by
Leonard Earl Johnson

Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans
May, 1999

Love your festivals. In The City. In the burbs. Out of town. Festivals celebrating neighborhood, music, food, mind altering booze, Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, ethnic pride, national pride, gay pride, but - most of all - celebrating life!

The recent French Quarter Festival is one of the best. Just a short walk from Faubourg Marigny, with The River as backdrop, could there be a prettier site for such good times?

Then there is the godfest-Jazzfest! Out in the shade-less racetrack. Huge, and The Fest all the other fests wish they could grow up to be.

It is fair to say, during Jazzfest most every name in the music business (and not just stage talent) is in our fair swamp. Yes, this is the festival all the little festivals want to be.…and you hope they don't become, right?

I know, I know, Jazzfest is not what it used to be.

Those first Jazzfests were terrific. A community fest, in Congo Square. It was great when you could pull your own wagon full of beer -- even after the move to the racetrack. And it was nicer when cheaper.

I know, I know. But I still love it!

I rode my bike from Faubourg Marigny, and parked in a special bicycle lot, near the front gate. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of other bicycles, and security guards. Jazzfest plans to please. (Hopefully they won't plan to charge.)

The music was hot. The sun, too. Umbrellas? You can count the locals present by the number of umbrellas popped open for a little soothing shade. Back in Congo Square -- though under live oaks, where you needed them less -- you would have seen them more.

At the racetrack, you see more people. Hear more music. Taste more food. Than any fest? Anywhere? Maybe. An orgy of abundance, as Becky Allen says, "Anything in New Orleans worth doing, is worth overdoing. "

*************

In the distance, Yugoslavia clouds the sun, and tickles Vietnam memories of "War Protests" that were themselves kind of festivals.

In the fabled Sixties, just before the army massacre at Kent State, I moved to San Francisco, leaving eight hippie-college years behind, in Illinois. Exchanged them for "Peace Demonstrations," in the Golden State. And never again go to another meeting.

On the morning after Kent State, I walked from The Bay, along Polk Street, to the UN Plaza (in front of City Hall). Nearby, a line spilled out the Federal Building's brass doors, and down the block.

I stopped a longhaired, buckskin be-suited man I knew, who told me of the Ohio shootings, and how he was leaving the country .

I lived in San Francisco's Castro district. That was so long ago, Castro was not yet the gay capital of San Francisco….America….The World?

That year, on 18th Street, a little shop front opened as The Bay Area Resistance. T-BAR counselors advised a gentle Mexican boy I knew how to avoid the draft…. Vietnam….death?

Did it work? You tell me. He got drafted, but didn't report.

He lived on a hillside overlooking Castro Valley, in a rambling Victorian apartment house full of the hippie sons and daughters of Norwegian and Swedish immigrants. From his bay window we saw the black car pull up. There were two of them, FBI.

As they came in the front door, he went through the attic, and onto the roof. From there he scrambled up the hillside, and all the way to Canada.

I never saw him again, but heard from him once and a while. He settled in Calgary, raised three boys, and died in a car accident, in 1992.