A passing parade

I fell in love with New Orleans while there on a business trip in the early ‘80s. It was still January, but the Mardi Gras parades had already begun. After a long dinner with clients in the uptown section of the city, I found myself in the middle of one.

As a native New Yorker, I knew enough to be cautious of a raucous crowd—especially one escorted by police. The frenzy of this crowd was clearly fueled by alcohol, another reason for caution. People were twirling in the streets, catching trinkets and beads being thrown from huge colorful floats that were decked out in paper bunting. Huge papier-mache puppets on broomsticks danced overhead.

The music was infectious. Before long, I was dancing along, calling out for “more beads!” And then, it was gone. The parade passed on, and a glittering green-gold sea of beads paved the street in its wake.

Somewhere, in a box, I still have the beads I picked up that night. They remind me of the night I fell in love with another city.

A few years after that, I was charmed to learn that my new beau, a fellow Manhattanite, owned a bar in New Orleans. Jim, who later became my husband, had been stationed in Louisiana as a young soldier in the ’60s. He met his first wife there, along with a circle of friends who remain vivid in his heart today, though less active in his everyday life.

Later, we steered clear of New Orleans during Mardi Gras but made regular visits together during Jazzfest and at other times. Jim’s involvement in the bar had become extremely laissez-faire by that time. The day-to-day management was left to a motley crew of partners—a linguistics professor with a Ph.D from the University of Mississippi, a lawyer with his finger on the lively pulse of Louisiana politics and a musicologist/mixologist with little or no talent for management, who was assigned to manage the place. Somehow, the Maple Leaf Bar lives on to this day—a force of nature as powerful as the Lady Katrina. (A news photo showed it temporarily boarded up, but dry, as of last week.)

It is hard to explain how a city can entice and infatuate—even make you fall in love, but I will try. There’s the sweet lazy heat of the place, a humid embrace as you step outside onto a shady street lined with magnolia trees that are like ladies of the night soaked in French perfume.

Sleep comes when it comes in New Orleans, not according to alarms. It comes in the afternoon, after eating some spicy étouffée or crispy fried oysters with hot sauce and a cold Dixie chaser. It comes after dancing all night to some live Zydeco music or to Marcia Ball and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the back of the Maple Leaf Bar. It might come after a hot day on the field at Jazzfest eating blackened redfish for the first time—a Mardi Gras of flavors, hot red pepper and juicy lemon escorting the sweet white meat of the redfish, still crackling from the fry pan.

Sleep leaves as the heat of the day is wearing thin and the magnolia trees are freshening the night air and there is more dancing to be done, more music to fill your heart.

It doesn’t matter when you sleep in New Orleans. There will always be a party going on when you wake up.

It didn’t take me long to figure I could never live in that town. I played out many fantasies of fixing up an old shotgun house near the fairgrounds to use as home base during Jazzfest, but I knew the Big Laissez would seduce me into being a big Lazy within a few weeks. They haven’t made a 12-step program for New Orleans yet.

Last spring, after years away, I tried to lure my husband back to Louisiana for another visit. Cheap airfares made it seem easy, and if our schedules hadn’t been so hectic, we might have gone. But we didn’t.

My daughter, who hasn’t been to New Orleans since she was a toddler, wrote a song last spring that seems prophetic now. It’s about the “Clarinet Queen,” a female jazz musician who is only taken seriously as a musician when she survives a horrific hurricane, sitting outside the Maple Leaf Bar, playing her clarinet.

It makes me wonder—how did New Orleans get into my daughter’s heart? Was it those purple and gold beads she used to play with?