New Orleans Memories

I was all set to put up these pictures of Jeffrey eating pie for breakfast on Monday morning, but then I saw all the news about the hurricane and flood down south, and I thought "Well, that doesn't seem quite appropriate under the circumstances."

Then I thought, well, maybe I should dig out some pictures of mine from New Orleans, because I visited that fine municipality many times when my mom lived down there in the 80's.

In fact, I was even there for the World's Fair in 1984, which was, to the best of my knowledge, the only World's Fair in history that to enter it, you had to walk under a gigantic topless fiberglass mermaid.

No lie. I'm talking nipples and everything!

Obviously, New Orleans is my kind of town. Great food, live music all over the place, some wonderful museums, architecture that incorporates topless mermaids. I loved the place!

So you'd think I would have some pictures of myself in New Orleans, right?

Well, that's what I thought, but apparently I don't. I have this picture of my mom sitting on the steps of a walkway with her friend Annette. I think the walkway was something left over from the World's Fair. It runs right alongside the Mississippi near the French Quarter.

If you walk down the bottom of the steps where my mom is sitting, you can actually beat your feet in the Mississippi mud.

Not far from where this picture was taken is the Convention Center, where you see all those evacuees waiting to be rescued. From what I'm hearing, this older part of New Orleans hasn't flooded too bad because it was built on relatively high ground in the days before engineers figured out how to construct the elaborate levee systems that allowed the city to expand into sub-sea-level areas.

So I guess the one fragment of good news that has come out of this whole disaster is that many of the old historical landmarks in New Orleans that we remember so fondly have survived because those things tend to be on higher ground.

As far as the giant topless mermaid goes, I guess fiberglass holds up pretty well in a flood, but who knows where the currents may have dragged her at this point. My guess is New Orleans is never going to get her back. She's probably already propped up over the piano in some drag bar on Key West.

Kurt "big daddy" True
3 september 2005