A KATRINA STORY: PART 1 Watching the televised weather reports in New Orleans in the last week of August, 2005 was an exercise in fear management. By Friday, that big swirl of clouds called Katrina filled the entire Gulf of Mexico and looked as if it was headed straight at the “City that Care Forgot.”…
The first love of my life was Mary Von Zastrow. Her family lived next door to us on Gayle Road in the bucolic Finger Lake Village of Skaneateles, NY. What does a five year old kid know about love? In retrospect, not much, but to me at that time, my undying love and devotion to…
(The Worst Best Day Of My Life) I spent my first year in New Orleans as a Yankee transplant, and I was there to work. Between endless months spent in windowless recording studios with the occasional 15- people-shoved-in-a-van-for-thousands-of-miles road trips spent with The Wild Magnolias, my personal agenda of weaving my cultural experience in a…
I moved down to New Orleans in the autumn of 1997, and I got hit by lightning a year later. My first year of my unexpected Yankee Relocation Agenda was going pretty well. I thought I was only going to be visiting “The City That Care Forgot” only momentarily to produce a the 25th anniversary…
The deal between my chronically alcoholic girlfriend and myself was this: Stay sober for one year, and we’ll get pregnant and get married. She held up her end of the bargain, and it was a very good year for us…. so as she was ingesting prenatal vitamins and going to AA meetings twice a day,…