Thank you, Hank Williams. Last Thursday we made our way to New Orleans. We went through the Delta on the way there, home of good music and lots of crosses on the side of the road.
The last time I was in New Orleans was my senior year of high school on a band trip to play in the half time show of the Sugar Bowl. The highlight of that trip was the all-band dance, when a kid in the percussion section was dancing on stage with a girl from some other school. He danced so vigorously that he pushed her off the stage, in front of approximately five hundred people.
This time was more fun. We drove into the city over a bridge spanning Lake Ponchartrain at possibly it's longest point. The bridge goes from a random city on the north side to slightly outside of New Orleans on the south side—not logical places connected by a bridge. Eli told me that this was a project of the famous Huey Long. The longer the bridge, the more jobs you create, the happier are your constituents! I can appreciate that kind of politics.
The city reminds me a lot of Cyprus; parts are beautiful, colorful buildings with wrought-iron fences and citrus trees out front, and then you come across an absolutely desolate area where it seems little progress has been made since the hurricane. It's like you can be in two different cities and have no idea what's going on in the other one.
We stayed in the spacious and lovely Avodah house. The Avodahniks seem far less neurotic than our New York bunch and are doing some really neat work. We joined them at an awesome show at Le Bon Temps Roule. We saw the Soul Rebels Brass Band, who play there every Thursday. It was every music cliché that you could want—everyone was dancing, a totally mixed crowd, an hour and a half long set without stopping for a break. I could do this every week.
And, I have a new favorite sandwich! I had many po'boys (the best of which were at Domilise's, where a table is hard to come by even at 2pm, see picture below) but the king of all bread and meat delights is for sure the muffaletta. I would like to take this salty-squishy-briney sandwich on a picnic to the beach one day.
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