Activity: Midnight pallet heist and garbage rummage

Difficulty Rating: 10 for sweat!

Katie recently moved into a new place and needs a bunch of furniture. “Who is Katie?” I hear you ask, because you know all the regular characters in my blog (including American Husband, Good Dog, Bad Dog and Em.) Katie is a fine society lady with a passion for adventure who can be talked into a midnight crime spree with a little beer and encouragement. Katie needed a bunch of new furniture and my stingey side needed to do something free so we combined our interests and went on a midnight lumber hunt around the city.

Our first stop was a pile of wood scraps beside a skip that I had spotted a few days earlier while doing important snooping. We managed to load what I think was a whole dismantled wooden bed frame into her boot before driving off, high-fiving and cackling. We pulled over a little further up the road and liberated some louvered doors from a smelly bin. Katie slammed on the brakes and almost leapt on a pile of beams before we realized we were on a construction site. The frenzy of rubbish-bin theft was making us giddy and senseless.

Eventually we found the jackpot. A huge, gorgeous, pristine pallet hiding under an old door and a pile of broken glass. It was every little girl’s dream. We tried to load it into the back of the car, but it was too wide every way we shoved it. There was no other option. Using a cunning combination of hammering, yanking and giggling we managed to break that pallet down in the middle of the street, to a pile of wooden splinters with rusty nails on the ends. We were as stealthy as raccoons and as quiet as night bats. At one point a passing crackhead asked us if we were robbers – which is a question I’ve oddly never felt the need to ask someone in the middle of a robbery – but it turned out OK because he was apparently a robber too. He was going from house to house pulling on doorknobs to see if anyone left them open. After we’d stuffed the trunk with wood, Katie doubled the car back to spy on him because by now she had become a conflicted woodland vigilante. Either he’d gone home or broken into one of the places because he wasn’t on the street anymore.

Proud of our hard-won bounty, we spent the rest of the night on Katie’s porch hammering nails out and sanding planks. I was very glad that we had liberated so much lumber from a slow death in a garbage dump and excited that we had become the Thelma and Louise of carpentry.

Here’s a picture of our ill-gotten gains.

Activity: Audobon park labyrinth

Difficulty Rating: Easy serenity, some dizziness

When I imagine a labyrinth I picture either this:

or this.

Either way there should be terrors, puzzles and bulges of mythical proportion. I was somewhat dismayed to learn that the labyrinth in Audobon park had no walls or muppets or anything. The real puzzle was finding where it was inside park, but that was ok because the paths were broad, the woods there lush, the air was peaceful and there were swans, dogs, turtles and tiny gators to keep us entertained. I wanted a little drama in my labyrinth experience though, so I decided to be the Minotaur I wanted to see in the world.

My Dear Neighbour and I tracked the labyrinth to a calm, flat place behind some horsey stables. It had a huge plaque dedicating it to peaceful meditation and quiet reflection, so we bounced in and started running around.

Instead of a maze with lots of dead ends, the labyrinth was one long track which went around and around creating a pattern of doubling back until you had walked every inch of the stones and ended up in the middle. The pattern was based on another labyrinth in the Chatres Cathedral in France. (Monks love circles!) There was also a mini-labyrinth at the entrance which followed a pattern dating from 2000BC, which just goes to prove that the human race really has been going nowhere for 4000 years.

After walking for a few minutes the serenity and beauty of the place really became apparent and our excitement had turned into noble reverence. But that might also have been because the many twists and turns were making me a little dizzy, and nothing puts you in a reverent mood like mild nausea.

Here’s a picture of me being quiet and reverent inside a 4000 year old meditation pattern and a Minotaur hat.

Activity: Free food, free ice cream, free comedy

Difficulty Rating: Easy listening, hard to digest.

Just outside of the super famous, mega popular, face-punchingly quaint French Quarter there’s a suburb cluster of Marigny/Bywater. It’s “on the rise”, which in this case means that the muggers are fewer and the hipsters are more, but you still have a roughly equal chance of bumping into each. Every time I go I meet a selection of artistic types who carry their screenplays in one hand and their pepper spray in the other.

Saturday is free comedy night at the Allways Lounge. This venue has a similar vibe to The Butterfly Club in Melbourne where I cut my teeth as a young cabaret artiste, and I felt instantly at home from the moment I walked it. They specialize in indy burlesque, cabaret, drag and comedy which is a nice change from all the hyped-up jazz boys and loud cover bands in town. They were also offering free food and ice cream so that was a no-brainer for me.

It was an open mic night so as you’d expect the lineup was hit and miss, but there were enough gems in the mix to make it worthwhile. Each set was only 3.5 minutes so it kept the night rolling along briskly. I was excited that there were three whole ladies on, and they we’re all funny! Thanks, Amy Schumer! The style of New Orleans comedy seems to be a relaxed “I could’ve worn a nice shirt but I didn’t wanna” vibe. A lot of people were reading from books which was surprising considering the short spots, but I think people were also testing out new jokes and the book was a good prop to show that.

Now, while the bar was great and the comedy was lively, I can’t go further without airing a misery. The ice cream was terrible. It was “cream cheese” flavoured, which I didn’t even know was a flavour of ice cream. I didn’t even know it was a flavour of cream cheese because cream cheese doesn’t have a flavour. It tasted like someone was trying to make vanilla but forgot to add the vanilla. Maybe it would’ve been ok if there had been some chopped nuts or strawberries to add, but there was nothing, not even napkins so I got all sticky trying to eat it. I wasn’t sure if the company was trying to advertise their product or offload unwanted tubs that no one with a tongue would buy. There were big signs for the ice cream everywhere but they chose the least charismatic anti-flavour to showcase. I must say, I’m more inclined to avoid that brand now. I guess on Day Thirteen I can’t expect three lucky strikes.

Here’s a photo of the host on the fancy stage. The lens flare is protecting you from that ice cream.

Activity: Southern fried chicken!

Difficulty Rating: Sing for your supper

New Orleans is chock to the brim with musicians, as you’d expect. It’s one of the few cities left on the planet where live entertainment is genuinely valued, not just a definition for your 8-year-old niece’s agonizing “Carols in the Car Park” school fundraiser. I’m used to Melbourne where everyone agrees fervently that something must be done to support the arts, but that thing is definitely not getting off the couch on a cold night to go see some.

By contrast, New Orleans is living proof that if a city supports art, art can support a city. The low rent and high history of the area attracts musicians who wish to pay homage at the temples of their heroes, which in turn attracts patrons looking for live fun. Cafes all around the city will install a band to pump up sales and it always works because tourists want to see “a New Orleans band” and bring a CD home to their aunts.

Sometimes cafes can’t afford the going rate for a band though so they’ll strike some kind of deal with new artists or, in my case, migrants with limited visa privileges who aren’t allowed to earn money. I recently hooked up with a fantastic cafe who are making the leap from boring food and drink to awesome food and drink and music. It’s called Fiorella’s and it’s perfectly located close to the fresh Mississippi and far from the vomity Bourbon street. Their policy is to give food and drinks to anyone willing to busk at the cafe.

Now, I’m 3/4 vegetarian and I cut animal fats and sugar from everything I cook…. but I would crawl over a truck bed of starving babies for Fiorella’s chicken. This sounds like product placement but it’s true. The meat is hot and pink and the crust crackles under your teeth. It’s almost definitely made of layers of diabetes and chunks of heart attack. Technically I bartered for it rather than getting it for free, but I didn’t have to pay for the feeling of chickeny glory and the knowledge that I’d need to go for a few jogs this week.

Here’s a picture of Mike eating chicken. His reaction speaks for us both. I was gonna take a photo of my chicken but I accidentally ate it.

Activity: That thayr Bayou!

Difficulty Rating: 7 fer gators

I wasn’t quite sure what a Bayou was before I moved here, even though I grew up singing Born On The Bayou and Blue Bayou as a kid. I imagined it as a big wet swamp, and I was half right. A bayou is an ill-defined, sluggish tidal river system that drains water out of soggy marshlands. In Louisiana they were used as natural trade routes, man-made drains and places to park your houseboat. The bayou near my place, Bayou St John, is a kind of gentrified version of that. A polite concrete border has turned it into a contained waterfront for boating, with a weird blunt ending at Jefferson Davis Blvd. But there are parts of it that spill over into the grass and create that characteristic ragged marshy edge that I’ve come to know and love after looking it up a few minutes ago.

There’s a cool tree that someone has carved into a sculpture of birds and musical instruments, and a bridge that looks like it used to be old and industrial but has been repeatedly used by hipsters as a backdrop for photos of them not looking into the camera. There’s a lush bike path under the oak trees on one side, but if you cross the bridge and try to ride up the other, you get diverted through a rundown neighbourhood and a youth justice centre, whatever hellish institution that is.

The dead heat of summer has finally cracked here and the evenings are becoming more pleasant so I took my American Husband’s bike out for a ride. American Husband stayed home and ate cheese. The houses around the bayou are slightly nicer than the rest of the area because rich people like looking at land colliding with water. The bayou is home to stacks of ducks, frogs, turtles and I’ve been told gators, but I’ve never seen one myself. There must also be fish because there were old guys with fishing rods under the trees where the bayou curls up to meet lake Pontchartrain. But I’ve heard fishing is more about the serenity than the catch, so maybe they were hoping the stream was empty.

As I rode by, I saw a guy feeding bread to some ducks. He told me proudly that it wasn’t even day-old bread, but fresh bread he bought for the ducks. He wasn’t old enough for that to be his “whole thing” so I guess he was just a rich guy doing duck-feeding better than the rest of us. The ducks knew he was coming and they all waddled up onto the shore. After a minute I heard a watery plop and a little turtle came waddling up to get some bread too! The ducks fought the turtle but he got a nibble of bread and swam away again.

Here’s a picture of the ducks. The tiny black dot in the picture is the turtle swimming up adorably.