Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 21, 1991 TAG: 9104210303
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JUDITH SCHWAB/ SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: NEW ORLEANS LENGTH: Long
You can tell Naw'lins is serious about fun when you find out you can get a cocktail - the favorite is a "hurricane" - to go.
Naw'lins has street musicians, but they play piano. There are horse-drawn carriages, but the horses wear hats and flowers. There are women in high heels, but they aren't all women. Oh the good times they sure do roll down in Naw'lins.
At night, all night, you can wander Bourbon Street, drink in hand. You can eat oysters sitting down or standing up. Standing up at a marble bar the shucker opens them up and lays them out in front of you. You mix your own sauce from ingredients at the end of the bar and make it hot enough to curl or straighten your hair if you want. Then you commence shlurping. The shucker keeps 'em comin'. In the end they add up the empty shells in the mess you've made and give you the bill. Then you toddle on down the street, belching at will.
On Bourbon Street there are bars open all night that feature naked lady performers, or maybe it's naked lady customers, whatever. Outside these places you're likely to find quite properly dressed ladies collecting change to help save souls, thus approximating a sort of standoff between sin and salvation - maybe.
On Canal Street the activity continues. Men sit at tables under the street lamps and play games of chess for money, and shoeshine scam artists reel in the rubes. The shine is free if the shiner can tell the shinee where he or she got his or her shoes. If he can, and believe me he can, then the shine costs $10. How can this slick-talkin' dude possibly know where you got your favorite Florsheims, especially when you picked them up in, let's say, downtown Pulaski, Virginia? Easy. You're standing on Canal Street, you got your shoes on Canal Street.
He didn't say he'd tell you where you bought them, just where you got them. I've seen them, known Ph.D.'s, their pants rolled up, getting their $10 shines. An education is a terrible thing to waste but even an education can't withstand a well-placed hurricane.
If you miss Mardi Gras, and most of the year you will, you can still enjoy the mood if your business group is big enough. Convention people can organize a "people parade." The group is given hats, noise makers, beads, and most important, a real brass band and away you go down the street cheerfully blocking traffic street after street. There's nothing quite like being able to make a lot of cars stop and wait to make you feel, well, good.
It only makes sense that people who know how to party also know how to make a cup of coffee that can bring you to your senses like a quick tap on the brakes. First thing in the morning - whether that is 5 a.m. on your way to bed, or 8 a.m. for those who actually went to bed - you can stop at Cafe du Monde, an open-air cafe that serves good black coffee, the kind where the spoon disappears from sight before it hits the bottom, and beignets - square doughnuts dredged in powdered sugar and made on the spot.
After this delicious and affordable breakfast you can amble on down Jackson Square and watch the merchants opening up their shops at the French Market. Like the young woman in simple skirt and sweater and plain purple hair rolling up the blinds on her basket stall.
At Loretta's New Orleans Authentic Pralines, you can enjoy a warm brown sugar smell so good it may be harmful to diabetics. The famous pecan candy is made in big black kettles with blue flames licking out from underneath. It's the sort of stuff travelers love - the flames of reality mixed with sugar and the aroma of Mom's 1958 kitchen. Mom's current kitchen smells like microwaves.
The French Market consists of open-air stalls filled with everything from produce to car parts, the latter both new and previously enjoyed. The produce section contains braids of garlic done up in red ribbons, pumpkins, peppers, sugar cane, tangerines and manderines - whatever they are - and alligator on a stick, which is a ready-to-eat Cajun-style smoked sausage, according to the hand-lettered sign.
The market is crammed with dead swamp animals - eelskin wallets, frogskin purses, gator skulls turned into letter racks, and gator toes on a stick called "Cajun back scratchers." Those Cajuns, they get all the credit for nifty ideas.
After the produce stalls, the market tends toward imported goods. A lot of Asian vendors sell everything from handbags to T-shirts. Sample T-shirt art - "If this is your brain on drugs, this is your brain with two strips of bacon and a piece of toast."
After the imported goods come the used books, handmade jewelry and herbal booths and a trip down memory lane. The jewelry and tie-dyed clothing vendors create a time warp for the middle-aged. It's almost like the '70s again with the jewelers' buffing machines humming, the trade beads, the scent of incense and displays of massage oils. A few of the jewelry vendors are gray enough to have soldered their first roach clips in the good old days but the majority are fresh-faced enough to think they've discovered the simple life of craftsmanship.
Heading back toward the bright skyline and away from the market breaks the sense of deja vu the market can produce but doesn't dampen the pervasive spirit of fun. New Orleans, where the good times and the old times rollez.
by CNB