I'm feeling a bit guilty about taking the day off today. Alex is visiting a High School for her Katrina project and I'm just sitting in the coffee shop. She's not going to be finished until 2:30 and I could have easliy gone to work today. It was nice to catch up on sleep though. Last night we went into the city and hung around Bourbon street for a few hours. The place seem to be functioning like normal again. The street was littered with frat boys and forty somethings staggering around drunk like headless chickens. The presence of national guard members enjoying themselves was blatently apparent. I saaw a few police officers on horseback enjoying a "huge ass beer" to go. A few guys had trouble getting off the beer soaked ground after having fallen like sacks of concrete. We met Zach, a resident bartender who had returned a week after ago from his Hurrication. He endured Katrina in the French Quarter and remained for a few days before being shipped by bus to the Louis Armstrong Airport and then airlifted out of the state. He seemed to enjoy flirting with Alex through self-deprication. Isn't that just the most effective way to pick up chicks? She was duly impressed. He told us that business was picking up each day and had faith that everything would be back to normal in a few weeks. There were a few separate groups of hispanic men clamoring around Alex for group photos that they would never see. They held the elongated green plastic Hand Grenades, a staple of Bourbon Street couture and an excessive amount of fake "bling." After walking up and down the street a few times, we veered over to Canal Street and scouted out some pictures for Alex's project. We found a few stores that looked like undisturbed crime scenes. One Foot Locker was strewn with empty shoe boxes and broken mannequins. The models were all looking up towards the sky. It reminded me of an old Twilight Zone that I had watched when I was younger.
On a brief tangent about the Twilight Zone. Rod Sterling had been the narrator of my youth. Instead of traditional bedtime stories, my dad had rocked me to sleep with the twisted tales of Burgess Meredith coming out of a bank safe after an atomic bomb in the US and Robert Redford playing a dashing young version of the grim reaper knocking on an old woman's door. It was one of those few instances that I really saw evidence of my dad's creativity, something more substantative than his sports fanaticism and well, sports fanaticism.
Anyway, back to the aimless wandering from last night. We also found the Land Rover that got crushed by a pile of bricks that constantly symbolizes Katrina on CNN. Alex got some cool pics. Speaking of CNN, we also ran into Anderson Cooper as we preparing to do a brief short on Bourbon Street. All in all it was a damn fun night. Probably going back tonight.
I saw a trailer for the movie RENT that's coming out in November. That brought back some serious memories. Josh Horowitz took me to the broadway production with the original cast before I had ever even heard about it. The experience definitely affected me. I became a total geek about it for the next six months. Then I forgot about it and a few years later in college went to see it again with Annie Johnson. I once again understood how emotionally powerful it was. Now with the movie coming out, I definitely got a few goosebumbs. There's that geek turning the corner.
So yeah folks, don't be hesitant to comment, it's always fascinating to hear others opinions about all this Katrina stuff. Up, up, and away!
