Not Strictly Related, But….

….Since it’s all I’ve been able to think about, I’m going to write about today’s big news: The California State Supreme Court just legalized gay marriage.

Early this afternoon I went to City Hall in San Francisco, hoping to crash what I expected to be a big party. My first thought when I arrived there was, “How cute; all the broadcasters in the city came down to get hitched to their partners.” Because the first thing I noticed was a huge number of news trucks parked around Civic Center Plaza. There were generators and cables all over the sidewalk, and unhappy men lugging cameras around looking for something to film. (It’s 96 degrees in San Francisco today.) Everywhere there was a puddle of shade there was a miserable looking TV reporter in a dark suit drinking water and trying not to have a makeup meltdown before his or her next stand-up spot.

What I didn’t see much of were gay couples celebrating. The scene was nothing like what I expected, which was something along the lines of the sea of tuxedoes and white dresses paired with Doc Martins I saw on the news several years ago after the mayor of San Francisco briefly declared gay marriage legal, but before the courts annulled every last one.

I realized, however, that this lack of exuberance somehow mirrored my own mood. If you had asked me a few weeks, even a few days ago, how I would feel if gay marriage were legalized, I would have guessed that I’d be ecstatic. But today, I feel strangely subdued, and it’s not just the heat.

I feel like I did when the Rex Sox won the World Series in 2004--another thing I never thought would happen in my lifetime. During the playoffs four years ago, it was incredibly exciting to think the cursed Sox actually had a chance to have something good happen to them, and when they beat the Yankees in the league championship series, I was thrilled.

But when the last out of the anticlimactic World Series was safely in Mientkiewicz’s glove, I didn’t feel euphoria. I just felt relief that they hadn’t blown the play, a routine toss to first base eerily reminiscent of the Bill Buckner between-the-legs error that doomed the Red Sox in 1986.

The plays were so similar in everything but outcome that I got mad all over again. I was happy that my team had finally gotten what in my mind they richly deserved. But I also had a fresh bout of righteous anger over having had this prize dangled in front of me once before, only to have it yanked away.

And that’s how I feel today. Relieved that no cringe-inducing gaffe occurred; that the state Supreme Court didn’t mess up. And a little angry. That old voice from 2004 is again whispering in my ear, “This is nice, but shouldn’t it have happened a long time ago?”

I’ll get over it and find my way to gratitude. I’m already on the way. Heading home from City Hall, I ran into an acquaintance who had just gotten an appointment to marry her partner. She will probably always remember today as the day she got engaged (or at least set a date), and she was radiating sunlight. It was good to see someone be a bigger person than I and go straight to the joyful part of the ruling.

I’m sure I’ll be getting a slew of wedding invitations in the coming weeks from friends rushing to the altar ahead of any possible November referendum. These weddings will be especially joyous occasions for not having had the spontaneity planned out of them over the course of months, and because they will, against all odds, result in actual marriage certificates for people who never thought they’d hold a real one in their hands. All this will also help bring me around to a purer form of happiness

I do understand that it’s a beautiful thing that gays and lesbians are finally being offered places at the table—especially if that table is the head table at a wedding banquet. But forgive me if I have to take a moment to feel indignant about the years we had to sit with the kids and the weird drunk uncles no one likes. That kind of slight takes a little time to get over.

Probably I’ll feel more gracious when the heat breaks.

Mardi Gras Indians

Here’s a tradition we just don’t have in the Bay Area: In New Orleans, people dress up as Indians and parade around in feathered outfits.

Not just anyone does this, though. These so-called Mardi-Gras Indians are exclusively African-American. My understanding is that these parades take place with the blessing of the Native American community, because the outfits are adopted in recognition of the fact that both blacks and Indians were treated as second-class citizens in New Orleans, excluded from white traditions like Mardi Gras krewes. It’s also said that the southern African-American collective memory has not forgotten that escaped slaves often were sheltered by Native American tribes, though why this gratitude would be expressed in feathers is not entirely clear. As with a lot of New Orleans legends and traditions, the truth is almost certainly lost to time.

Today Mardi Gras Indian groups are social clubs whose organization mirrors mostly white krewes. Krewes are ruled by kings and queens and named after Greek mythological figures; Mardi Gras Indian tribes have chiefs and are named after local landmarks. At Mardi Gras, tribes dress in colorful, feathery, beaded outfits that weigh 50 pounds and chase each other around the neighborhood in ritualized mock confrontations with dancing and chanting. (Interestingly, the song Iko Iko is about this kind of encounter—the lyrics make a little more sense knowing this, but not a lot.)

Unfortunately, Mardi Gras was long over by the time we got to New Orleans, so we didn’t get to see a real parade. But some tribes did march at Jazz Fest. Pipi and I have half a mind to go to Mardi Gras one year so that we can see this for ourselves. In the Bay Area, you do sometimes get people in feathered outfits, but they’re usually just expressing their appreciation of Cher, and you hardly ever get enough in once place for a parade.

This woman is a part of a tribe called the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian Rhythm Section.

T-Shirts

As I’ve said, I really don’t like crowds, but one fun thing about being among a throng of people is that I almost always see a few funny t-shirts. The jazz festival crowd didn’t disappoint. Here are a few that I saw, some of which I think you would only see in New Orleans.

Here I am. Now what were your other two wishes?
You used to be my type, but I got help.
I like girls who like girls—worn by a man.
Real men marry doctors—worn by a woman.
Louisiana: third-world and proud of it.
I took my Chevy to the levee but the levee was gone.

In addition, two airplanes with banners were circling the fairgrounds on the last day of the festival. One towed a flag saying “Shell: Hear the music and fix the coast U broke.” (A reference to the fact that many think Shell Oil’s environmental practices made Katrina’s impact worse.) The other was advertising Larry Flint’s Hustler Club. Think the two pilots waved to each other whenever their loops brought them close?

Jazz Fest

We didn’t actually go to New Orleans just to eat. We went to see the 2008 Jazz & Heritage Festival. We were there for four days of the festival but only attended two—one day off was planned, and we declared ourselves rained out another morning. (The festival goes on rain or shine but Pipi and I make no such promises, so we went sightseeing instead.)

Two days is actually just about perfect, I think. I have a limited tolerance for crowds, so a third day might have been too much humanity. And there was a lot of really great music packing into those two days. We saw Richard Thompson twice, once on a main stage and once being interviewed at a small venue (pictured). Stevie Wonder played, and we saw some of his set. It almost didn’t feel like a live show, because he was about a quarter of a mile away from where we were, but it counts. We saw quite a bit of zydeco, some gospel, and discovered the John Butler trio, who were billed as a blues act. Keb’ Mo’ played. The Neville Brothers closed the festival for the first time since before Hurricane Katrina. Apparently they stayed away from New Orleans long enough that some were starting to call them the Never Brothers, but all seemed to be forgiven at the show, which went on for about an hour longer than scheduled.

The one thing we didn’t see all that much of was jazz. We listened to some ragtime while waiting out a squall in the Preservation Hall tent, but that was about it. They may have to rename the festival at some point, because as in New Orleans itself, there are so many different genres of music represented.

Where You Eat?

The second thing everyone asks me—and this says as much about my friends and me as it does about New Orleans, is, “What did you eat?”

Our best meal by far was at a restaurant called Upperline, in the Garden District. Pipi and I both opted for a tasting menu, which was a great idea because of the variety of things we got to try. The first course was two kinds of soups, a gumbo and a turtle soup. Yes, real turtle soup. The turtle meat looked and tasted like ground beef. There was also a duck etoufee with corn cakes. Dessert was a choice of pecan pie, which I had, or bread pudding (a New Orleans obsession), which Pipi tried.

The entrée was roast duck with peach sauce. I did worry that this would be too much duck, but it wasn’t. I had forgotten how good duck can be. It was served with fried green tomatoes and a shrimp remoulade. Photos unfortunately make diner look like a plate with three kinds of brown on it. They don’t begin to do it justice, and neither do words, so you’ll just have to believe me that it was fantastic. (Now you know why I’m not a food writer.) The duck was juicy without being greasy. The tomato was fried to the point of being soft and hot, but not soggily breaded like an onion ring, and the bread pudding, never my favorite dessert, came with a rich, toasty caramel sauce that took it to a new realm.

The beautiful thing about New Orleans is that it’s one of those cities where you can eat well at any price. We both had lots of yummy cheap things at the Jazz festival. Highlights included a great jerk chicken (our Frommer’s guide described New Orleans as the northernmost city in the Caribbean, which made perfect sense to us), a key lime tart, and a spinach-artichoke casserole. I know that sounds boring, but southerners know how to add enough salt and fat to anything to make it decadent. One other discovery was the New Orleans snowball. It’s shaved ice with flavored syrup and condensed milk. It tastes more like Hong Kong than the Deep South, but it’s great on a hot day. And better for you than ice cream, we told ourselves as we tried to ignore the server draining a can of Borden’s on mine.

We also went to a fascinating restaurant in Metarie called Deanie's Seafood Bucktown USA. It was an enormous family restaurant with acres of tables and lots of kids running around. (It didn’t help that the official soft drink of New Orleans appears to be Barq’s, the only root beer I know of with caffeine.) Walking in, I was afraid the place would be an Applebee’s or Olive Garden sort of place, with huge servings of bland, mediocre food. The only thing I was right about was the huge servings. The food was pretty good, and almost everything on the menu seemed exotic from my California perspective. You could get crawfish any which way (I had etoufee) and almost everything seemed to include shrimp, which seems to be the food of the people in Louisiana. In fact, we didn’t get the sense that there was anything at all unusual about taking a station wagon full of kids to eat massive plates of shellfish. Pipi says she left the restaurant feeling like she better understood what regular people eat in New Orleans, and I agree. I can’t help but think how disappointed Louisianans must be when they frequent diners in other states.

In case you missed it the first time, New Orleans photos are here.

Back From New Orleans

The first thing everyone asks me is, “How is New Orleans doing?”

It’s hard for me to answer that because I didn’t know it well before Hurricane Katrina, and of course still don’t. One thing I can say is that the infrastructure is still surprisingly debilitated. There are still whole neighborhoods where hardly anybody lives, where many houses are boarded up or just abandoned, and where the shopping plazas are empty shells. It’s a vicious cycle—who wants to live in a neighborhood with no grocery stores? Who wants to rebuild a grocery store where nobody lives? I can see that it takes time to break out of a cycle like that, but I am a little surprised that more developers haven’t stepped in to make it happen. (I think that’s okay—recovery should happen organically, when people are ready to come home. I’m just surprised, is all.)

One other thing that surprised me is that signs of flood damage are everywhere. I had expected that after two and a half years, people would have moved to put the tragedy behind them by covering up as many visual reminders as they could. But I think that some of these scars are in fact proudly preserved.

When I say that I’m thinking mostly of the X marks that were spray-painted on virtually every residential building in the city in the days and weeks after the flood. Many are still visible. I understand that nobody is going to repaint an abandoned house, but some inhabited homes still have the marks. The home near the fairgrounds pictured above, for example, is definitely lived in (by an older woman I saw rocking on the porch) and otherwise maintained. But the owner still hasn’t painted over the Red Cross graffiti next to her door.

The Xs, by the way, tell very interesting and often horrifying stories. For one thing, if you imagine them being drawn by someone sitting in a boat floating by, you can get an idea of how high the water was. In this case, the boat wouldn’t have been in deep water when the rescuers came by, but look at the date (always in the top quadrant): September 9. That’s 11 days after the storm hit, and more than a week after the flood.

The left-hand side of the X is where rescue crews leave some kind of identifying mark, almost always involving the state they came from—someone from California seems to have looked at this house.

The bottom section is for a body count, the right-hand side usually notes anything else alarming found on site, like gas leaks, animal carcasses, or vicious dogs. Here, though, the story is relatively happy. No bodies were found, and the only warning note, “1 SIP,” stands for “One Sheltering in Place.” That just means that one person chose to stay in the flooded home. A later note, dated Sep. 28, asks that any would-be rescuers not take the pets away, and an addendum elaborates that if anyone finds the house empty, it’s just because the owner is out for a stroll with her dogs.

I’ll say one thing for New Orleans: It may be falling apart physically, woefully mis-managed, and abandoned by a third of its population. But the people who do live there? They’re as tough as nails.

Here’s a link to some of my New Orleans photos.

Going to New Orleans

Pipi and I are leaving for New Orleans tomorrow. We’re going to see the Jazz Festival, which we’ve done once before, but we also hope to see some of the city this time. The last time we went, we almost literally did nothing but attend the festival. This year we’ve allowed a little more free time to be tourists.

I probably won’t bring my computer with me, so I won’t be blogging regularly until I’m back. Have a good week!

Technical Difficulties

I’m sorry about the outage. I’ve been working on two projects again, destination descriptions and another cookbook. And we’re getting ready to go on a trip, so it has been a little crazy. I’m really looking forward to this vacation!

Mouthpiece

I got a mouth in the mail today. I think I’m about half-way toward a complete Mr. Potato head now. I’ve got: eyes, ears, a mouth, and one arm. I think I just need the other arm, a nose, and feet. And an explanation for all of this.

Fun Fact

The name “Boca Raton,” as in the resort town near Miami, means “Rat’s Mouth” in Spanish.

Did everyone in Florida take French in high school?

The Horror

Today I got two plastic eyeballs in the mail. There was a press release with them that had a headline about how this new Toy Story ride is going to be “eye-popping.”

There’s always some kind of connection between the press release and the enclosed body part, which does not, in my opinion, make it any less morbid.

The interesting thing is that each of the three boxes I’ve gotten shows evidence of having been opened roughly. But no one ever takes the pieces. Which goes to show that even mail thieves don’t want any part of this P.R. campaign.

Make it Stop

I got another box from Disney today. It had a little plastic arm in it. Just one. The right one, I think. I’m not kidding. This is really getting creepy.

This Just In:

Computers and water don't mix.

Yesterday, I was upset about having to pay a self-employment tax. Here's another cost of self-employment: If you do something really, really stupid, you have to pay to fix it yourself.

If, for instance, you manage to spill a big glass of water all over your laptop and corrode parts of your motherboard, optical drive, and other important-sounding things (my computer could see? Who knew?), your boss doesn't have to make room in the budget for repairs. You do.

Fortunately, my little Mac is not a total loss. It looks like the hard drive is intact, and the wet parts are replaceable for less than it would cost to buy a new laptop. We have another computer in the house, so I'm not out of work while mine is in the shop. Best of all, I had time to back up all my previous week's work before the screen went black, so I didn't lose any current projects.

Also, the nice man at the Apple store in Emeryville told me a story that made me realize it could have been worse: He said he helped a woman who had spilled wine in her laptop, which gummed everything up so badly the machine couldn't be salvaged. So she bought a new computer. Two weeks later she did it again. I'm pretty confident something like this won't happen to me because I'm never, ever going to put anything even slightly moist, much less liquid, anywhere near my computer again.

Tax Day

Well, that wasn't much fun. Even though I kept careful records and organized my receipts, it wasn't easy to get my taxes done this year, even with professional help. But they're done and mailed, so I don't have to worry about it again for a while. And that's a good thing, too. The whole process was an awful lot of fuss over a depressingly small amount of money.

This morning, after I'd made copies of all my paperwork, I took the tax forms to the post office to mail. On my way there, I saw a woman who appeared to be a professional can collector asking a homeless man slumped on the steps where the nearest H&R Block office was.

Not surprisingly, the homeless guy wasn't all that helpful. But the two of them, especially the can lady just barely scraping by yet apparently still wanting to do the right thing and pay her taxes, really helped put my situation in perspective.

Imagine how difficult THAT return was to compile.

Bad Publicity

I used to write about Disney a lot when I worked at Travelocity. I enjoyed that for the most part, especially since I got to travel to the parks sometimes. I went to Disney World twice, Disneyland once, and Even Disneyland Paris on one surreal occasion.

Because of this relationship, Disney kept me on their mailing list even after I started freelancing. So I’m used to getting press releases, photos, and, every Christmas, a calendar in the mail from them.

None of this prepared me for this afternoon when I opened up a cardboard box about the size of a desk calendar, mailed from Orlando. (In April? Funny.) What was inside, though, wasn’t a calendar. It was a press release about a Toy Story-themed ride that will be opening soon at one of the parks….and a pair of disembodied Mr. Potato Head ears.

This really disturbed me. It looked like something the Mafia would do, or a serial-killer trophy. Why just the ears? Is there a deaf little Mr. Potato Head somewhere being tortured for my benefit? (“And if you don’t pay up, lady, we’ll stick his mouth on upside down!”) It doesn’t make sense and I want it to stop. I don’t want any trouble. I just want Mr. Potato Head to come home safely.

Re-Upped

I just got the word that Perfect Escapes wants me to write more destination descriptions for them. This is excellent news financially and professionally, but a disaster from a time management standpoint. Pipi’s birthday is Friday, so we were planning to make a long weekend of it by both taking the day off. Oh well. You always appreciate time off when there’s something else you really should be doing.

What’s Going on Here?

And now Skybus has gone out of business. I wasn’t familiar with them. It’s just surprising to me because it’s the third airline in about a week to cease operations.

Somewhere—I think in a box in my parents’ attic—I have a number of those little plastic pilot wings they give children on airplanes. I know I have several from now-defunct carriers, like TWA and Eastern. I wish I’d been more aggressive about collecting these because I know I’ve flown other airlines that are no longer in business.

Oh, oh. Is it me?

Mahalo to Aloha Airlines

The news of Aloha Airlines’ closing also surprised me. This didn’t feel quite as personal, but Pipi and I have flown Aloha, so I was a little nostalgic.

It was the one time I’ve ever been to Hawaii, which felt luxurious enough. It was also one of the few times I’ve ever traveled in anything other than coach. First class on Aloha was sort of first-class lite, but it was a very enjoyable trip. The attendant in the front cabin was a particularly handsome and charming man who knelt down in the aisle next to our row and introduced himself, whispering like his name was a secret that he was only going to tell the two of us. Ice cream was served during one of the movies, and we got a bottomless container of macadamia nuts to share. (It wasn’t really bottomless, of course; our partner in crime just kept refilling it as fast as we could gobble.)

Later, Pipi and I confessed to each other that as we landed, we’d both been secretly wishing the flight were longer. That’s the only time in my adult life I’ve ever had that thought. So I wish all those Aloha employees well, too, especially our friend who was so generous with the macadamia nuts. I hope he lands on his feet.

And I hope my attempt to eat enough nuts to make up for the cost of the upgrade didn’t have anything to do with the airline’s demise.

Back on Track

By the way, I do apologize for going dark earlier in the week. I was working on two projects at once, both of which were paying gigs, so I had to let something else slide. (It was either the blog or litter-box maintenance. The guys thank you for your patience.)

RIP ATA

I just saw the surprising news that ATA ceased operations today.

This news surprised me for many reasons. For one, it follows the shutdown of Aloha Airlines so quickly that when I saw the headline about “Major Airline Folding,” I thought to myself, “Why are they still writing about Aloha? That news is so three days ago.”

Another reason I was surprised is that I can’t remember ever seeing an airline shut down so abruptly without being in bankruptcy. ATA had filed Chapter 11 in the past, but came out of it. I have always thought that if an airline was not in the process of reorganizing, you could depend on it to keep running, but clearly I was wrong about that.

The biggest reason this news shocks me is that my father flew for this airline for many years, so ATA feels like part of the family. Luckily for my father, he retired about a year ago, so he at least got to make a graceful, planned exit—no cardboard box full of personal effects delivered by a guard for him. Still, I think a lot of ex-employees are getting these boxes shoved at them today, so let’s take a moment to remember the late, great ATA and its employees.