Skip to main content

Bruce vs New Orleans

We didn't have all that great a time in Newahlins, it was February and cold and mostly rainy around St. Valentine's Day. Not all that impressed with Bourbon Street even with the Confederacy of Dunces ringing 'round my brain. The people seemed OK and we had a really short mass on Sunday with the back 2 pews full of sleeping bums. 

I was hunting up bookshops and we ended up between Jackson Square & Esplanade on Decatur Street. I think the first thing we noticed were the drink rails at just the right hight on all the posts along that section. There was a Margarittaville which, although cheesy, had the best bathrooms thusfar, but across the street I had noticed a kind of dutch-door open bar called Molly's and after visiting Central Grocery we made it back there and spent a couple of days hanging out. 

I remember sitting facing the street listening to the juke box and hearing a certain tune that just grabbed me -- Mary's from Jersey and I'm an 80's Springsteen fan -- but I'm not sure it clicked with either of us till ten minutes in or so. It was "New York Serenade" from his second album and I'd never really paid so much attention to it. 

Hell, I was seranading! The crowd was so cool, the afternoon had actually turned a kind of chilly but sunny wonderful hue. We met this wonderful gal named Natalie who was a nurse (I pray you're fine!!) who had had a few relationships with guys that had ended up with the guy telling her he discovered he was gay. And we met the current guy and could just tell it was gonna happen again. Anyways, the red-beans-and-rice place next door was amazing. The ambience was "Be Nice or Leave" and we ran into some of the same great folks there. I listen to that magically long Springsteen tune alot and just imagine myself there and the city back the way it was and hope it all ends up with the great people of New Orleans back home again.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Yale Shakespeare

I've had this set of Shakespeare volumes since the late 1980's. Super-portable at 7" by 4.5" with nice, readable font size. Well footnoted for vocabulary and extensive note apparatus at the end of each volume. I'm surprised there's not much more on this set than various auctions and used book listings — looks like they still fetch $80 for all 40 books. Mine is a printing from 1954 edited by Tucker Brooke I found this review of the series from when it first came out. Very critical, but wanted to capture it, since this has been my reference edition for over 30 years  

The New Jersey part of the Queen of Hearts passes

This was a really fun group of songwriters that used to frequent the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville. I first saw The Queen of Hearts at the late-lamented Swallow In The Hollow in Roswell. If you never got a chance to go, imagine a big rustic mountain cabin with pretty damn good BBQ and live music every night. Everybody in the band wrote songs and they would rotate who would lead and everybody else sang great harmony. BethAnne Clayton was the one from New Jersey and she passed 14 January 2020 at 54. Sounds like the rest of the band were able to gather around her in the hospital for a last round of singing together. I can only imagine the emotion that day. Here's how I found out about it: https://www.ellenbritton.com/blog/2020/2/14/in-memory-of-bethanne-clayton The band got together in 1999 and it doesn't look like much of anything made it into the new world of streaming but the two albums I have are: Queen of Hearts (2002) with stand-out songs "Treat Me Right" and "He

Another reason why Atlanta weather forecasts are inaccurate

This was in a long-gone 2005 blog by Jon Richards but it's still relevant: He explains why it didn't get as warm as it was supposed to earlier this week, and why it's so cold today Forecasts Get It Wrong Three Days In a Row For the last three days, the predicted high temperatures in metro Atlanta haven’t been what they were forecast to be. As detailed  here , Monday’s miss was caused by a slow moving warm front. On Tuesday, we were supposed to reach a high of 70 degrees, before retreating to a low in the lower sixties today. Instead, we had a high of 60 Tuesday, and broke 70 degrees for the first time this year on Wednesday. Tuesday’s colder than expected temperatures were caused by a combination of heavy fog in the morning and a mini wedge, where the colder air closer to the ground was overrun by the warmer air approaching from the southwest. Overnight Monday, the skies cleared, and due to Monday’s rain, fog developed close to the ground. As the warmer air approached Tuesd