Gretna Heritage Festival

A couple of weeks ago we decided on a whim to go to the Gretna Heritage festival across the river. We ended up liking it so much we went back the next day! What a great event for children. Adults were $15 at the gate, kids were free. Large selection of food of course, and a minimum of five stages with live music ranging from cajun to classic rock. Plenty of room to dance, which my children love to do. We manage a combination of swing and ring-around-the-rosie that can clear the dance floor.

Our favorite area was the festival's version of Little Italy. Non-stop "mob hits" and the largest oysters I have ever seen - what's not to love? And as an added bonus the Mardi Gras Indians paraded through. Just to remind everyone that we were not, in fact, in Italy.

Our second favorite area was the levee. A stage on either side provided musical backdrop to my children's death-defying slides down to the bottom on squares of cardboard left by other slightly more enterprizing kids (until they found the cardboard they had to make do with simply rolling down the levee. Always a classic but less of a thrill than the cardboard box toboggan). The levee almost made the amusement park midway rides slightly less exciting. Almost.

Cats and kids

Apparently dry cleaning bags are comfy

There are SO many feral cats in Uptown New Orleans. Apparently many were lost or abandoned after Katrina. And our warm climate means they can have more litters than in areas where they have to hunker down for the winter. So the result is that we have approximately 7 gazillion cats running around. The streets around our house are particularly cat-heavy, due to the sweet but misguided old lady a few houses down who feeds them. It's both a scary and hilarious sight, seeing 30 cats swarming around her driveway, with empty cat food cans lying around. Very Grey Gardens. Come to think of it, I would love to see the inside of her giant house. Or maybe that's a bad idea.

An unadulterated NOLA pumpkin

There are some very good things about the cats. I have never seen a rat outside our house (which is saying something given that New Orleans lies between a lake and a river). And the squirrels wisely stick to trees and power lines, which means they do NOT bore large holes in our Halloween pumpkins as they ceremoniously did every October when we lived in the northeast. Here you can actually put out pumpkins for weeks without worry, unless you live near mischievous middle-schoolers who feel compelled to smash them. So wild cats actually help our Halloween. Kind of fitting.


We have a family of cats under our house. (I know we need to catch them and have them spayed but with three small kids that project just stays low on the list.) Two beautiful black cats occupy the front yard and a mother cat inhabits the back. A few months ago my 7 year old came into the house holding a small calico kitten in her arms that ended up joining our family. Perhaps this was not the greatest idea, because the kids now look at every stray kitten as an opportunity to obtain more inside cats (we have three - two too many for me, because of course I am the one scooping the litter box three times a day). But it's magical for them: walking outside in the morning and seeing the front yard come to life with the scattering of cats. And I get it. I do. I just feel guilty that I haven't gotten them spayed and done my duty as a responsible resident of the Crescent City Feral Cat Colony.

One of many feral kittens

Kitten rescued by 7 year old

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Driving to school, or Frogger Revisited

We moved here from a very lovely suburb in the northeast. It was very lovely and very sterile and the local paper was filled with letters to the editor about whether or not the bras on the Victoria's Secret window models were appropriate for children to see. I don't mean to run it down, it just wasn't for me.

Driving the kids to school in the suburbs was a quick and uneventful process. Driving kids to school in Uptown New Orleans is something altogether different. It is a very short trip - maybe a mile - which we should walk except for the fact that we are lazy AND running late every morning. So we drive.

Traveling down Broadway is a visual United Nations of sorts. We see Orthodox Jews in black hats, Muslims in white hats, half-dressed college kids, Catholic schoolgirls, a drunk man leaning against The Boot bar (no one is fazed that it is Monday morning at 8 am - the Saints lost yesterday and he probably needed to blot out the memory), and a smattering of hippies both young and old.

The trip always changes. That is because New Orleans seems to have no rules about who can put up a "Road Closed" sign for any given block. Sometimes it is city construction, sometimes it is local construction, sometimes it is a block party, and sometimes there seems to be no reason at all. Maybe people wanted to preserve their parking spaces. Anyway, it's impossible to predict which roads will be open, so it's always an adventure finding a way to the school. Inching the minivan through European-narrow streets (one way of course) with gargantuan potholes is challenging at best. Add to that darting bicyclists (who I concede are smarter than I am with their chosen vehicles in this area) and you have a much more exciting video game than Atari ever put out.

This morning I finally got them at school and as I was driving away I noticed my 7 year old running at top speed down the block AWAY from the school. I stopped to yell out to her and was waved forward by a harried parent volunteer. "Move along - we'll catch her!" Torn between two critical parental duties (save child vs. don't block the carpool lane) I went ahead. By the time I made it around the block again to check on her, everyone was gone. Did they catch her? Did she turn around? Where the hell was she going anyway?? Is she still running around Uptown New Orleans? These mysteries will hopefully be solved at 3:15 this afternoon when I hope to God she's there at pick up.

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What are Hucklebucks?

I'm not even sure if anyone outside of the three street area where I grew up in New Orleans even knows what Hucklebucks are, or at least defines them in the same way I do. It might be a city-wide thing - like Cabbageball (which I didn't know until I was 36 that it was only a New Orleans sport!) or it might be something that one little old lady invented that went on to define my childhood. Anyway, Hucklebucks were pretty simple - a paper cup filled with frozen concentrated fruit juice, which sort of makes it a popsicle in a paper cup, but for some reason was more exciting that a popsicle. The way to eat one was to pop the frozen treat upside down and then peel the top of the the paper cup so the treat was accessible and keep peeling as you ate the Hucklebuck. Not much to it, except for the fact that the only place to get it was the old lady's house 7 blocks away. You knocked on her door, gave her a dime, and the Hucklebuck was all yours. She was known as, of course, the Hucklebuck Lady. Every kid on Bellaire Drive knew where she lived. The funniest part now is how little our parents cared about the safety of this woman. Did they even know her? Did they even know OF her? We didn't ask. In our world, what our parents thought of the Hucklebuck Lady was not exactly relevant. What was relevant was that we be home by dusk.