled Sixties. And new friends came from today's cyber world. Even Jim Hood, my estimable Webmeister
(www.consumeraffairs.com), came from the mysterious Eastern coast of America.
Tony the Greek came, a friend with whom life in California and Oregon was first discovered when we wore younger men's clothes.
No longer are we hunters for starfish and sand dollars. He camps now at the Ritz-Carlton. We met in the bar outside Victor's, for Sazeraks made with Wild Turkey and served in polished stemware. Our drinks glowed, spotlighted by better electricity than I get at Squalor Heights. A well-mannered wait person offered us green peas roasted crisp and sharp with hot spices. "They are seasoned with the green wasabi you get in sushi-bars," she told us.
More Sazeraks in The Sazerak Room at the Fairmont where the drink was invented. Tony laughed, telling the bartender of a night long ago, in his City by The Bay, when he watched both Judy Swigg (her Grandfather owned The Fairmont) and I consume two seafood Alfredo dinners at one sitting. We were young and cholesterol was our oyster!
"Oysters in San Francisco run two dollars apiece now," Tony says during the long cab ride out to strip-mall Metaire. After drinks in a new old mansion, we lunched at Drago's, one of the area's great oyster houses. Three dozen char broiled for me; two on the half shell for Tony. "Judy, you should'a stayed with us," he says.
Dinner at the Upperline that night tickled our palets with perfect roasted duck and shank of lamb and we were tickled under our chins by JoAnn Clevenger, the former Frenchmen Street shop keeper turned Uptown art & food impresario of this fine restaurant.
So sweet, so good! "So slow the cabs," exclaimed Tony. We are the last to leave and the staff explained again, "It is Carnival." Tony nods. He grew up in Greece, they have Carnival, too. He knows.
Everyone agreed our second dinner at NOLA was the best. "So was the first," Norma snickered into her crème brule'e. Tasty breads, terrific cornbreaded oysters & spinach salad, the world's best turtle soup, Prosciuto wrapped salmon and the only grand deserts in nearly two months of overdoing it (Carnival Season was long, running from January sixth through February twenty-seventh).
We went to Dooky Chase's in Treme' for Leah's fine Creole 'Feed-me Meal.' It was terrific. She gave us new appetizers of crab cakes lightly browned and served on French bread medallions resting atop a pink shrimp sauce. Around the sauce were onion rings, quarted, battered, French fried and laid out in a handsome aromatic flower. A lovely presentation. "Could be the main course in lots of San Francisco restaurants," Tony sighed.
Ducking out of the rain one afternoon, we fell into Wild Turkey and ten dollar cigars in the courtyard at The Napoleon House (Editor's note: the aforesaid Jim "CyberNader" Hood's favorite bar in all the world). Sure, the toilet has been upgraded and ferns have moved out of the cracks and into pots, but it is still a great bar. The maitre d', once my neighbor, flatteringly called me by name in front of my friends. Alas, my fab-flame moment was lost to the distraction of bead transactions on the street outside.
However, one night on Bourbon Street, a TV crew from Los Angeles filmed me sitting beside Frank Parsley, the dirty magnet magnate from Houston. I was filmed, it turned out, in exchange for some unusual beads with metal doolies, crystal-like dangles and a plastic medallion that proclaimed, "THE MAN SHOW". A stranger came through the crowd wearing a neck choking with these jewels and I said, "Nice beads." He said I could have a pair if I …
If I would WHAT?
A medallion heralding "THE MAN SHOW" now hangs in my kitchen dormer window and my fat tits are bewildering Los Angelenos.
Other days, we lunched at the New Orleans Museum of Art with Judy Chicago, who told us she did indeed grow up in Chicago (her show closes April first). And we Second Lined from Arnaud's to the Hanson Gallery on rue Royal with Faubourgundians Angela King and Julie Jacobs and their friend LeRoy Neiman (his show ends mid-March).
We also ate in the world's most beautiful restaurant, Christians in Mid-city and were dazzled by the charm of Faubourg Marigny's Café Feelings and the chef's work at Café Marigny. There was dinner at Café Sbisa on Decatur Street and coffee at Café Du monde and the great Krewe du Vieux (but why was fallacy spelled with an 'F' this year?) Parade.
On Mardi Gras we marched up Royal from Faubourg Bywater with the Saint Anne Marching Society and toasted Rex on Canal Street.
Then, like thunder, the garbage trucks gathered and Ash Wednesday rose over the Eastbank.
Waiting in line for ashes at the Cathedral, a young man stood behind us sporting a crimson cape, two silver nose rings and a black eye. L.A. Norma offered him an aspirin, a bottle of water and the advice that, "Baby powder would help hide your shiner, son." He thought about it, but said, "It will look good with the ashes." Rain fell as we left the Cathedral. Our ashes would soon run off and mix with the street litter.
© 2001 Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved
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