Fun day Saturday. I got a call about 12 p.m. saying our afternoon rehearsal was cancelled. Why? Because there was a birthday party at the rehearsal hall.

New Orleans Opera, like the rest of the city, took some pretty heavy hits in Katrina. Their usual theater and rehearsal space was destroyed and is in the process of being rebuilt. In the meantime, they had to find an affordable, reasonably located spot, and that was a meeting hall owned by one of those fraternal orders that does a lot of charity work. This chapter rents out their hall for wedding receptions, quinceñeras, and so forth. It seems that the scheduling can sometimes get a little wanky, and in this case, there was a miscommunication, and the quinceñera people had the hall on Saturday afternoon. So I got this call from the stage manager, Carol: “Rehearsal is cancelled tomorrow afternoon. Wanna go to the French Quarter with Marti and me?” (Marti would be our leading lady).

Ummmm, yes please! So after another frustrating bout of wireless access hide ‘n’ seek, I gathered up my husband and off we went. The highway seems to be in a perpetual jam, so we went the back way down St. Charles’ Avenue. This is the route taken by many of the Mardi Gras parades, smack through the beautiful Garden District, and the trees which line the street are festooned with long strands of beads from Mardi Gras past, some of them decades old.

Once in the Quarter, we quickly found ourselves being drawn into the various shops. This ugly fellow, who reminded me of the Mad TV agent character, drew us into a souvenir shop.



Marti, Carol, and I had to buy Mardi Gras masks. We plan to wear them to rehearsal on Halloween.



Marti could not resist trying on this pimpin’ hat.



Thus supplied, we continued past Jackson Square and the St. Louis Cathedral, where there was a wedding complete with jazz band parade. All the guests were following the band, which was dressed in white tuxedos. I hope I don’t die while I’m here, but if I do, I want a jazz funeral. What a way to go. I’d a hell of a lot rather have my friends and loved ones pay their respects and then have a wild party in my honor than sit around crying.

Soon we were compelled to stop at Café du Monde for café au lait and beignets. The place was packed, but we managed to find a small table. The tile floor is liberally coated in powdered sugar, and I am convinced that periodically a waitress must step into a patch which has been coated with sugar and spilled coffee, become stuck like a woolly mammoth in a tar pit, and have to be chiseled out by her colleagues wielding paint scrapers. The loudest table in the joint was occupied by a group of well-dressed middle-aged ladies who did not appear to be chemically enhanced, but nonetheless thought it the height of hilarity to throw powdered sugar on one another. They were shrieking good-naturedly. No one batted an eye. This is New Orleans, and if you don’t come here to party, you are sadly, sadly lost. During our sojourn through the Quarter, we saw partiers of all ages, including some decked in Mardi Gras finery hobbling along on their canes and walkers. Alcohol is a wonderful preservative!

We weren’t merely wandering; we were in search of the Ursuline Convent, at which our version of Suor Angelica has been set. (Shouldn’t that be Soeur Angelica)? We soon found it --- a very plain white building surrounded by tall walls. You couldn’t see much; it was truly a cloister. We went around to the front and peered as we could through the gates, where you could see neatly trimmed boxwood hedges in a stone courtyard. Very French. Musn’t let the garden appear too natural.

These cool tile signs appear on walls all over the French Quarter, letting you know where you would have been, had you been here between 1762 and 1803. Sniff.

While we had our noses pressed up to the convent wall, an interesting little event took place. We heard some chanting and shouting down the street. About a block away, a small war protest parade was headed our way, manned largely by Ron Paul supporters. Just across the street from the convent, there was a chi-chi party taking place. Well-heeled young Republicans, complete with a couple of Ann Coulter look-alikes (well, it IS almost Halloween; the ghouls do come out) were having cocktails on a veranda. When the protesters passed us, the partiers began to heckle them, calling them cowards and shouting at them to “Get a job”! Some of the protesters yelled back, and soon obscenities were being exchanged. It seemed very symbolic of the lack of dialogue between the opposing sides in this country, complete with stereotypes and the inability to hear (or care) what the other side is saying.



The protesters invited us to “join the revolution”, but since I plan on voting for either Hilary or Obama, and since we were coming up on Bourbon Street, we politely declined.

The Quarter is an odd mix of beauty and shabbiness. I suspect much of the truly spectacular is hidden in the courtyards within. Sometimes you get a little peek.



Other times, it’s just out there for you to see.

We found ourselves on Bourbon Street, where around 4 p.m. the action was definitely picking up. Halloween was clearly in full swing on Bourbon Street. We saw, among other things, a pregnant transvestite bride, Hugh Hefner with a Bunny on each arm, and my personal favorite, Tippi Hedron from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, complete with messy blonde wig and a vintage suit covered in blood and angry crows.

The bars were already hopping, and the walk-up daiquiri mills were doing steady business. I saw more than one sign advertising Huge Ass Beers, which caused me to speculate on whether 1) this was merely descriptive of the size; 2) this was the brand name; 3) this was a promise of what is to come should you partake of one.



Shortly after circumnavigating the Huge Ass Beer, we came upon the old French opera house. New Orleans was the first city in the US to boast an opera house. It’s now some type of jazz bar, but we felt we had to make our mark.



We also popped into Marie Laveau’s VooDoo Shop, which everyone agreed was creepy. It’s tiny, but it was packed, mostly with curious tourists like ourselves. There did not appear to be much commerce going on. No one in our party felt the need to put a curse on anyone, and we’d been walking for a couple of hours by now. It was time to sit down and eat something. It was also time to get off Bourbon Street, with its crowds and deafening music. We ended up at the ACME Oyster Bar, which had a line down the street. This is a place where you want to order fried stuff, as that is practically all they have on the menu, but I’d already had a beignet and hadn’t planned for that kind of culinary extravagance. So Eric and I split some charbroiled oysters, served heavy on the garlic (mmm)!, an order of the best hush puppies you will ever taste, and some tasty seafood gumbo, followed by a small but perfect bread pudding liberally doused in a plate-lickin’ good bourbon sauce. Our companions plowed into a sausage po’boy and jambalaya, respectively. No one left hungry!

By this time there was a beautiful full moon and it was getting chilly, so it was time to head home. We amused ourselves on the drive back by introducing Carol and Marti to the GPS. They also think she sounds pissed off when we don’t do what she says.

Eric goes home today, but Marti, Carol, and I are hitting the Quarter on Halloween night. Santa Maria, prega per noi!

Welcome to the musings and mutterings of a traveling singer. For many years now I’ve filed reports from various exotic locations to which my career has sent me --- Des Moines, Fort Lauderdale, San Jose, Tucson and Phoenix, Chicago, Santa Barbara, and beyond. These quirky little rants/newsletters/travelogues have hitherto been reserved for an exclusive group of friends and relatives, but they’ve urged me to inflict them on the world at large, and so here we are. This blog is currently not set up for commenting, but feel free to do so --- drop me a line at cindy@cindy-sadler.com with BLOG in the subject title.

My current adventure finds me in New Orleans. Eric and I drove down on Thursday. It’s an uneventful drive, except when one is attempting to navigate the snarl of Houston highways, with their exciting instant lane changes. Even with the reassuring guiding voice of the GPS, attention must be paid, lest you be shunted off to some distant and undesireable suburb unawares. We haven’t had the GPS long, but it’s a fun and useful toy. However, I am convinced that it gets pissed off when we don’t obey it. At first the Star Trek-y mechanical female voice sounds cool and professional: “Recalculating. Please drive to highlighted route.” The third or fourth time you disobey (because you’re busy making an illegal U-turn to reach the first Starbucks’ you’ve seen in 250 miles; or because there’s the rest stop THERE THERE THERE oh crap it’s just picnic tables, no restroom), the thing begins to sound distinctly annoyed. I kind of like pissing it off. I admit it.

To those of you just meeting us, Eric and I are just ever so slightly Food Fascists. We like to cook, and when we do, we like to cook fancy. Not only are we kinda snobby about food, but we’re really careful about what we eat. This is because both of us are engaged in a lifelong battle of the bulge, and also because the reading and research we’ve done has convinced us that organic and natural is the way to go. Being refugees from the Fast Food Nation, there is no pulling off at the sign of the big yellow M, unless it’s time to recycle. So we took a picnic (smoked trout and salmon, a tiny piece of REALLY good bleu cheese, an olive oil and salt ciabatta roll, some crudite, and pomegranate seeds, if you must know) and then suffered the indignity of NO RESTSTOPS between Houston and Beaumont. We finally found a windy little patch of ground just off the highway where there were picnic tables but no toilets (what is the POINT, I ask you?) and then, just a few miles down the road in Beaumont, was the biggest, purtiest, most high-falutin’ visitor’s center you ever did see and it was named after somebody named Ben J. Rogers, or something like that. It had a little theater and everything. The ladies’ room was well-lit, all tiled in natural stone and there were little pots of succulents artfully placed on the marble counter. You could hold a wedding reception in there, it was so purty. I don’t know who Ben J. Rogers was, but he was either mighty hospitable or he really liked a well-appointed necessary.

As we rolled over the many causeways on the way into New Orleans, I was reminded of the trips we used to take when we were kids, to visit Uncle Tom and Aunt Dorothy and our cousins Bill, Ann Marie, and Catherine. We had this gigantic blue Pontiac station wagon with three back seats, and the dog and I always got the very back seat. I loved that. When we hit those causeways, my nose would be pressed to the window, looking for alligators. Never did see a blessed one, this time included. I couldn’t exactly press my nose to the window because I was driving, but I was looking, friends, I was looking. Eric said, “Throw a fat kid in there and you’ll see ‘em soon enough.” Yeah, my husband has a sick sense of humor.

My new temporary home is located in an ugly patch of urban sprawl just off the highway. The hotel itself is nice enough, but the fact that it is built like a little fortress, complete with decorative-and-highly-functional iron gates all around and lots of security cameras does tend to make one a little … shall we say, alert? The locale is full of low-rent apartments and shabby storefronts, although a few streets over there’s a big drag with everything a lily white suburban yuppie such as myself could dream of, up to and including a big, beautiful Whole Foods.

The very best thing about the hotel is the people at the front desk. They could not be more gracious and friendly, which actually goes for everyone I’ve met so far. I’m from Texas, and we are friendly people, but in a bluff, hearty sort of way. These folks are real Southerners, and one of the best things about the South is the genuine hospitality. If you are a stranger people just go out of their way to make you feel at home. If you are a New Yorker, or if you are Yurpeen (as my formerly French husband is) you might regard this behavior with a little bit of suspicion. You might find it a little creepy. Relax. Nobody’s going after your wallet. It’s just the way things are done here.

The very worst thing about the hotel is the fact that, although it advertises itself as a business extended stay hotel with free wireless internet, as it turns out that wireless is available only on a mysterious and arcane basis, and only if you are in the rooms right above the office (which I am not). In order to partake of the free wireless, I must balance my laptop on a wobby iron table in the chilly courtyard, cross myself, spit, turn three times counterclockwise, sacrifice a live chicken to the spirit of Marie Laveau, and wait until someone else gets offline so I can get on. Because apparently the hotel has limited the number of people who can be on the network at one time, and that number appears to be about five. The hotel room itself has its quirks. It's mainly comfortable, with a tiny but functional kitchen and bathroom, an oddly shaped living room which features two large armchairs, a desk, and a TV stand but nothing resembling a table where one might eat; a walkin closet which also serves as storage for the full-sized water heater; and a large bedroom with a lot of wasted space. There are very few surfaces or drawers upon and in which to store things. The AC sounds forth in such volume and intensity that Eric is given to remarking, "Landing gear engaged!" whenever it comes on. The picturesque plantation shutters do not quite shut out the light. But it's reasonably attractive and comfy.

There's a beautiful little French Quarter-style courtyard with a pool and a tiny exercise room, into which is jammed a weight bench, a treadmill, and some sort of off-brand Stairmaster-type torture device. If the person on the treadmill should fart, he'd asphyxiate the weightlifter, whose nose would be practically up his ass. That's how small that room is.

I had my first rehearsal on Friday. Getting there was an adventure. New Orleans streets are like a big bowl of spaghetti. They make absolutely no sense. As Eric said, "I think the French came here, founded it, and then screwed it up so badly that they said, 'What the hell, let's sell it.'" Were it not for the GPS, you would never hear from me again. I'd be driving around the labyrinth, trying to find a way to get on the highway without making an illegal left turn. (They are not fans of left turns in New Orleans. They would rather you make a right and then do a U-turn. I am not clear on the logic, but Eric says it's just like back home in France).

Rehearsals are taking place at the Lion’s Club, which lies a few hundred yards from one of the infamous levees but apparently survived the flooding no worse for the wear. It’s a dreary sort of hall with a long, red leatherette bar on one side and a tiny chandelier hanging from the center of the acoustical tile ceiling. They rent it out a lot for various functions. More on that later.

Our first rehearsal went swimmingly. It was for Suor Angelica, which is all women (on account of it takes place in a convent). We mostly listened to the director explain his concept and the costumes and the different types of nuns; sang through part of it, and did a tiny bit of staging. Then we had to clear out, because the Lion’s Club had a quinceñera coming in. More on that later.

And that was the first day.