Saturday, March 5, 2011.
Tornados And Other Storms. Louis Armstrong. The Airport.
The weather became violent today. The cold front triggered off a lot of rain and a few tornadoes, causing at least one death and quite a few injuries down on the bayou. It was at full career when I went on the air with a three-hour radio show. Which meant that we were taking reports from several weather sources. And traffic reporter John Bray--who has been doing that as long as I've been on the air--had several reports an hour to the effect that the daytime parades started early and moved quickly to avoid the worst weather. And that Endymion--the biggest parade of them all--has postponed its parade until tomorrow.
Jude's almost spookily good luck continued. His flight came in at almost ten p.m., right between the end of the rain and the coming of the forty-mile-per-hour cold winds. I brought him to Drago's downtown, where Mary Ann and her sibs were dining. the Windsor Court, and--before anyone could see me or tell me otherwise--I beat it home. I must take the whole day tomorrow to write. I get my share of parades on Mardi Gras, anyway. I knew Mary Ann wouldn't like this, but. . . well, she'd having a good time.
She called at home and told me that a lot of people in the party at the Windsor Court were asking for me, so they could have drinks with me. I looked forward to that on Monday. I would wind up regretting that I did.
I read about a dozen books a year in the time between going to bed and falling asleep. The reading hastens the slumber, I find.) Right now I'm making tracks through Pops, a new biography of Louis Armstrong by Terry Teachout. It's unusual in that the author is himself a classical and jazz musician, and can explain exactly why Satchmo was such a force on the music scene in the 1920s. He leaves out nothing from the story, much of which is not well known to most people. I didn't know, for example, that Armstrong was an embarrassment to some African Americans in the 1960s and 1970s, because of the way he mixed clowning around with his undeniably superb music. But he ignored the criticism. I also didn't know that he was a lifelong user of marijuana, but not other drugs and not much alcohol. The more I read about old Satch, the better I like him. I certainly think it was a good idea to name the airport after him.
