NOLA Writer: The Saints Are Marching
Steve Beisner -- December 11, 2009
Every time I get back to my New Orleans home I feel like I've dropped a heavy backpack from my shoulders, reclined into an easy chair with a cold drink in my hand, and relaxed. In fact, that's often exactly what happens. Although New Orleans has a reputation for hard partying, it's also a place that encourages visitors and residents to slow down, de-stress, relax, and just muse about what it all means. Maybe that's why it's a good spot for writers.
Some reading this are probably saying "What about Bourbon Street?" Unfortunately, more than a few tourists go home thinking they've seen New Orleans after a few hours of staggering from strip joint to bar to music club: the essence of New Orleans -- but they're wrong.
If not decadent Bourbon Street, then it must be the city's famous restaurants. I can't argue with that. I believe New Orleans is among the best restaurant cities in the world, although I wish our visitors would take the time to check out the small and lesser-known neighborhood eateries. They're where New Orleans eating rising above that of any other American city.
The music is the big draw for many. Ah, yes, sublime... and it's everywhere. While traditional forms persist, the New Orleans melting pot blends sounds as much as it does people, food, and culture.
Writers have their favorite ways of putting stories together and their favorite ways of wading into the waves of life and change, looking for new material. Melinda and I hadn't been in town more than 90 minutes before we headed to one of our favorite spots, the Maple Leaf Bar off Carrollton on Oak Street for the Sunday afternoon poetry reading. Poetry at the Maple Leaf has been a Sunday afternoon tradition since the days when the gentleman poet, Everette Maddox, began inviting his friends to join him on the back patio to listen to each others' work in 1979.
Now days, (actually since shortly after Everette's untimely death in 1989) the Maple Leaf readings have been organized and lovingly shepherded through ups, downs, and hurricanes by poet Nancy Harris, an incredibly talented poet, herself. Continuing Everette's practices, she has created an atmosphere where experienced and beginning poets are listened to with interest and respect. For the old timers, there's a lot of audience participation in the form of good natured ribbing. The combination of seriousness and the the humorous touch makes these readings a delight.
One never knows what to expect at the Maple Leaf. This week, when we walked into the dark bar, the normally quiet Sunday afternoon "crowd" of twenty or so had swelled to hundreds, filling both the bar area and the adjoining dance-hall and bandstand. On stage was a huge TV screen, and chairs were set up all over the dance floor. The fourth quarter of the New Orleans Saints vs. the Redskins had just started, the Saints were behind, and it was pandemonium. People were ping-ponging between rapture and despair.
We all know that people get crazy about football. So what? To understand New Orleans and the Saints you have to understand New Orleans, a town whose life is lived in the public square, where institutions like Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, the Tomato Festival, Voodoo Festival, the French Quarter Festival, and dozens of similar community extravaganzas are the glue which holds all New Orleanians, Black, White, Latino, Asian, rich, poor, upper class, working class and no class, together in the shared celebrations of life in this strange city.
To that add Katrina. There's not a soul in the city, of any color, political persuasion, sexual orientation, or any other way you might divide some people from other people, who didn't suffer profound losses from the storm. Many of those wounds persist.
From the earliest days of the New Orleans franchise, the Saints were always, well... lousy. They could always find a way to lose. They were a joke. New Orleans loved them, but people didn't expect much. Then, in 2006, the year after Katrina, when the city was full of walking wounded, before rebuilding of the city had really gotten off the ground, and some people could break into tears in the middle of a normal conversation, the Saints got into the playoffs for only the third time in their history. They didn't go all the way on the field, but on the streets of a broken city they were heroes at a time when many felt betrayed by their country and dealt out of life's game. New Orleans hasn't forgotten.
This week in December the Sunday crowd at the Maple Leaf saw their team clinch the southern division, in an almost miraculous finish after winning twelve games and losing none this season. They trailed late in the fourth quarter, persisted, tied at the end and won in overtime... as good as it gets in football.
The poetry at the Maple Leaf started late, only after the game was over. On the patio, dusk was approaching, the air had a chill, and people were bundled against the cold, but the audience was attentive and lively. It was one of those days when all the readers seemed as on top of their games as the Saints.
After the poetry we retired to the bar. It was someone's birthday and a couple of hundred closest friends, strangers, and poets hung around to eat barbecued pork and birthday cake, listen to a dynamite local blues band, dance, and drink a few toast to "Dem Saints".
For a writer as much as anyone else, dis place ain't like no other place.