Never underestimate the likelihood of fun public protests in New Orleans
Superb Owls courtesy of French Quarter yarn and needle store The Quarter Stitch
It’s all about super second lines and Superb Owls
Category Archives: French Quarter
The Man in the Red Beret
The brilliant Troubled Men Podcast features the ever-present chess master Jude Acers. Acers is best known for playing against all comers in a New Orleans downtown gazebo while wearing a red beret. A longtime resident of Louisiana, he claims to have been the first New Orleans native chess master of comparable strength since Paul Morphy.
Acers in the French Quarter in 2011
He is also known for being a great showman, touring the country giving simultaneous chess exhibitions. He was twice the world record holder of having played the most opponents in a simultaneous exhibition. First against 117 opponents (1974, Lloyd Center, Portland, Oregon), then against 179 opponents (1976, Mid Island Plaza, Long Island, New York). The records were certified by the Guinness Book of World Records.
This podcast is exactly what you’d expect of Jude, if you have ever heard him hold the floor in a convo. Its as New Orleans as it gets baby.
Plessy’s Red Beans & Rice Social and Second Line
Homer A. Plessy Community School
On 2/21 at 6:00 pm they’ll roll with The Marigny Street Brass Band as they second line through the French Quarter. When they return to Plessy, there will be a red beans challenge, float viewing, and music provided by their house D.J., Chinolasoul.
Making fried chicken, Anne Churchill-style
My fabulous pal shows you how to easily make great fried chicken.
Leona Tate continues New Orleans’ education
Today, Tate is working with the exhibit designers to re-create her first-grade classroom. Almost certainly, visitors will see three small desks pulled close to the chalkboard in the corner classroom. All the windows will be covered in brown kraft paper, as they were in 1960, so that no one could see in or out.
But visitors to her classroom will see no other desks. At Frantz school, a handful of white students braved crowds of hecklers for the entire school year. But McDonogh 19’s enrollment quickly plummeted to three. “For the rest of the year, it was just me, Gail, Tessie, and Miss Meyer, our teacher,” Tate said.
At first, people expected the white students would return to New Orleans schools, after a few days or maybe a few weeks. That didn’t happen. It was a prime example of structural racism in action, Tate said.
Some students from the two desegregated schools in New Orleans transferred to newly built, all-white “private” academies that used state per-pupil funding to operate. Immediately after desegregation, school buses paid for by segregationists picked up white students from the city’s 9th Ward and took them across county lines to neighboring St. Bernard Parish, where the all-white schools took them in, with the state picking up the tab.
12.17/12.18: Harry Shearer and Judith Owen’s Christmas Without Tears
The highlight of the holiday season. Not only will this be a delightful time to spend with actual people, they may even share their fancy candy or smuggled-in drinks with you. I expect there will be both. And it’s led by world-class performers, held in an intimate, historic little theater founded by an earlier generation of performers and residents who were probably just like Harry and Judith and their friends. And it benefits Le Petit Théâtre and the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic.
$70 | VIP Tickets
$45 | Adult Tickets
December 17-18th, 7:30PM
Get ready for the Christmas party of the year! In a series of intimate evenings full of music, laughter and special guests, musician Judith Owen and her husband, actor and humorist Harry Shearer (The Simpsons, Spinal Tap), will once again spread their special brand of yuletide cheer for the 2018 Christmas Without Tears Tour.
A tradition that began in Shearer and Owen’s Santa Monica home, these annual gatherings have grown into a heartwarming house party around the piano that involves and entertains fellow performers and audience members alike. Since 2005, when the first public performance was staged at the Walt Disney Concert Hall to aid the people of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Christmas Without Tears has been a guilt-free way of having fun and giving back: ALL proceeds go to charities, with this year’s New Orleans performances benefiting Le Petit Théâtre Du Vieux Carré.
A reverent and irreverent antidote to the most stressful of seasons, each evening includes both invited performers and surprise guests who drop into Harry and Judith’s onstage living room and share a song or a joke to bring the holiday spirit to all. Song selections range from the sentimental (“Winter Wonderland” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”) to the irreverent (“F&*k Christmas” and “Jesus Was a Dreidel Spinner”). Comics, magicians, female impersonators, and even a somber clown have been welcome additions, adding the perfect mix that makes this a true variety show.
Past revelers have included Mario Cantone, Davell Crawford, Evan Christopher, Alan Cumming, Donald Fagen, Béla Fleck, Christopher Guest, John Goodman, Tom Hanks, John Michael Higgins, Jane Lynch, Steve Martin, Tom McDermott, Stephen Merchant, Tim Minchin, Catherine O’Hara, Paul Shaffer, Martin Short, Richard Thompson, Fred Willard, and Weird Al Yankovic, to name but a few.
A throwback to simpler times, this homespun variety show is both festive romp and salve for the soul, serving as a reminder to all that Christmas is a time to be with the ones you love…and sometimes, even family!
Recommended for ages 13 and up.
Ironwork: why?
The brilliant geographer/author Rich Campanella has shed so much light on many facets of New Orleans physical space that it is hard to separate what we knew before he began to teach us about our place and what we now know. Search his name on this blog and find the many pieces that have inspired me.
His latest in The Advocate on the ironwork that has become a signature of the city separates fiction (mythology may be more apt) from fact and is a good example of his gently musing writing style that is eminently approachable and therefore useful to a wide number of people.
I have begun to photograph and map the different ironwork designs around the Quarter, relying on his map from my favorite book of his, “Geographies of New Orleans” which has maps galore of structure styles, ethnographic clusters and much more.
One of those maps is recreated in The Advocate piece, a “heat map” of the many styles of ironwork found in the old quarter.
I’d like to ask him if he thinks this house was Pontalba’s home during the construction of the Jackson Square apartments and if that is why the same signature ironwork can be found on it.
“Why is New Orleans alone among American cities in its association with iron-lace galleries? To be sure, other 19th-century coastal and river cities also expressed their wealth through ornamental iron, oftentimes flamboyantly. Examples may be found in Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, Baton Rouge, Natchez, Vicksburg, St. Louis, Natchitoches and Galveston, among others.
But New Orleans is the only American city where iron-lace galleries dominate entire streetscapes. At play are a number of variables. This city has long had an outdoor culture, not to mention a spectacle culture, and both are abetted by galleries and balconies, especially in a climate of hot summers and balmy winters.
The city’s Franco-Hispanic Afro-Caribbean heritage imparted it with a legacy of ironworking and ironworkers. Starting in the late 1700s, its many multistory brick edifices were structurally conducive to balcony and gallery installation, particularly in high-density urban environments.
Port activity made imports of pig iron cheap and available, and an abundance of local furnaces were in place to convert the metal into finished railings.”
Find my photographs using the ironwork search function on this blog.
French Quarter block by block 
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