Let the Good Times Roll!

Last weekend, my husband Jimmy and I spent five days in New Orleans at the Tennessee Williams Festival. We live in the metro area of the Big Easy – north of Lake Pontchartrain, 20 minutes from the city over the causeway. But we stayed at the Royal Sonesta in the French Quarter, where the festival was headquartered because there are parties and plays and all kinds of things going on at night during the festival as well as daytime–music, plays, dress-ups at the New Orleans Historic Collection museum on Royal Street.

It was colder than usual, but beautiful sunshiny days. There were street musicians everywhere, so you almost had to dance down the street. Flowers, balloons, red and white lucky dog carts, crazy hats, mimes, weird costumes. A random food festival popped up all down Royal Street with booths and samplings from every great restaurant in town. We even have the coolest police station in the middle of the Quarter. It’s the only police station I’ve ever seen that has an outdoor cafe attached to it so you can rest and do some people watching, and blues drifting from a speaker in the courtyard, and sometimes BBQ’s and boiling pots of seafood outside!

Speaking of cool – for writers and non-writers, the Master Classes, panels and conversations were great. Eric Overmyer who’s now co-creator of an upcoming HBO series being filmed in New Orleans called Treme, gave one of the master classes on Friday and was all over the place.

Overmyer’s also an acclaimed writer for series like St. Elsewhere, Law & Order, The Wire, Crimal Intent, and has won the Peabody, Writers Guild, and Edgar awards for his screenwriting. Jill McCorkle gave one too, and Agent, Marly Rusoff, on making the deal. There were conversations with Dave Eggers, Cokie Roberts, Michael Lewis, John Patrick Shanley…and on and on. James Carville was on several panels. Did you know that a small town in Louisiana where patients with Hanson’s disease (Leprosy) were/are incarcerated for many years is named after his family? It’s a fascinating story, and a beautiful one.

There’s a small restaurant on Orleans Street called Orleans Grapevine that we love. You can sit outside and watch the world go by, or inside where the player piano jazzes things up. Orleans Street dead ends at Royal where the garden sits behind the St. Louis Cathedral. Pirate’s Alley is to the right. But right after Katrina, Jimmy and I discovered something beautiful had happened in that garden. The storm had taken out all the old beautiful trees, but, almost like a special message to the city, we found that lighting on a statue of Jesus which had always been in the garden now created a gigantic shadow of Christ, arms raised as if blessing the city, on the back walls of the Cathedral. The shadow hadn’t been visible before because of the trees! It’s a special sight and now people flock to see the shadow and take pictures.

Speaking of Pirate’s Alley, if you’re ever in New Orleans, don’t miss Faulkner Bookstore in the Alley. Stop in and say hello to Joe DeSalvo, bookman. This is where William Faulkner lived and wrote in New Orleans. Joe and his wife, Rosemary James, head up The Faulkner Literary Society and they hold great festival held in the fall every year. Right next door of the Faulkner House is a small cafe where you can sit outside on a good day and listen to the birds in the Cathedral garden and watch the world grow by. The Cathedral bells chime on the quarter hour – they’re so old you can tell the difference in the sound versus newer churches.

At the end of Pirate’s Alley is Jackson Square and that’s a major setting for my new book, to be released Summer of 2011, titled Dancing On Glass. Amalise Catoir, young law student, lives in the Quarter and is working her way through school by waitressing at the Pontalba Cafe right at the corner of the square. So Jimmy and I spent time there, sitting at a table in the corner. The cafe built hundreds of years ago is framed by shutter doors that open from floor to ceiling in nice weather. So we sat there for hours and watched the artists and clowns, the street musicians and fortune tellers and people and had a great time.

Maybe you’ve seen the “STELLA!” contest on television? It gets national press every year. The scene where Stanley shouts for Stella in Streetcar Named Desire is enacted at the end of the TWF every year on St. Peter Street between Jackson Square and the Pontalba Apartments. (The Pontalba Apartments are the oldest apartment buildings in the country, I believe). This contest is wild, just wild. The four runners-up finish the contest in La Petite Theater, one block away on St. Peter across from the Square. My favorite runner-up was a mime–he won by silently miming Stella! Another runner up: two guys, one shouting “Stell” and the other shouting “La”. When they finally got together it was pretty funny. The whole contest is open to the public, and afterward we all had Tea with Tennessee in the patio courtyard of the old theater.