From a Broadmoor guy: This is a fun little neighborhood festival and gives the New Orleans crowd a rare opportunity to soak the politicians, instead of them soaking you. The Broadmoor Improvement Association’s Dunking Booth operates from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., featuring “Dunk You Tax Assessor” with Nancy Marshall; and “Dunk the Council” with Stacy Head, Arnie Fielkow and Shelley Midura.
When I attended closing night of the play, Someone Bought the House on the Island, at Marigny Theatre, I did not know in advance that the play was adapted from a novel. But soon into the play, I came to that conclusion myself. I also suspected that the playwright and novelist are the same person. Why? Because certain technical gaffs in the script were committed by someone with a fiction writer’s perspective on storytelling. My suspicion was confirmed in the after-show talkback with the author, Ken Anderson. The story itself is fine, if you like gay melodrama, which I do. But my main observation about Someone Bought the House on the Island is that the script is an awkward adaptation of fiction, and may have been accomplished better by someone other than the novelist himself.
For example, too often, the protagonist breaks out of scene to read from a dog-eared journal, long descriptive passages and direct narration that the playwright wanted to preserve from his novel, but could find no other way to dramatize, I suppose. These interruptions stop the drama dead each time. We writers fall in love with our own words, and are loathe to cut them. My unasked for advice (you knew it was coming): cut ‘em anyway. Like the Titans of old, we eat our own children. Besides, if you can’t dramatize it, then how is it drama? (more…)
Sometimes New Orleans doesn’t feel as southern as other cities, and I am not speaking in respect to the heat but more in regards to our tea isn’t quite as sweet, or “R”’s don’t drawl and I don’t see Vera Bradley bags on every shoulder of every lady. But this Friday’s event at Canal Place always reminds me of our location in the deep south as patrons of the Sippin’ in Seersucker event are dressed to the “T” in their breathable striped attire.
I personally think that men look like handsome gentleman in seersucker suits but a good friend of mine has been known to tell men that she thinks they look like great big giant babies. Regardless of your feeling on the fabric I recommend checking out this event and dressing the part of the southern lady or gentleman. Fashion coordinated parties are always the most fun. Tickets are $35 and entertainment will be provided by Topsy Chapman’s Tribute to Dinah Washington, The Preservation Hall Hot 4 Jazz Band, and The New Orleans BINGO! Show. This event supports the Ogden Museum and light food and summer cocktails will be served.
The cute Chaiken Clothing dress shown is available online on the Saks website. Guys need a suit? Perlis sells them for $250, and it is an investment that will last you for years (my father just replaced his after 25 years, and it was still in adequate shape). And trust me- most women will think you look great, there is just one girl in town that may approach you and tell you that you look like an infant child.
by Alejandro de los Rios
Perhaps the better question is what the fans are going to do tomorrow.
This is a couple of days late, but it was lost in all the news surrounding the Hornets Game 1 victory. Deservedly so, because the game is played on the court and all credit and blame for its outcome falls on the players and coaches participating. But say the game was played in the seats and teams judged solely on their fans, can you guess where the New Orleans Hornets would be?
Dead last.
Here are the attendance numbers of all eight first-round openers (UPDATE: Because I wasn’t familiar with the NBA’s nonsensical seeding system, I had put down the numbers for Utah’s arena when the series is being played in Houston. Apologies): (more…)
by Alejandro de los Rios
This is, without a doubt, the funniest sign that I’ve ever seen at a Hornets game. It was made by Jazon Pitre (far left), who found the picture of the shirtless Slovak using a Google image search (isn’t the internet wonderful?). He printed the picture on multiple sheets of paper and put it together piece by piece. Kevin Billiot (left) said it was Ashley Stewart’s (middle) duty to hold it up should a camera catch sight of them.
But while this Peja sign is the funniest thing I’ve seen at the Hive Nest, the man that deserves an award for his sign(s) has to be Larry Lane for his “Mucho Jannero” sign and the “Peja Vu” sign and the “Give me a Hive Five” sign and his “Jam Ball-Aya” sign and … well it goes on and on. (more…)
“I got po-tay-toes and to-may-toes.”
The curiously cadenced voice rings out every Sunday morning, sometimes waking me up, sometimes accompanying my Rose Nicaud coffee and quiche, depending on the hour of last call the previous Saturday night.
“Corn on da cob. Apples and ba-nan-as.”
Blaring from a megaphone attached to a beat-up old pickup, the crackling advertisements to bleary-eyed Frenchmen Street denizens issue forth from Mr. Okra, a sort of one-man food co-op on wheels. Okra, in actuality a genial, elderly gentleman, traverses the Marigny Triangle each week loudly peddling grocery wares from the back of his truck bed: root vegetables, farm-fresh fruits and, naturally, his namesake gumbo ingredient. (more…)
by Alejandro de los Rios
As promised, here’s a picture of Sean Payton sitting courtside at last night’s Hornets game. The girl dressed in blue is actually Meghan, Payton’s daughter. This is the third game Payton has attended, all of them with one member of his family (his first game he attended was with his son, Connor, and the second was with his wife, Beth). What’s more significant, though, is that Payton decided to buy season tickets for next year.
“I’m fired up for this team,” he said.
He added that, this being the quiet portion of the NFL season — the time between the Super Bowl and the draft — he has been able to take in a more games of late. Not too long ago, Payton was featured on the Hornets’ Arena jumbotron and received a raucous ovation from the crowd. Last night was not the case and Payton said he liked it more that way.
“I like to keep it more low key,” he said. (more…)
Here’s a tax day special. Both last spring and this one, I was intrigued and a little perplexed by the lawn signs stuck in the neutral grounds on Esplanade and St. Claude Avenue advertising “Joe Blakk - Income Tax help.”The Joe Blakk I know of is an old-school bounce rapper who had a local hit in 1993 with the upbeat, positive-thinking track “It Ain’t Where Ya From.” Apparently, when he’s off the mic, Blakk is also a tax professional, slinging 1099’s as effortlessly as he does rhymes. I wish I had known this before I filed - paying Uncle Sam could have been way more crunk this year.Once his busy season is over, Blakk will celebrate by taking the Congo Square stage at Jazz Fest as part of the Throw Back Jamm on Sunday, April 27. Ya heard?
Vintage
4536 Magazine Street (upstairs)
Thursdays 6 p.m. - midnight
Friday classes optional. It was a kind of unwritten rule many of us lived by, back in my days as a happy little co-ed at LSU. Thursday was the big night to go out. Fraternity mixers, drink specials and live music at the bars, etc.
But out here in the real world — inasmuch as New Orleans can be considered the real world — Fridays are mandatory. Or maybe that doesn’t apply to everyone, because lately I’ve noticed that wherever I go, Thursday nights are happening. Restaurants are packed; bars are hopping. People are out. .
However, it takes more than a hip crowd, a hot meal or a drink special to get me out on a school night these days. Still, for the past two Thursdays, I’ve been bellying up to a new bar in town, one that is exclusively a Thursday night thing. It’s called Vintage (4523 Magazine St.), the beautiful, newly renovated space above Savvy Gourmet. (more…)
by Alejandro de los Rios
It seems like only yesterday that I went to the the site of the Iberville Projects’ Boys and Girls Club to look around at where Peja Stojakovic was going to build a basketball court. Then I check my calendar and realize that it was indeed two and a half weeks ago. Boy, does time fly.
Today the Boys & Girls Club of South East Louisiana celebrated the grand opening of it’s Iberville Center. Dozens of area children were in attendance and registered with the Boys & Girls Club and enjoyed free food and activities (including one moon bounce which very nearly toppled over from all the exuberant youth inside). (more…)
by Alejandro de los Rios
There it is.
If you haven’t heard by now, the Superdome is playing host to V-Day, the 10th Anniversary of the Vagina Monologues. I could go into detail about the events today or you can read all about it in this week’s cover story. But really, you should just go Downtown and see it for yourself. It is free, after all. And if giant vaginas aren’t your thing, there is the French Quarter Fest. Really, You have no excuse to be inside right now.
Unless it’s inside this: (more…)
This blog post necessitates an embarrassing confession which I’ll just get out of the way now; I, dear reader, am a stringer for a celebrity magazine. That’s right - when you’re in the checkout line at Rouse’s, skimming a headline about Brad and Angelina’s latest baby or Britney’s latest self-inflicted debasement and wondering who comes up with this stuff, wonder no more. It’s shameless**, underpaid (hint, hint, Gambit Weekly) freelancers like me.
On a recent Saturday night, my cell phone buzzed multiple times, displaying an unfamiliar Los Angeles number. Like all good paranoiacs, I ignored it. But after five calls, curiosity got the better of me and I answered. It was the celebrity magazine.
A voice chirped: “Hi, this is Heather?** And we just got a tip that Brad and Angelina are getting married right now, in the French Market? Can you go check it out?” (more…)
THOU still unravish’d bride of great savings,
Thou foster-child of Dealerships and Junkyards,
Sylvan mechanics, who canst thus express
A greasy tale more slick than our rhyme:
What gasket-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Metairie or the dales of Jeff Parish?
What men or gods are these? What vehicles loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and exhaust? What wild combustion? (more…)
The consciously itinerant writers of the Beat literary movement chose a bohemian lifestyle that celebrated unfettered movement at a time when the whole country was nesting, separating themselves violently from the stultifying return-to-normal culture of the postwar economic boom and its white picket fences bought with GI loans. While the Kerouacs and Corsos were scribbling the free-form screeds that would have them celebrated as maverick revolutionaries striking blows to literary and social structure, wives and girlfriends - more often than not highly literate Radcliffe and Barnard grads who put their own manuscripts aside - brewed the espresso and typed the chapbooks. (more…)
by Alejandro de los Rios
So Bruno’s Tavern in Uptown had as a Hornets Watch Party last night feature some of the Honeybees handing out free swag (beads, wristbands and those inflatable, um, whatever those are) and a lot of drunk people screaming and jumping when they offered out hats and t-shirts.
In exchange, the Honeybees got the pleasure to be hit on by a lot of drunk college kids, some of which could be seen despondent as the girls that were so receptive in the third quarter bolted in unison as Boston stretched its lead to 20 in the waning minutes of the fourth. (more…)
Tomorrow afternoon, Saturday March 29, Parkway Partners’ ReLeaf New Orleans program will gather at 2448 N. Villere St. in the St. Roch neighborhood to plant trees along St. Roch from St. Claude to N. Johnson. Beginning at noon, residents and local volunteers from all parts of the city will gather together to replant the St. Roch corridor and help restore the vitality of this once-thriving community. A neighborhood deeply impacted by the construction of the railroad and I10 decades ago, St. Roch has continually struggled to recover from its transformation into a major transportation artery, according to Parkway Partners. (more…)
