Photo by Yuval Zukerman
One of the perks—and occasional hazards—of publishing Country Roads is that attending cultural, dining, and entertainment events and calling it “work” is not only tolerated, it’s expected. This is why, one hot August morning, my wife and I were in New Orleans, practicing what we preach. The Historic New Orleans Collection was hosting its annual Antiques Forum—which CR has sponsored for years. This lovely symposium, which brings in experts in material culture from around the country to speak on topics related to decorative arts in the South, was underway in various French Quarter locations, and the invitation to enjoy lectures and social events in the company of tweedy academics from places like Colonial Williamsburg and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts was too good to pass up. A couple of blocks over at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the annual Louisiana Contemporary exhibition had recently debuted. As the name suggests, Louisiana Contemporary presents fifty recent works by Louisiana artists judged exceptional by a visiting curator from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Given that I have been entrusted by the good people at Louisiana Public Broadcasting to host its Art Rocks TV series again this fall, it felt important to acquaint myself with the work in this year’s exhibition. Within walking distance was Delacroix—a new seafood restaurant we’d been keen to try. I’d been longing to return to the Jewel of the South cocktail tavern since first darkening its periwinkle blue doors a year ago, and the peerless jazz trumpeter Kevin Louis was playing at Snug Harbor. So much! As someone who lives at the end of a gravel road in rural Louisiana, I tend to feel that country life is fine—so long as you can escape it once in a while. During late summer, when the garden is overtaken by weeds and the pool’s gone green, the urge to escape is strong. So, a weekend in the Crescent City, attending lectures about religious artifacts, roaming around art galleries, and enjoying a cocktail or two didn’t sound like “work” at all. Indeed, it sounded like the cure for what ailed us.
In New Orleans, nothing happens in a vacuum. Arriving at lunchtime on Friday, we beat a path directly to Delacroix to celebrate the recent discovery that a shellfish allergy that has been depriving my wife of shrimp and crab for years (a culinary tragedy in Louisiana), had been a misdiagnosis. She was halfway through her Crabmeat Ravigote when in swept Dawn, a running buddy from my wife's LSU days, resplendent in a red dress and on her way to join a tableful of well-dressed business types. Dawn, who these days is the kind of high-powered New Orleans businesswoman who gets an industrial crane named after her, has remarkable powers of persuasion, because we somehow ended up joining her party for most of the evening—first for cocktails, and later at the restaurant GW Fins, where the erstwhile seafood allergy was ruled out once and for all.
Dawn was the one dressed for the occasion, because also happening that weekend was the Red Dress Run, when thousands of participants clad in red dresses charge through the French Quarter, with stops for refreshments and socializing along the way. This created an interesting juxtaposition. When the well-dressed Antiques Forum crowd (tweedy academics, remember) let out for lunch, the streets were awash with red dress-wearing, beverage-clutching runners of both sexes, making their way unsteadily hither and yon. The Antiques Forum’s lunch event was happening on the seventeenth floor at the Hotel Monteleone, and since the Monteleone, and specifically the Carousel Bar, was clearly a must-do pit stop for Red Dress Runners, the sight of pearl-strung Antiques Forum academics from Pennsylvania emerging, grinning but somewhat disheveled, from an elevator stuffed with large, sweaty, middle-aged men wearing poorly fitting red cocktail dresses, is one I’ll not soon forget.
It occurs to me that a good weekend in New Orleans is performance art in its own right. You know those weekends: the ones in which every event, exhibition, artwork, cocktail, meal, musical performance, and chance encounter with an old friend or a new acquaintance, adds another verse to an evolving, somewhat improvisational theatrical experience. Despite the many challenges, frustrations, and shortcomings of life in Louisiana, of which we are constantly reminded, performing the art of living is something that New Orleans, and our culture as a whole, does rather well. As folks who call Louisiana home, it’s our responsibility, and our privilege, to make the most of it.
