Oh, Freddy. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but if you ever go back to New Orleans, be prepared. The French Market really doesn't have produce stands anymore. There are a lot of stands, but they all sell tourist stuff like coffee with chicory, hot sauce, prepackaged red bean and rice mix, roux mix, spice mixes (Blackened Redfish mix, boiled seafood mix), and Mardi Gras beads. It like to broke my heart when I was there this summer.
And, around Jackson Square, it's not artists with stands, it's fortune tellers. Anne Rice is really big now, and there are a lot of kids dressed up in black flowing clothes, with their hair dyed black and their faces painted white.
I've been in New Orleans, off and on, since 1955, and it's the worst I've ever seen it, even worse than when it was full of nasty, smelly hippies all spare-changing everyone, and I was a hippie myself, then, so it's not all hippies I am talking about, it was the bums. That wasn't a good time.
And it's not good now.
But, New Orleans will continue on, as it has for almost three hundred years, and this too shall pass. |
