It’s been awhile, but since landing in Wisconsin we’ve been working on building the college fund back up, which is far less fun to ruminate on than folding your life into a paper airplane and watching it sail atop whatever breezes may come. I’ve seen the leaves fall off the trees, Packer Green turn to Hunter Orange, watched the snow fall and the lake freeze. I have a favorite checkout guy at the grocery store. The kids go sledding during recess. I’m writing heartfelt stories for the local paper. It’s all so damn quaint except for the two existential-crises-prone maniacs running the show.
I’m speaking of Wilder and Nakota, naturally.
So I turned 40 on Thanksgiving. That god-damned bird and I have been battling it out for the floating holiday since I was born but no one has ever complained of me being too dry, so I thought I was winning. That is, until Gobble Gobble usurped my 40th in an unceremoniously vindictive power play.
Five days before Thanksjordan, though, Billy drove me to the airport and handed me a ticket that said New Orleans, and I got on a plane giddy and alone, flipping the bird to the bird on a bird. So, take that, bird.
The ticket was courtesy of my best friend, Zoe, who I met–in true middle-aged style–at The Ritz, which was swarming with children that looked kind of like the ones I had just left but were dressed in festive plaids and corduroy jackets, a full thirty-nine days before Christmas. I marveled at the millionaire toddlers, the pretty moms, the “I’d rather be golfing” dads, and was battling the bellhop for my bag (to prove I wasn’t a snob or to save five bucks?) when Zoe suggested we go out for a drink.
The first time I went to New Orleans I was 22, on a three-month road trip with my best friend, Mariel. It was also the first time I went to a strip club. It was also, upon sharing that tidbit with my cab driver, the first time a cab driver drove me to my destination, parked and escorted me inside. He led me to a seat at the bar and we sat down, leg level with the bored stripper’s worn stiletto. The cabbie pulled a thick wad of tips out of his pocket and handed it to me.
“What?” I asked. He nodded his head in the direction of the stripper. She crouched down like a giant, tired cat.
Dumbly, I handed her the entire wad.
“Dance like no one’s watching,” I whispered in her ear, honestly believing I had coined the phrase right there, on the spot.
She winked and proceeded to dance… exactly like she had been dancing.
I turned to the cab driver. His eyelids peeled back in disbelief.
“What?” I said, not knowing what I had done wrong.
“One by one!” he said, mimicking doling out a bill at a time. “One. By. One!”
The second time I went to New Orleans was for my 24 birthday. Mariel and Zoe kidnapped me in the middle of the night, getting me all the way through security blindfolded with headphones on before revealing the destination. When we got there we went out for a drink where Steven, another best friend (can a girl have too many?) happened to be seated at the piano in the back room, surprising the shit out of me.
This time, as Zoe and I strolled the French Quarter looking for the least obnoxious place to have a drink, I spotted the very bar that Steven had surprised me so many years ago. Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop Bar. Claiming to be the “oldest structure used as a bar in the United States,” Lafitte’s has tangoed with the livers of Noel Coward and Tennessee Williams. It also purports to be lit entirely by candlelight, having no electrical lights, but that’s kind of a joke–in the years since my last visit they’d acquired computerized registers and flat screen TV’s, though candles do the rest of the work.
We grabbed a table in the courtyard out back and ordered a beer. The waitress approached with a a round of shots.
“We didn’t order these,” Zoe said.
“I know," said the waitress, smiling.
We’ve still got it, I thought to myself, looking around for our admirers.
And suddenly, there was Steven. They had pulled it off again!
This trip to New Orleans there would be no strip bars, no immobilizing, Sazerac-induced hangovers, and we actually managed to venture out of the French Quarter. We hopped up on the uptown trolley and took a stroll through the garden district, grabbing lunch and bloody marys at Ralph's in City Park.
We had a really fun dinner at Bachanal, a cool little spot in the Ninth Ward with business up front and a party in the back. It’s a wine shop with a stage in the backyard, where you order your bottle and food and then grab a seat and watch the show. It’s exactly my preferred brand of low maintenance dining.
We did midnight photo shoots at the Ritz and took shameless selfies in the giant bathroom. We interrupted a stranger's anniversary dinner to ask where the cool kids hung out.
In general, we acted like we did when we were half our age, with only slightly more restraint.
People often write off the French Quarter as being a touristy drunk fest, claiming that the real New Orleans lies outside of Bourbon Street and it’s adjacent offenders. And it’s true, sometimes it feels like it’s one T-Shirt and dildo shop away from a derelict’s Disney World. But while I loved seeing the other parts of the city, and when I go back will spend much more time exploring them, there’s something about a lazy walk with a cocktail in hand through the sunny streets of the French Quarter while a bouncy brass band plays for love and money on the corner. It has the tendency to cure my most existential of crises, at least for an afternoon.
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