SFBAYou.com
Providing Cajun & Zydeco information on the Web since 1995
©Andrea D. Rubinstein, 1995-2007
Visit my new Amazon Store for Cajun, Creole & Zydeco music, book & video recommendations (and help support this website).
Bay Area Calendar
(maintained by Ellen Papper)
This website is created and maintained by Andrea Rubinstein.
I've been taking Juice Plus+ since 1996.
|
SFBAYou WebSite Design Services and Consulting for Cajun & Zydeco websites |
Subject: Hurricane Katrina / Geno Delafose
Hello,
Geno Delafose, his band French Rockin' Boogie, and all of here at
Ritmo Artists want to thank all of you who have contacted us over the
past few days offering help and wanting information on how Geno and
his family have faired during this tragic situation now facing
Louisiana and the Gulf Coast in general.
The good news is that Geno, the band, and their families are all safe
and sound, the storm having placed the brunt of its fury into the New
Orleans area and points Eastward.
Geno's brother Tony, who lives in New Orleans, was able to get his
family evacuated prior to the storm and they are safe in Eunice,
Louisiana at the home of Geno's mother JoAnne. The fate of Tony's
New Orleans home remains unknown, but with the current state in
affairs, everyone is thankful just to be outside of the city and out
of harms way.
We are in the planning stages for a benefit show to aid those
affected by this heartbreaking tragedy, and details of that event
will be announced soon.
In the meantime, we urge all of you to make a donation, earmarked for
Hurricane Katrina Relief, to an appropriate aid organization of your
choice. A few reputable charities include:
http://www.americares.org/
http://www.redcross.org/
I include below a moving essay from our dear friend Michael
Tisserand, who is author of the fantastic "Kingdom of Zydeco" book
and the managing editor of New Orleans' weekly Gambit Magazine. It
is a heartfelt and personal piece on leaving behind the city that he
and his family have called home.
Looking forward to better times ahead.....
Best Regards,
David Gaar
Ritmo Artists
Box 684705 - Austin, TX 78768
Phone: 512-447-5661 / Fax: 512-447-5886
E-Mail:
david@ritmoartists.com
Web:
www.ritmoartists.com
------------------------------
Submerged
By Michael Tisserand (Staff)
"Some people got lost in the flood, some people got away alright." --
Randy Newman, "Louisiana 1927"
New Orleans is gone.
I left it behind me on Saturday, with my two kids in the backseat,
the soundtrack to Shrek on the CD player. My wife, a pediatrician,
was on call for the weekend and stayed behind. She joined us in a
town just outside Lafayette, La., Sunday evening after a harrowing
odyssey along the southern route of Highway 90, driving without her
glasses or a cell phone, our three cats roaming in the back of a
shaky Volvo.
Together that night, we watched the same show that all who'd gotten
out were watching. The straight line for our city. The familiar "Cat-
4" and "Cat-5." And for those of us who thought we'd seen this
before, the much-hoped-for right turn.
It didn't matter. It hit.
Even those who could read the tea leaves in John McPhee's Forces of
Nature or John Barry's Rising Tide, or who had seen the diagrams of a
bowl-shaped city, are in disbelief.
New Orleans is gone, along with the newspaper where I work, the home
where I live, my kids' beloved school, my neighborhood sno-ball
stand, my neighborhood anything.
On The Times-Picayune's Web site and on cable news, I see my former
home's dark and distorted reflection: submerged rooftops; a battered
Superdome filled with the desperate; looters grabbing guns and VCRs
and racks of shirts; a mob storming Children's Hospital; a house
scrawled in red with "diabetic inside"; the breach in the levee.
The future is recited: a bowl of toxic stew. The gas, the sewage, the
dead.
On the local news shows in south Louisiana, the crawl beneath the
picture lists statewide evacuation centers in Rayne and Opelousas,
and announces that "Evacuees in need of dialysis should call ..."
Above these details are shots of aerial superheroes in short red
jumpsuits or head-to-toe military green, alighting on rooftops and
loading old women and little boys in wire baskets for their ride out.
Scan along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and it's tragedy and timber. A
man holds his two boys. "I can't find my wife,"he tells the
reporter. "Our house split in two."
This is all via TV. Direct information is harder to come by. Cell
phones aren't working; contact with others is haphazard. I haven't
been able to talk with my publisher yet. But this morning, my wife
reached her boss. This is a man who embodies the New Orleans
peculiarly dark joie de vivre to such an extent that he dressed as
the tsunami for this year's Mardi Gras.
On the phone, he was blunt. "I don't know if we're going to have a
practice to come back to," he said. "What families will return to the
city with their children?"
*******
Other cities are mightier. Los Angeles, Chicago, New York. But New
Orleans is where I wanted to make my home.
I first hitchhiked to the city as a college dropout who wanted to
hear jazz and see Mardi Gras. The ride I got was with a preacher who
warned me about sin and temptation. Just like every drunk tourist on
Bourbon Street, that's exactly what I was looking for.
Soon after, I heard zydeco and followed the blast of brass bands on
the streets, and started writing about musicians who seemed like
magicians, the way they could conjure a mood. I even covered
Hurricane Andrew, drove straight toward it, fueled by recklessness
and a USA Today day rate.
For the past 20 years, I have moved in and out of New Orleans. This
last time, the roots buried deep: job, house, family, school. Early
notions of the city of good times were tempered by the closer looks
at poverty, illiteracy and crime I obtained as editor of the city's
alternative weekly.
Being a parent in the public school system brought me even closer.
Long before the rain started, New Orleans was a troubled city.
But it's still the hallowed ground of Jelly Roll Morton and Louis
Armstrong, of Mardi Gras and jazz funerals that send off the dead
with "Didn't He Ramble?" Of lesser-known purveyors of high spirits
in bleak houses. I love New Orleans more than I've ever loved a
particular place.
Most recently, I loved my neighborhood. Every morning, friends passed
by our corner on their way to school. We'd hurry up tying our shoes
to join them.
Of the thousands who evacuated to the towns surrounding Lafayette, a
handful are from my street. We fled on the buddy system and hooked up
when we got here. We've met for pizza and seen ourselves in each
other, and we've drawn some comfort from that.
Now, as the TV news reports rising floodwaters and worse, it is
becoming more difficult to speak to each other about our plans and
how long we can hold on.
*******
I haven't told you about Katy Reckdahl.
She's a staff writer I hired a couple years back, and she writes
about the hardest-hit citizens of New Orleans, including those who
put themselves on the trigger side of a gun. She cares about all
kinds of people. She knows this city better than most, and I am
better for having worked with her.
On Saturday, when I was driving my kids out, she was having her first
child, a boy, in Touro Infirmary. Last I heard, they were moving
people from floor to floor in Touro, and will now be evacuating them,
along with others stranded in hospitals with no air conditioning and
sealed windows, generators running out of gas.
Where is Katy?
At The Times-Picayune's Web site, stories like mine pile on top of
each other. Looking for grandfather. Want to hear from my friend.
What do you know?
It's harder to access pleas that aren't online.
Meanwhile, the TV stations traffic in comparisons: a war zone,
Hiroshima, the tsunami, a third-world refugee camp, 9/11.
I try not to think like that, but Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads
keep coming to mind. He wrote them about another time when the
forces of man and nature sent refugees into America:
"So long, it's been good to know you."
As I write, what's left of New Orleans is being swallowed up. Gov.
Kathleen Blanco -- whose maternal concern has helped me through each
day -- is removing the last of us from the flooding city. The next
journey belongs to the tens of thousands in the Superdome, now on to
the Astrodome in a fleet of buses.
A couple hundred miles away, we have new household decisions to make.
"I'm getting pretty bored of not having school," my 7-year-old
daughter announced today. A week ago, her life was filled with first-
day-of-school excitement. Now, there's maybe a Catholic girl's
academy. The public schools are also taking in the children of New
Orleans. My wife returned from a registration session, speaking
through tears about the warmth and efficiency.
We're staying with friends who just keep saying "as long as it
takes." Last night, one of their neighbors showed up with smothered
steak, rice and gravy, cabbage and sausage, and bread pudding.
Another showed up with margaritas.
Decisions. Maybe we'll call my daughter's first-grade teacher, who
evacuated to a nearby town, and we'll set up a home school.
The Saturday we left, my daughter was in his classroom a block up the
street, playing on the computers while he put together lesson
plans. "I want to go to Mr.
Reynaud's," she'd beg every week until we relented. That's one of
those memories that seems untraceable now.
It leads nowhere.
I also have a 4-year-old son. Last night, we were unfolding our hide-
a-bed and putting blankets on the floor. "Did you see this?" my wife
said, holding a book he'd made last month, before this hurricane had
begun to form. He had drawn the pictures and recited the story, and
my wife had taken his dictation.
It was titled "Miles and the Sun!" and it goes like this:
"One spring day, Miles came out of his house in New Orleans. The sun
was happy to see Miles. The sun was wearing sunglasses. Miles moved
to his new house and the sun got very very hot. Now it was even
hotter! A fearful wild storm came with lots of monsters. Luckily
Miles wasn't in it. The water splashed all over it."
The drawing for that last page was all deep, hard-pressed scribbles.
Last night, he sat on my lap and looked at the TV and the people
walking through the water. "Are those the people who didn't
evacuate?" he asked, carefully enunciating his new word.
New Orleans is gone and I can't say when it will come back. My
neighborhood, my job, all of it might somehow return.
Yet I don't know what a rebuilt New Orleans will look like and I
don't know if I'll be there for it.
For now, we're living on the generosity of others.
That's what it's like to be a refugee. You never know what's n
