Thursday 29 August 2013

HURRICANE BUGS ROCKS NEW ORLEANS!

Tara in Gone With The Wind was modelled on Houmas House in New Orleans (Photo by Richard Burnett)
 
I blew into New Orleans with my buddy Bicente two days before Halloween 2008 and scared the bejezus out of the Big Sleazy on our absinthe-laced boozy first night there when I tripped and fell on Bourbon Street, then slid face first into a gutter next to a policewoman on her horse.

It reminded me of the famous Oscar Wilde quote, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

Except I now know the stars look brightest from the gutter.


Bugs morphed into Starlet O'Hara

at Houmas House
Anyway, I got scrapes on my knees and elbows for all the wrong reasons, as well as a bruise the size of Africa on my left thigh. And local spices made my ass so sore I decided to forgo a visit to The Club bathhouse on lower Toulouse Street ("Too Loose!" Bicente called it) in the French Quarter.

Still, on this, my third trip to N’Awlins – a city founded in 1718 by the former French governor of Louisiana, Jean-Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, who was born in Montreal in 1680 – I regaled friends old and new in a city that has won my heart.