[title type="h5"]Monday, April 13, 2015.
No Recess For Rain.[/title]
The French Quarter Festival kept on going through the four days of its World's Largest Jazz Brunch, closing only for an hour or two when the thunderstorms were at their worst. But, I learn today, the weather cut down attendance at the mostly-outdoors event by about half. Still, 350,000 people can't be called a failure.
The rain continues today, with the road to and from the Cool Water Ranch briefly covered as the ditch on the north side flowed into the ditch on the south side. When we had some out-of-town guests over during Jude's wedding festival a few months ago, someone asked me why it was that there are so many ditches around New Orleans. "It feels a little dangerous driving with a three-foot dropoff on both sides of a one-lane road," he said. Yes, it does, even after living here with that for twenty-four years.
Mary Ann felt a hunger pang for fried chicken. It's Monday, so that would mean the buffet at the Camellia Café, the nearest good restaurant to our house. I go along because the one dish that actually improves on a buffet steam table--red beans and rice--is cooked rather well there. Mary Ann always gets more fried chicken than she really wants, so I get a bite.
But for reasons nobody at the restaurant could explain, the kitchen put baked chicken in place of the usual fried on the buffet. It wasn't bad, but the fried chicken is a particularly crunchy-good version. When one gets her expectations revved up for something, not even the best possible alternative can hope to satisfy.
[caption id="attachment_14184" align="alignleft" width="400"]
Red beans with hot sausage and cornbread[/caption]
On the other hand, the half-plate of red beans with smoked sausage before me is "an elegant sufficiency" (my mother's phrase). And the bread pudding is pretty good, too.
At the end of a radio show, I am usually a little goofy. (I hear someone saying right now that I am that way all the other times, and more than a little, too.) But today I made four trips back and forth to the car before I could leave for chorus rehearsal. I was all the way there when I found that I'd left my sheet music at home. I was twenty minutes late getting in line. I feel terrible about this. NPAS is such a well-disciplined organization that I am surely now marked as a slacker, even though I have not been late ever before.
I forget all that when we get into the music. It's for the twentieth anniversary of NPAS, and includes a lot of my favorites, songs I already know well enough not to need the sheet music. But I will be away on the cruise when this event takes place! I have yet to attend any of the three actual performances since I joined up. All the rehearsals, none of the shows. There's a metaphor for life in there somewhere, but I'm too goofy to dope it out.
[title type="h5"]Camellia Cafe. Abita Springs: 69455 LA 59. 985-809-6313. [/title]
