Krewes of Freret & Themis Parades 2023

Krewe of Freret is one of my favorites of the season. The original Krewe paraded for 40 years until the 90’s. In 2011, some children of the previous membership and others gave the parade a reboot. The addition of Grammy-winner Trombone Shorty’s float with the super-long trombone prop has given the ever-evolving parade new continuity. His cover of Ernie K-Doe’s Here Come the Girls was playing as he rode past, throwing goodies to the crowd.

TV in New Orleans

There’s a lot of talk about all the movies filming in New Orleans but Louisiana is also home to many television shows from A&E’s Duck Dynasty to the CW’s Star-Crossed. This Sunday, HBO’s Treme returns for its 4th and final season. I have been blogging about the show since its inception in April 2010 when I first watched it playing on a bed sheet in a back yard in the Treme. We all squealed when we saw the very house we were sitting behind fly across the “screen” in an early scene. It was clear from the opening credits that this show would be for and about New Orleanians and their amazing resilience and unendurable trials after Katrina.

NOLA in a Week (Mom’s Visit)

There’s nothing like having a visitor to push you to take advantage of the city as much as possible in a week. My mom  and stepdad came to town and we went to 2 festivals, a number of concerts, a bunch of restaurants and plenty of cool shops. We even visited the set of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. If you’re planning to visit New Orleans or if you’re a New Orleanian looking for some ideas of how to entertain your guests, here are some highlights from our week.

St. Louis Cemetery #1 and Armstrong Park

I’ve spent most of my life in D.C., New York and L.A. That is to say, I’ve spent most of my life in tourist destinations, stuck in traffic behind someone with a map and sharing sidewalks with people looking up and pointing. New Orleans is yet another of these many destinations, a magical and historical place that attracts people from all over the world. Before I left the East Coast, I made a serious effort to enjoy the attractions people came from far and wide to see. I went to monuments and museums. Instead of seeing them through the eyes of a kid who’d “been there, done that” since my many elementary school field trips, I pretended I was from Nebraska and seeing it all for the first time.

Favorite Things in NOLA 2011

I continue to accumulate favorite things about New Orleans, but here’s my second year favorites in a nutshell. Anything named previously in my Favorite Things in NOLA 2010 is marked with an Asterix*. Though there are too many “ties,” revealing an inability to “just pick one,” I promise you there were so many more things I wanted to include, so many more people and places I felt deserved mentioning.

a French Quarter apartment hunt

When I was sitting on my couch in L.A. planning to move to New Orleans, I was open to many experiences of this city. I looked at a home in Mid-City, a neighborhood shifting identities in the last few years. I liked the idea of living across the street from City Park, home to an art museum, botanical garden, sculpture garden, a golf course and on and on and one of my favorite places in the city, the Singing Oak (which I call the Bing Bong Tree).