If this isn’t heaven, I don’t know what is! We were lucky to arrive just as the Crescent Street Blues & BBQ Festival opened. It’s a free (yup!) blues festival featuring top-notch bands including Los Lobos and Bobby Rush Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Also heard terrific performances from Walter “Wolfman” Washington and an amazing keyboardist playing with Papa Mali.
We began the day taking the trolley to the French Quarter. As with most people, I suspect, we found the city (like any big city) a little off-putting at first. Someone warned of a rash of pickpocketing, so there was that concern, and we had to relearn the trolley system and the streets. But unease soon dissolved—at least for me—as the familiar sights and sounds of the French Quarter surrounded us. Intricate grill work adorned the buildings, mimes performed their routines, and street musicians belted out old jazz favorites.
As we browsed the wares in the market, a brass band marched through playing “When the Saints Come Marching In” (what else?) and children in costume ran in and out of shops, collecting treats doled out by merchants participating in an early Halloween ritual.
John and I sat down to listen to a demonstration of jack-o-lantern carving when I spotted Oscar (Oscar C. Donahue III), the artist who has fashioned brightly colored broaches and earrings out of metallic resins for the past 25 years. In fact, he began selling his distinctive jewelry at the French Market here the same year John and I married. When we visited New Orleans in 1998, I stopped to chat with him and bought a multicolored fish pin, one of his specialties. At some point I lost the pin and bought a replacement on our next visit a year later. Each time Oscar greeted me like an old friend. Clearly, he enjoyed his work. He had originally considered going to law school after graduating from college, but instead he chose a career that fulfilled his artistic bent.
This time Oscar and I chatted about how long he had been selling at the Market and his upward transition from the flea market to a regular stall. I chose a pin and a pair of earrings from his offerings. So happy to reconnect with this upbeat artist who always seems to have a smile.
At 11 a.m. we walked to Lafayette Park for the blues festival and melt-in-your-mouth smothered pork po’boys. We spent most of the rest of the day there, enjoying the music, eating, sitting in the sun, and watching an amazing array of people pass by. A woman nearby gave me the thumbs up when I bent my knee and sat on the ground (I don’t bend my knees quite as much as most folks and sort of come in for a landing with a little more “emphasis” than other people). When she and her husband got up from their chairs to go check out another band, they told us to sit and relax until they got back. We happily accepted; it was a much-appreciated gesture that gave John’s back some needed rest.
For supper we took a brief break from the festival and retraced our steps to Decatur Street in the French Quarter. Stopped at a little place offering local dishes, sat in the open balcony overlooking the street, and feasted on an absolutely amazing dinner of barbecued shrimp po’boy and potatoes fried in garlic and butter (Sue) and red beans and sausage (John).
We stopped at the market for dessert of pralines and chocolate, then wandered along the Mississippi River as a giant Carnival cruise ship left port and a tugboat pushed a load of barges toward the ocean. The Natchez, the paddleboat that gives tourists a riverboat experience, was docked and a guy sat at a steel console on the top deck and played jazz tunes on the ship’s steam pipes. Music everywhere in this city!
We’ll be aboard later in the week. We’ve been promised tickets on the jazz dinner cruise if we endure an hour and a half of sales pitch for the hotel’s timeshares at breakfast on Monday. John has pledged to keep a hand over my mouth and disable my check writing hand, though after our real estate ventures, I have no intention of EVER buying another property (timeshare or otherwise). So he’s safe.
We returned to the blues festival in time to hear Los Lobos play. The park was packed with so many people we could hardly move. We finally found a spot to sit along the monument where a statue of Henry Clay stood in the center of the open area. At first I assumed the statue was Lafayette, but the plaque noted that Clay’s statue had once resided elsewhere in the city and had been moved there. Clay has a special connection to Maine as the architect, along with Webster and Calhoun, of the Missouri Compromise (I always thought it should have been called the Maine Compromise) that gave us statehood in 1820.
The end of a most exquisite day with all the best that is New Orleans.