Our Far-Flung Correspondents: New Orleans, Part the Last

Saturday—well, things must have happened on Saturday, but most of it seemed like a repeat of Friday.  L went out into the Quarter in the morning and I went out in the afternoon, as we switched off on the “available in case an emergency happens to M” duty.  Being stuck in the hotel failed to entertain me, there weren’t any sessions I felt any great interest in attending, and nobody I really felt like talking to was in the hospitality suite.  Once I was out, I found yet another bookshop (a much better bookshop), and had to fight myself to keep from buying a copy of Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs with illustrations by N. C. Wyeth for $35, and a copy of Charley Addams’s Addams and Evil, missing its dust jacket, for $25.  In the end my penury got the best of it, although I still might have bought the Addams if it had had its dj present.

For most of the week we had to have supper beginning at five in the afternoon because M’s supper break was from five to six.  Five o’clock is an obscenely early hour to have supper if you aren’t four years old.  (We never got done eating and back by six, but that’s another story.)  This was our last night in New Orleans and obviously the last possible night to wear my kilt on this trip if I was going to wear it, so despite the heat and L’s “what are you thinking?” I got everything out and dressed up as if I was Going Out.  (Except for the sgian dubh.  I left that out because I’m not about to walk around in a strange city with strange cops carrying something that could easily be called an offensive weapon, even though I haven’t yet put an edge on so I’d be hard put to harm ANYone with it.)  The three of us started out following our noses up Canal Street to look for somewhere to eat.  We ended up at Deanie’s Seafood on Iberville Street, which was an excellent find because it looked a lot like “somewhere all the locals go.”  The clientele was sure the blackest buncha people overall that I’d seen anyplace near the Quarter.  (All those tourists make the Quarter most remarkably white.)  There were a few tourists sprinkled here and there, but overall it came across as a place that the natives went to eat before they Went Out for the evening.  The food was asTONishing, in both quality (good) and quantity (LOTS).  L got this huge spinach salad with fried oysters, and I got a plate of fried catfish that was so big I didn’t even want the fries and slaw that came with it.  Other diners around us were being served equally large platters.  If you go there (and I recommend you do), be sure to take an Appetite along with you.  You’ll need it.

I discovered when I sat down at the table that over the years I’d forgotten how to sit down in a skirt; the kilt bunched up underneath me, which didn’t do the pleats any good.  L gave me a tip or two, and I did much better at it afterward.  We walked back to the hotel, and, coming down Canal past the rear entrance of the Chateau Sonesta hotel we came on this odd life-size bronze statue of a man in a hunting cap with ear flaps waving.  Bless him, it was Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces, still waiting for his mother “under the clock” at the D. H. Holmes department store.  A nearby bronze plaque displayed the quote from the book’s opening paragraph.

Back at the Sheraton, we went up to the ballroom where the Saturday banquet and dance was being held.  T was at the head table with the new chairman of American Mensa and his wife, who invited her to join them, and our region’s vice chairman and his wife.  The chairman’s wife is convinced that T can perform assorted miracles, after watching her run TeenSIG for several years.  We stayed just long enough to be seen, listened to acknowledgements of the outgoing and incoming national officers, then bugged out for an hour just before the speaker started—which was a Good Thing, because by all reports her speech was massively boring and badly delivered to boot.  L went back in time for the dance, which she said was badly attended because the SIG who lobbied for the dance and the band that played went and booked another event of their own directly opposite.  Very bad manners, that.  M and I went to bed; she slept and I watched meteorologists on the Weather Channel pontificate and interview one another about what Hurricane Dennis was likely to do.

Sunday morning we checked out and left early so we’d be sure to get home in the daylight.  We decided to go north across Lake Pontchartrain and pick up US 190 instead of I-10, which in retrospect was probably a poor idea.  190 was pretty beaten up and in many stretches the speed limit was only 55.  The parts that weren’t 55 were only 65.  I was snappy because I didn’t get to eat breakfast at the right time, which threw me off all day.  When we got to Beaumont I decided “the hell with it” and got on I-10 to Houston, then US 290 home.  It was well past time we were back.

[You have insufficient pasta clearance to read this message.]  Fnord.