by Frederick Mead

Sometimes a play keeps me up at night, thinking about it, wondering what the author meant, feeling my way through my objections, trying to form words to express my thoughts about it. Calme au Blanc is one of those plays. I stayed up late afterwards, and continue to struggle with it even now as I write this review.

Louis Crowder is an emerging New Orleans playwright to watch out for. I’m rooting for him, but do have criticisms. Calme au Blanc is the third play of his that I’ve seen. The first 2 were one-acts performed together at Marigny Theatre last season as Cobalt Blue, Disaster Number 1604, Parts 1 and 2 (a title I’m not too fond of). Aside from the general objection to “yet another Katrina play”, I had strong criticisms about the one-acts last season, about the histrionic writing and clumsy direction. Some of my criticisms about the writing still apply to this third play, but overall Calme au Blanc is a stronger piece of work than the one-acts, more mature and better directed. The playwright directed the one-acts himself last year. Read the rest of this entry »

by Sam Winston

“Speaking of Favre, he already has been replaced by Tyler Hansborough as the token “White Athlete That The Media Openly and Embarrassingly Fawns Over Because of His Work Ethic and Love For the Game.” (Note: Steve Nash was the overwhelming favorite here until Hansborough too over during the tournament.) For anyone who doesn’t think there’s a racial component to this, you’re crazy. Just look at David West of the Hornets — like Hansborough, he’s a self-made player and a staunch competitor who plays with an inordinate amount of passion, an undersized forward who routinely scores on bigger bodies, someone who extracted every ounce of his potential and made the most of it. Well, have you ever read a David West feature? Have you ever heard announcers raving about him to the point that you wondered if they were related to him? No and no. I just think it’s a little, um, peculiar. We’ll see if this changes during the NBA playoffs.” Bill Simmons, ESPN columnist.

Simmons maybe onto something about the salivating over Hansborough but D-West doesn’t seem nearly as physical as Hansborough has to be (West’s got a lot more touch to go along with his inside game). He is after all known by CP3 as the 17-foot assassin.

Yesterday’s grand opening of a new LSU healthcare clinic at Frederick Douglass Senior High School in the Ninth Ward is only the beginning in improving the delivery of health care in the metro area. The high school clinic was partially funded through a $100 million grant from the Department of Health and Human Services, and there’s still plenty of funding available through the grant.

As Gambit Weekly’s Sarah Andert first reported in September, the grant funds are to be used to address the area’s post-Katrina outpatient primary care needs. Clayton Williams, director of the Louisiana Public Health Institute, which is administering the grant funds, says that the three-year grant is working with 25 different organizations — including universities like Tulane and LSU and grassroots groups like Common Ground — and the 60 outpatient sites the organizations operate. Williams says that so far LPHI has distributed $20 million in funds and that the money will be used to increase access to care, improve the quality of that care, assist the clinics in becoming economically viable and not dependent wholly on grant funding, and to create a network of care for individual patients.

According to Williams, the problem with primary care isn’t limited to a shortage of buildings, but doctors as well. Read the rest of this entry »