Friday, November 7, 2003|
How did I miss this? She must have been one of the last and oldest liberals down here. Spreading the anti-Bush gospel after death. Cool. Keep on keepin' on, sister! 7:47:55 PM | 
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 Our tuba player's back! It's a terrible picture. Sorry. My dang digital camera takes FOREVER to turn on. Bah humbug!
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What a New Orleans day this has been. 4:32:49 PM | First there was the gun scare in my morning class. I walked into the room and a student from next door came in to tell me there was a man pacing the hallway with a gun trying to get into some of the locked classrooms and acting as if he were looking for someone in particular. When I asked her if she'd told an officer, she said no, that she'd only told me. Whaa?! Needless to say, I asked her for a description and went to find a cop. My most eager students suggested we suspend class (nothing to do with the fact that they had an essay due today, I'm sure). When I came back with a security guard, the young student said the guy had left the building and was driving off (or not -- the question of which one was him came up a few times. It's interesting how untrustworthy our observations can be.). The building was surrounded by officers, so we closed the door and started class. About 15 minutes later, a film studies professor came in to apologize -- seems the man with the gun was one of her students, and he had the gun for a scene they were filming that day. That he decided to walk around with it and act peculiar...go figure. I'm just glad that he wasn't hurt, a distinct possibility considering how many police officers were around. We had a good laugh in the class, even as everyone became that much more aware of our vulnerablility. In my afternoon class, a student came running in because she'd just seen a dead body being wheeled through the hallway. Seems the funerary services class around the corner was setting up just as she was walking to class. This reminded another student of the dead body she found on her front lawn on Mardi Gras day last year -- an overdose on the parade route. The police cordoned off her house with yellow tape, leaving it up for the hours and hours it took the coroner's office to come and collect the body. Her three young children were whisked out the back door to a neighbor's so they could avoid seeing the "sleeping" man. What a thing to wake up to! This morning, too, our voodoo neighbor came by to ask my roommate to move her car. He was dressed in a purple shirt, black pants, and purple and black snakeskin shoes. What a player! I met his priestess the other day, Sallie Ann Glassman, an artist and Manbo who has a store on Piety Street, Island of Salvation Botanica, and performs ceremonies throughout the year. The one and only fully active voodoo temple, I've heard, is the Voodoo Spiritual Temple of New Orleans where Priestess Miriam presides, a woman who was trained in a spritual church in Chicago (there are just so many connections between these two cities...). If you visit the Temple link make sure to run your cursor over the photo of Priestess Miriam. She glows yellow! I heard Glassman at a screening of Body: The Value of Women, a documentary about women's body issues and their relationship to self-esteem at Loyola University a couple of nights ago. Glassman's comments were interesting, as were most that evening. She is apparently a friend of the film's director. I didn't ask if the director had had her voodoo tarot cards read before filming, or if a few bones were thrown to guide the editing process. I've always been fascinated by the many ways people try to find "truth" in their lives, where their spiritual quests lead them. To come from New York and Judaism and end up in New Orleans involved with voodoo is quite a journey, to say the least. I'm sure she's got plenty of stories. Guns, dead bodies, voodoo. Just another day in the New Orleans neighborhood. It has felt like rain all day today, though it hasn't come. The air is heavy, moist. This is unusual for New Orleans. Usually it rains (no, pours) within hours of the onset of this weighty feeling. Every neighborhood is littered with acorns as the live oaks shed their nuts. I want it to rain, but I don't think it will. Perhaps tomorrow's lunar eclipse will bring the rain and wash all the nuts into the storm drains.
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Last update: 7/17/05; 10:06:06 AM .
