New Orleans: Thursday through Saturday

The house-gutting crew, with the house in the background.

Ahhhh afternoon off...ish.  So instead of starting my research paper, doing my laundry, practicing, packing for my weekend away, studying for my Music History exam or starting my Orchestration project, I'm going to finish writing about New Orleans. Let's face it, this is much more fun, and I've been putting it off longer than anything else on that list.

So where did I leave off? I believe my last entry dealt with Wednesday night, two hours of trying to get food, me yelling a few times and finally delicious Mexican eats.

Thursday:

To be honest, I barely remember Thursday, at least the daytime part of it.  I'm pretty sure that I just gutted all day. I know if that was the case, I was exhausted by the end of it, which is probably why all the details are fuzzy. It probably doesn't help that I ate vegetables dipped in peanut butter every single day that week for lunch.

After our work day, though, we went out to a gumbo place...I can't remember the name.  Gumbo something. But if you ever get the chance to taste New Orleans gumbo, and you don't take it, you have failed as a human  being. 

Then the drama started. I believe this was on gift shop number 85 for the week. Well, a few of us wanted to go to historic Preservation Hall on the last night of the trip.  Well, really just any night but it seemed to work best on Friday. The goal was to see live jazz music being played because, let's face it, we were in New Orleans. To help people rebuild is great, but it seems strange to do so while shunning a vital piece of their culture. One person was even rumored to have said, "You can see jazz in Albany!" Our response: ".........."

So that, combined with a rather inappropriate reaction on my part made for a shittily interesting night.

Friday: 

The last day of work. Woot! In the morning, I began gutting. I was also in an incredibly bad mood from the night before, so when my crowbar disappeared, I went to painting. (I had had enough gutting at that point anyway, and welcomed the break.) After painting for an hour or so, we were beginning to run out of things to paint. (Lack of available work was the theme that week.) So I gave piggy-back rides to kindergartners instead. Every time I would go to put one down, two more were waiting to climb up. 

Just after lunch, and after playing with the kids some more, Sydney and Esteban, whose father is Spanish, came to drop off some crawfish for us. I had never eaten crawfish before. She laid a giant box of them out on a table for both groups that were working at the school. So the way to eat crawfish is to tear them in half, then suck the juice out of their body and eat the meat from the tail. They were delicious, but after a little while, the whole 'sucking the gut juice from the body of a shell fish' got to me, just as it used to when I would eat whole mussels. I stuck to the tails briefly before just ending my crawfish consumption.

After lunch, we went back to gutting, for a few more exhausting hours. By the end of the day, it was impossible to even lift the crowbar any more. I had one section of wall above a window and one section that went to the next adjoining wall, and only the top part of it. So maybe 4 feet by 5 or 6 feet of wall left to rip down. But I honestly couldn't move any more. I was more drained than I think I have ever been in my life. But then, and I do realize how cheesy this sounds, I would think about the students of the school, about giving them piggy back rides and tutoring them in English, about the stories they told of what their families went through during and after the storm, about the teddy bear that we found in the house, the cafeteria ladies who fed us, watching the principal play basketball with fourth graders and on and on and on. Reminder: I know how cheesy this is, but thinking about all of that gave me more energy than I had at the beginning of the day. I quite literally attacked the wall with all my (considerably limited) strength and when I stopped, I was panting. I would see another image and attack it all over again. This kept me going until the wall was done. When it was finished, I went outside and took my gear off--hard hat, goggles, face mask and gloves--and sat on the steps, trying not to break down. For the next fifteen minutes, I barely kept it together, spoke to almost no one and just carried some of our equipment back to the Pod. We got everything put away and took some pictures of the group in front of the school. (This picture was framed by Heath, our chaperone, who gave us each a copy during the NOLA reunion dinner last week.)

After returning to the B&B, Sydney stopped by with food for us: roasted chicken salad and other items put out buffet style. I helped by tearing about the chicken for the salad. One girl, Brittany, helped by tearing the bread because Sydney had a superstition about bread that'd been sliced. Liz, the student leader, helped by feeding Esteban oranges that apparently suffice as substitutes for his mother's quite busy nipples. It was weird. So I went back out to the group and interrupted the conversation to do impressions of Sydney. Then I showered. May I just opine that showers after long days of house-gutting in New Orleans are truly heavenly experiences?

So anyway, after dinner, four of us went to Preservation Hall to see the Jazzmasters. I'm seriously considering devoting an entirely new post to this because it was so epic. But I won't because you're kind enough to have even read this far. The group was made up of trumpet/vocals (bandleader), tenor sax, trombone, piano, bass and drums. In one tune each set, everyone traded solos; the rest of the time, it was mostly winds and sometimes piano. I can't even describe in text some of the things they pulled off. Maybe I'll make a video blog about it. That'd be fun.

After the concert, we once again basically went straight to bed. We needed to be up early to catch our flight back to Albany.

Saturday: 

Other than getting up at like 5am or some other non-existent hour, the flight back went much smoother than the flight there. We flew through Dulles Airport in D.C., which has a delightful sandwich shop and almost enough Starbucks shops to satisfy my withdrawals. After landing in Albany, I was dropped off close to my house, said goodbye, and went to rehearsal with my brass quintet. I've barely stopped since.

So there is the rest of my trip. I hope you enjoyed. I certainly love having it done so that now I can go back to writing about political stuff, boys, fruit flies, music and my favorite topic: nothing. Within the week, an album will be available at Flickr or Photobucket. 

Cheers!