Feet on the Street Read Online Free Page B

to New Orleans, they say the same thing Meyer Lansky said when he discovered Batista’s Cuba: “At last, a government I can work with.” Stephanie knows Hollywood lore. She says that when people on the set of
Some Like It Hot
were complaining that Marilyn was always late, Wilder, the director, said this: “I have an aunt in Austria who is always on time. You want her to play the part?”
    Orientation. You’re in the French Quarter looking at the river. Now turn around and repeat this mnemonic:
D
ixie
C
ups,
R
ock ’n’
B
owl,
D
ucks
B
y
R
uthie. The Dixie Cups were a sweet and snappy New Orleans trio, two sisters and a cousin, who knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts with “Chapel of Love” and had another big hit with “Iko, Iko,” the old Mardis Gras chant. (New Orleans has a long history of musical families, the Boswells, the Nevilles, the Marsalises, Harry Connick Jr. and Sr.—senior having retired as the city’s district attorney to appear as “the singing DA.”) Rock ’n’ Bowl is an uptown bowling alley (Mid-City Lanes) that is also where you can dance till all hours to, say, the zydeco stylings of Boozoo Chavis. And Ruthie is perhaps the most famous French Quarter character, who used to rollerskate around the Quarter followed by a string of ducks.
D
is for Decatur,
C
for Chartres,
R
for Royal,
B
for Bourbon,
D
for Dauphine,
B
for Burgundy (pronounced with the accent on
gun
),
R
for Rampart, the long streets of the Quarter in order.
    The order of the short streets that cross the long ones may be borne in mind as follows: “
C
’mon,
I
’ll
B
e
C
ool,
S
ugar,
T
ake
S
omething
O
ff
—
S
omething
D
ainty,
S
ome
U
nderwear
—
G
o,
B
aby,
E
verything!” Canal, Iberville, Bienville, Conti, St. Louis, Toulouse, St. Peter, Orleans, St. Ann, Dumaine, St. Philip, Ursulines, Governor Nichols, Barracks, Esplanade. To keep the sequence of the saint streets straight, remember, Louis, Peter, Ann, Philip: “
L
et’s
P
arty
A
nd
P
arty.” These are my own mnemonics, which may not suit everyone, but you are welcome to share them.
    We will walk beyond the Quarter, but this is the old city, the Vieux Carré, the central, original, the part of the city that is most . . . how shall I put it? The music critic Will Friedwald praises Connie Boswell’s singing as follows: “Unlike [Mildred] Bailey’s thin, delicate wisp, which, though charming, represented a coy middle-American attitude toward sex, Boswell’s is a more directly sensual, genuinely vaginal instrument, something else [aside from the influence of Louis Armstrong] she picked up in New Orleans.” It is said that the French founders of the city, when they couched its name in the feminine gender, as opposed to
Le Nouveau,
were making a bit of a joke: the Duke of Orleans, for whom it was named, was known to wear women’s underwear. But if a city may be regarded as having a sex, surely Chicago for instance is male, New Orleans female. And the Quarter, for all the rectilinearity of its grid, is the most vaginal part of town.
    Lagniappe with Orientation
    G ENIFER F LOWERS
    For a time early in the twenty-first century, she and her husband Finis D. (forgive me if I have the middle initial wrong) Shelnut operated a club in the Quarter where she sang. I had a chat with her between sets, a good-looking woman not at all stuck up. She sang pretty, too. “It Was Just One of Those Things,” which she modified slightly for two patrons who said they were from Buffalo (“a trip to the moon on Buffalo wings”), and “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman.” Shelnut himself stood over in a corner listening. J.F. winked at him and said, “My husband went to the doctor, wasn’t feeling good. The doctor said, ‘You need to have sex five times a week.’ My husband told me, and I said, ‘Put me down for two of those.’