Crescent City Love

I wish I’d known my dad. He must have really been something. Then again, my mom was a piece of work herself back in the day. Their influence, as all parental influence tends to be, was more profound than I realized when either one of them was around to talk to.

Apparently it was his idea to implement the “graduation trip” when my sisters finished high school. No doubt he remembered the world-shaking experience of heading off to war the minute he came of age and hoped to provide a similar transition for his girls. When the time came, however, it was the mid-1960s and my mom was newly widowed with four daughters, the youngest (me) just two-years old. She stuck close to home.

Home was Houston, and the closest approximations of the cosmopolitan world at large were San Antonio and New Orleans. I was too young to remember the trip to San Antonio, but the trip to New Orleans is indelibly etched on my psyche.

The audacity of that trip! The daring. Did she really traipse off down to the quintessential Southern den of iniquity with her girl children, then aged six to twenty? She did indeed. My mother was almost smotheringly overprotective until it came to travel. I don’t remember her ever discouraging any of us from venturing out into the wild unknown, from sailing races across the Gulf of Mexico to a summer job in NYC. I remember the thrill of standing on the top level of the airport parking garage, watching my sister’s KLM flight race down the runway and lift off into the night (different times, y’all), headed for Europe on a choir trip. Only once my sister had escaped terra firma did my mother allow herself to cry.

I only remember snippets of my first trip to New Orleans. It was the first time I recall being aware of travel, of being someplace that definitely was not home. In memory, it is night and we are on Bourbon Street. I am fascinated by the posters of pretty ladies in skimpy, sparkly outfits. (That would be Burlesque, darling, you’re not there yet.) None of the establishments will allow us inside, obviously, but these are the early days of the “passing parade” with doors thrown open to entice those walking by. We come across a bar that is screening black & white movies with the sound off. Marx Brothers, Laurel & Hardy, some kind of slapstick that entertains a babe in Gomorrah. It’s a separate room from the main bar, just tables and chairs, and empty except for us. Those huge floor-to-ceiling doors are wide open on adjacent sides and it is the most amazing environment. To this day, that is my preferred aesthetic.

Sadly, it didn’t take the proprietors long to get hip to our tricks and kick us out. Back at the hotel, the matriarchal eldresses taught me to pantomime drunkenly mimicking something Groucho Marx would have slurred, “That’s alright buddy, I’ve been kicked out of better joints than this!” I perfect my line, throwing myself into bed as final punctuation, and we fall apart in hilarity. The first, and the perfect, girls’ trip. New Orleans is in my heart and soul from that moment forward and I have loved her ever since.