Home of the Blues

 “New Orleans is an awe-inspiring mixture of joy, revelry, and sadness.”

That’s the expression I used to describe to family and friends the overwhelming mixture of feelings I experienced as I made my way around “still recovering” New Orleans, Louisiana, following last week’s Walt Disney Company stockholders’ meeting held in that city’s Ernst N. Morial Convention Center.

Disney’s annual meeting lasted only a few hours. The demands of running a multibillion dollar corporation required the great majority of Disney personnel who came to New Orleans for the meeting to head back to their jobs after spending less than 48 hours in the city. And yet, of the dozens of people I spoke with during my two and a half-day postmeeting visit, I never met a soul who wasn’t aware of the Disney meeting or failed to express their joy and gratitude that Mickey came to town.

No place was this message driven home more clearly to me than in one of the flood-ravaged neighborhoods to the north of downtown.

This was my second visit to a Katrina ravaged part of the country. Less than a year ago, during a trip east for a family wedding, my brothers and I toured the still devastated Gulf Coast around Biloxi, Mississippi. Now, as then, I once again experienced the complete failure of the English language to be able to come up with terms equal to the sights being seared into my soul.

Camera at my side, I found there was no lens wide enough, no vantage point high enough to convey the image of hundreds upon hundreds of square blocks of ruined and abandoned homes. The only major difference between the sights I saw during this first full week of March 2007 and those broadcast around the world following the recession of the floodwaters that wreaked this havoc in the fall of 2005 was that the majority of residences lifted from foundations that came to rest in the streets or on other homes have, as one resident put it, “finally been cleared away.” In their place, random, orderly, piles of debris or vacant lots scoured to street level.

I drove down a Live Oak tree-lined street of mid ‘60s suburban starter homes, not at all unlike the neighborhood of starter homes in which I live in Los Angeles. The eight-block long stretch of what was obviously once a well cared for community of lawns, gardens, and homes was now nearly devoid of human activity. Only three of the more than 100 homes I passed showed any signs of being restored.

Over 18 months after Katrina made landfall thousands of New Orleans residents are still living in “temporary” emergency housing.
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At the end of the street, in the front yard of the very last house on the eastern side of the street, sat a FEMA trailer, exactly like the thousands of such trailers I’d seen last year in Biloxi. Between the trailer and the driveway, proudly sticking up through the tall dark green Louisiana weeds that were trying to reclaim large swaths of the neighborhood, stood a sign that defiantly read:

I AM COMING HOME!
I WILL REBUILD!
I AM NEW ORLEANS!

The sign also bore the name of a bank, probably the one the owner was borrowing the money to rebuild from, but it didn’t matter. In its lone defiance, this sign, and the homeowner who placed it there, called out for recognition.

I parked my rental car, got out—camera around my neck—walked past the sign down the short driveway, and asked a large burly man standing between the FEMA trailer and the gutted house if I might take his picture standing beside the sign.

“This isn’t my house,” the man explained. “It belongs to my cousin. She’s in the trailer.”

With that, the man, whose name I never got, stuck his head in the trailer to tell his cousin she had a visitor, “a reporter or something from Los Angeles.”

When he emerged, he motioned for me to go up the short flight of stairs to the trailer. As it turned out, his cousin, Miss Shirley, was not feeling well that day.

As I approached the door of the trailer, which couldn’t have been more than twenty or twenty-five feet in length, I could instantly see a tall handsome woman in her sixties stretched out on a bed that was nearly as wide as the room it was in.

Miss Shirley looked tired and weary. She apologized for not getting up and, seemingly sensing my uneasiness over having intruded upon her rest, went out of her way to tell me she simply was not feeling well, and that she wasn’t in any way seriously ill.

I introduced myself and told Miss Shirley that I was a writer from Los Angeles, in town to cover the Walt Disney Company’s annual stockholder’s meeting.

“Yes, I heard about it on the TV,” Miss Shirley told me. “And I want to thank ya’ll for coming here. It means a lot to us.”

I was dumbfounded, so much so I couldn’t figure out how to tell her I was not with the Disney Company.

Her home in ruins, her life compacted into the soulless confines of a tiny, aluminum box, and nowhere near feeling her best, the most important thing in this woman’s life at that moment was to make sure the people of a giant American corporation knew that she and her fellow citizens appreciated their coming to her hometown.

Miss Shirley told me to take all the pictures I wanted. “Please, just don’t take none of me; I don’t hardly look my best,” she said.

I thanked Miss Shirley for her permission to photograph her trailer and sign, promised not to take her picture, wished her a speedy and full recovery from her illness, and said goodbye.

In neighborhoods throughout the city random piles of debris dot the streets of New Orleans.
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Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez—Let the Good Times Roll

My visit with Miss Shirley was the first time that, through me, a citizen of New Orleans expressed thanks to the Walt Disney Company for bringing its annual meeting to the city. It was by no means the last.

Virtually every desk clerk, maître d', waiter, bartender—I met quite a few of those—street busker, and store clerk I spoke with wanted to know where I was from and how I came to be in town. When I told them, without exception they thanked me for supporting New Orleans by coming to town, and they asked me to thank the Disney Company as well.

After being introduced by friends from Atlanta to several new friends in New Orleans, I asked my unofficial hosts why so many people felt it necessary to express their gratitude to total strangers. Adam, a consulate attaché, told me that people still want to know what they can do to help.

“I know it sounds crass,” Adam said, “but coming to town to have a good time, spending money here, is the best way [now] people can help.”

He went on to say how New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin received a great deal of criticism for concentrating on downtown businesses during the early days of the city’s recovery. “But those businesses were hotels, restaurants, and bars, all things that bring money in from outside the city and state. And given how poor help’s been from the Federal government, those funds are a real blessing.” Adam said.

“We want people to come back to New Orleans and have a good time,” said Ray, whose wind damaged classic “shotgun” Garden District home is just now completing its restoration. “New Orleans is not dead. It’s not dying, and we need as many people as possible to spread the word.”

During my days and nights in the French Quarter, I can say without fear of contradiction that the heart of the city is very much alive and open for business. Two words you’ll never hear in New Orleans are “last call.” This is not to say that first-time and returning visitors might not experience a few minor inconveniences.

Street buskers have returned and just as their Disneyland counterparts do these comic professionals invite members of their audience to join in on the act.
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There’s a real shortage of livable housing in and around New Orleans, which has a negative impact on many industries, including the service industry. There are still random shortages of various commodities, which can lead to some surprises in the way things are priced: booze is cheap and a breakfast of bacon and eggs at a neighborhood diner is about 20% higher than it is in L.A.

Additionally, an abundance of vacant storefronts downtown and in the French Quarter has led a city eager to collect license fees and sales tax to permit an explosion in cheap tacky T-shirt and souvenir shops, all of which seem to carry the exact same merchandise.

Those things not withstanding, the streets downtown, those not under repair, were crawling with smiling, carefree “visitors,” remarkably clean, and well lit. Despite the fact that New Orleans currently has one of the highest rates of violent crime in the nation, I never felt threatened or in any way in danger, and would often walk, late at night, the ten blocks between my hotel in Lee Circle and the French Quarter. Okay, maybe that wasn’t the smartest thing in the world to do.

The bottom line is that not only is New Orleans open for business, it’s brimming with vitality and life, even if much of that vitality is 80 proof.

The good times rolled March 10 on New Orleans fabled Bourbon St. for this year’s Saint Joseph’s parade.
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At first, I didn’t really want to go to New Orleans. Not yet, anyway. To be honest, I was afraid of feeling guilty about having a good time while so many around me would still be suffering. I didn’t want to be overtaken by sadness and hopelessness—and then I met Miss Shirley.

When I had left Miss Shirley’s side, I turned, walked down the small flight of stairs to her trailer, and despite the warm temperatures felt cold and nearly empty inside. I was overwhelmed by a sense of having my worst fears about visiting Katrina-ravaged New Orleans come true. But even as those feelings began to rise in me, they were quickly assuaged by a feeling of hopefulness that could only have come from Miss Shirley having shared with me her positive outlook on a life that had done her so wrong.

And, as I promised, on behalf of the city and people of New Orleans, Louisiana, to John Pepper, Bob Iger, Zenia Mucha, Jay Rasulo—who first suggested Disney hold its annual meeting in New Orleans—Disney workers, and shareholders worldwide, thank you for believing in the Big Easy!

C’ya real soon

Café Du Monde the home of café au lait and world famous powered sugar drenched beignets.
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