Words about New Orleans.

La belle de l'Avenue d'Esplanade

In the end, it's all words, words words.  In Italian, "Alla fine, si tart di tutti le parole."  It's true.  Ce sera sera.  As the Creole maw-maws say when they're granddaughters come home after a big date telling their grandmothers they're in love, the maw-maws say, "En fin de compte, il best tour les mots."  C'est vrai.    

Thus, today's soundtrack:


Alain Delon could talk, but Dalida... Dalida!  That Dalida, she had quite a set of pipes.

Whatever I say, it's all just gonna be words in the end.  All just words, words, words.  So, what might those words be?

Here's one for you: Prosopagnosia.  An innkeeper with prosopagnosia can get along, but it's going to make his or her job tougher, I can tell you that.  I'm not saying that either your humble narrator nor Frau Schmitt can be described as prosopagnosiac.  We aren't.  At least not as far as I can tell.  Some neuroscientists will tell you that when a person is born with a condition, he or she will compensate for it through other ways---like the belief that blind people have a heightened sense of smell.  I'm not making this up.  We have neuroscientists stay with us when they have a convention in town.  

The Sniffer by Enrique Alférez

New Orleans smells like no place else.  Whether it's the mules in the French Quarter, among other things in the French Quarter, or the smell of a roux cooking up in kitchens in all the downtown neighborhoods, or the whiff of crawfish boil on weekends, no place smells like New Orleans.  No, no place, nowhere, no how.  I guarantee.  


I think it was in our last installment that I featured two sculptures by Enrique Alférez on Poydras Street.  If it wasn't the last installment it was the one after that.  I'm so lackadaisical in my research that I won't go back and read my own blog.  ...and yet, I expect you to.  

Serendipity being something that informs everything that happens in New Orleans, it turns out that there is a new sculpture garden opening up in City Park, in the Botanical Gardens in particular.  This new garden will be full of statues made by our local hero and one of my personal favorite sculptors, Enrique Alférez.  I had no idea until I read it in the newspaper yesterday.  Naturally, I'm tickled pink, which is a phrase I've learned a southern gentleman can say in public without blushing.

New Orleans Botanical Gardens

There is a nice exhibit of sculpture at the New Orleans Museum of Art for the next couple of months.  You can see it here: https://noma.org/exhibitions.  I would post the link directly so that you could just click on it, but their server is down so I just get a page that tells me that NOMA's server is down.  That's the way things work in New Orleans sometimes.  You don't do things virtually or plan ahead.  You just show up and make the best of what you find.  It's always better that way.

Sometimes, our guests go someplace, like to the Backstreet Cultural Center, and it will be closed even if their website says they should have been open.  That's usually okay. "We met somebody sitting on the porch three houses down and he told us about it and then his daughter walked us around the neighborhood and she told us to go to L'il Dizzy's for lunch, which we did, and we had the best gumbo and jambalaya."

That's how things work in New Orleans.  Don't overplan.  The city will provide what it wants you to enjoy.

Somebody opened their front shutters on Esplanade Avenue the other morning and somebody else took a picture.

You can't be afraid of color

Jazz in the Park happens tomorrow.  I wonder what we missed last week?



Kermit Ruffins!!!!  Waitaminnit!  That was last season!

I think tomorrow is the last session of Jazz in the Park for this season.  This weekend is Voodoo Fest up in City Park, and, it's also Hallowe'en.  It's gonna be a magical weekend in New Orleans.  What else would it be?  It's been a magical week.  Isn't it always?

I promise, this won't be the last session of this blog.  Jazz.

À votre santé, 
La Belle Esplanade, a boutique New Orleans bed and breakfast inn.
Where quality is our nature.