New Orleans: Welcome To The Big Easy

By: Diane Millsap

I’m strolling through the darkness past one world after the next: a brightly lit gallery where artists and friends mingle at an opening, a candlelit oyster bar with couples eating dinner at 11 p.m, a beat-up cherry wood bar with as many Jazz musicians as audience members swinging to old standards and smoking cigars…

I continue to peek into beckoning havens as one flips through TV channels looking for a show to watch. I hear the distinct soundtracks of each place spilling onto the street getting louder and softer and then louder again. If you stand on just the right corner at the right time you can hear blues, bluegrass, jazz, chatter and tap dancing melding into a cacophony. These are the sounds of New Orleans.

I continue my saunter down Royal Street. I hear a low, resonant tone. I look across the way to see an old black man with a Santa Claus beard, overalls and a straw hat sitting on a tired plastic crate. He’s swaying in slow motion as he serenades the night.

                               

“No, I won’t be afraid. No, I won’t shed a tear. Just as long, as you stand, stand by me.” I stand quietly listening for about 10 seconds when he stops. “Are you done?” I ask. He looks at me briefly, then looks away and without a response begins singing once more.

I head towards Frenchman street where I encounter a gaunt white man in his fifties with a severely sunburned face and rotting teeth sitting on the curb. He intentionally sat out in the sun without protection because he recently started a band called The Crawfish and he thought his skin needed to be red for it. He’s upset tonight and is looking for someone to vent to. In exchange for a photo, I listen. 

He was supposed to play a gig at a nearby bar, but the owner told him he wasn’t appropriately dressed. He stands up for me with gusto and struts down an imaginary catwalk in an attempt to prove how absurd the criticism was. He’s wearing what looks like school shorts bought in the girl’s section of a department store, a leopard midriff top which exposes his hairy, pierced belly button, a bow tie and oversized women’s sunglasses. He thinks he looks fabbuuuuuulousss.

Next, I stop in front of the Spotted Cat Music Club to soak in the inception of the night as the nocturnal circus begins to emerge. 

A girl named Ash who looks like a Tim Burton character on acid skips up to me. She’s wearing black and white striped hose, a poofy white slip, a corset and two huge yellow and orange flowers that look like they came from a discount store arrangement flopping in her ponytails. “How’s it goin?” I ask her. She’s very stressed, she explains. She has a ton of marijuana to sell and no one will take it off her hands. She opens her satchel and little zip locks of ganja spill out onto the pavement.

New Orleans is as eccentric as the people who call it home. The city is a dynamic character out of the most surreal novel and its personality is in everything from the cracking roads to the fried alligator poboys. This week Backpacktress is taking you there.