Baileys Shakes on the Mississippi

There’s something magic about sitting and watching the Mississippi River roll by. Watching the river tugs gracefully maneuver their cumbersome barges around the bend in the river and through the current; swinging wide until they’re literally going sideways, then, almost implausibly, ending pointing straight, without turning at all. There’s something about blowing off work for the better part of an afternoon and just sitting.

It certainly wasn’t the first time anyone had ever played hooky on the banks of that muddy water.

Several days before, I was in my apartment, my packed bags waiting at the door. I recalled how I used to go to the Rochester Airport just to watch the planes and imagine that I was going somewhere, anywhere!

Now I was!

Travel itself hasn’t always been sweet. I had flown back to LA only a couple of months before from Rochester. I had lived in LA for a little over a year at that point and was coming back from the holidays at my parents’. It was like leaving home for the second time, I was freshly separated from my wife and was coming home to an empty apartment. I had just enough money to take a cab from the airport. The cabbie agreed to a flat rate. I had no TV, no money to go out and no friends to do anything with.

The next day started work on my first real TV show, “Win Ben Stein’s Money”. I was the game graphics operator and was having a hard time of it. I was stressed. I’d mess up, get more stressed about messing up, mess up some more... Twice, the director asked to have me fired.

Gradually things got a little better. After a month I got my first paycheck and no longer had to use the Ben Stein craft table as my only source of nutrition. I filled my gas tank and no longer had to walk to the studio. A few months later I was asked to work on a game show demonstration at the National Cable Television Association convention in New Orleans.

The morning of my trip the front door buzzed. My car—they told me they were “sending a car”—had arrived.

Instead of seeing a shuttle van packed with harried travelers as I had figured, there was a stretch limo parked in front of my building. That can’t be right, maybe the shuttle was behind it or something. No, the dude in the bad suit grabbed my bags, opened the door for me and placed my luggage in the trunk.

If this was a mix-up and I wound up at a filming location with a bunch of people in headsets and clipboards saying, “Wait, you’re not Sigourney Weaver, are you?” it would be worth the adventure I figured so I got in the car.

I was thirty four years old and it was my first ride in a limo… even a regular limo.

I looked around my street in the predawn light. I suppose it would have been too much to ask that one of my neighbors saw me getting into that long black car and chauffeured away.

When the plane touched down in New Orleans—and yes, I am talking about literally as the landing gear hit the ground and the brakes and reversers kicked in—the pilot came on the PA and said “WHOOOOOOA NELLY!”

Only on Southwest.

Ironically, my second-ever stretch limo ride was from the New Orleans airport. For myself and the three other guys I was traveling with, it was all of our first time being ripped-off by a crooked limo driver.

Only in New Orleans.

We were installing and operating the electronic controls for game show demos for both MTV and Gameshow Network’s booths at the NCTA show. Fortunately, it was, pre-9/11, hand-over-fist MTV that made our hotel arrangements, not the notoriously cheap Gameshow Network. Otherwise I might not have stayed in the nicest and largest hotel room I had ever seen. The ceiling was over twelve feet high! MTV hosted a party in a fancy bar with an open bar all night and “Moby” for entertainment.

New Orleans itself was amazing of course. Every evening was a culinary adventure followed by an eye popping stroll through the French Quarter. Music flowed from each hole-in-the-wall and even on the sidewalk there were amazing and colorful performers. Helen Keller would have been aptly entertained walking down those streets from an olfactory adventure ranging from urine to gumbo spice, not to mention the vibe coming from every crack in every wall. I’m glad I’m not blind though. I got an eyeful of bared chests several times without even trying.

I drank beer in a bar where over two hundred years of boots had worn deep grooves in the brick footrest at the bar between the more resolute layers of mortar. The orange light of early evening soaked so deeply into the ancient brick streets that they seemed to glow long after dark.

 Jean Laffite's Blackmsith Bar, the oldest in New Orleans
and just about anywhere else in the US

At midnight everything closes and the streets are soon empty. The parties continue in private and till dawn I’m told.

I also saw the birthplace of American Music: Congo Square.

Some locals, friends of friends, picked me up and took me to see the ‘real’ New Orleans far from the Quarter. We hung out at a corner bar and sucked the heads out of ‘mud bugs’ (crawfish) at a local restaurant. It was every bit as amazing as the fancy joints in the Quarter. We saw a band of high school aged musicians play at a bar. They weren’t playing guitars and drums though, it was a brass band: trumpet, sax, trombone, sousaphone (tuba), a guy carrying a marching snare drum and a guy carrying a bass drum. Unencumbered by amps and cables, they danced around freely and even marched out into the street at one point. For New Orleans, they were as badass and hip as any punk band.

A mudbug (crawfish) boil

There are streets in New Orleans that are officially spelled one way on the street signs in one neighborhood and another way across town. I was told by a local that this is a prime example of New Orleans logic.

Later, on one of our lazy strolls through the Quarter, my local friend explained how much of the area was below sea level and how a big enough storm could put most of the city underwater. I looked around at all the beauty and history. I shuttered to think of it.

Unimaginable.

A Side Story:

Many of my friends that I work with on Jeopardy also work on “Wheel of Fortune”. That show also made a trip to New Orleans to tape a series of shows; remotes, we call them.

After a week of setting up lighting, the stage and the mobile production trailers, the ’Wheel’ crew had taped their first day of shows on a Saturday at the New Orleans Convention Center. At the end of the day, the crew was gathered for a meeting. The second and final day of taping would be canceled. They would strike the huge stage and lighting rig that night (normally a two-day task) and load it onto the 12-or-so tractor trailers.

There was a hurricane over the gulf that was headed straight for them. It was Saturday March 27^th, 2005.

Back at the hotel, the bar was still open even though the windows had already been boarded up. The drinks were on Harry Freidman, the executive producer. The locals seemed fairly casual as if they’d had many of these scares before.

The next morning, on some of the last buses available in the city the crew of 110 was evacuated along with the rest of the City of New Orleans. There were no flights out of the airport so they would have to trek to Houston to fly home to LA. The traffic was moving so slowly, friends tell me, that they could get off the bus, walk off the freeway to convenience stores and casually make their way back to the bus without fear of being left behind.

It was later discovered that both of the drivers who had driven the Wheel crew out of New Orleans had lost everything they owned in the flooding. Back in LA a collection was taken up.

Normally a six hour trip, it took them over twenty hours to get to Houston. It was 5:00AM Monday morning. Katrina made land fall near New Orleans an hour-and-a-half later.

The crew checked into a hotel. They had about an hour to clean up before meeting the shuttles to the airport.

Some on the lighting crew had elected to stay try to deal with some of the lighting equipment that had not yet been loaded onto trucks. They ended up stranded in the city for several days. The lighting gear remained for weeks and had to endure the onslaught of storm refugees that took up residence in the convention center. When they were able to retrieve the lighting, it did not smell nice, to put it politely.

-If you happen to be Facebook Friends with my friend Jeff Schuster, he has a wonderful photo album of that particular trip to New Orleans and the crew’s subsequent evacuation. If you aren’t friends with Jeff, I highly recommend it :)

Back to my own earlier trip:

On the 2000 NCTA Convention floor I saw more forklifts than I had ever seen in my life. They whized by loaded with crates, cases and carpet rolls for the different displays like two ton ants. The displays ranged from single tables to city-block-long strongholds of the bigger networks. Once the convention was underway and all the carpet, banners and curtains had been installed the suited throngs looked even more like ants; seeking booty to carry back to their nests. Every vendor and network had some sort free gimmicky item they were giving out by the arm full and logo-emblazoned bags to carry it all in. The must-have item for that convention was a “Mr. T” Chia Pet that TVLand was giving away. I think I gave mine to a friend.

For some reason though, it wasn’t the convention, or the French Quarter, or the food, or the New Orleans Jazz Festival I got to attend my last afternoon there. It wasn’t the bright colors or the wrought iron railings or the beads that I remember most about this trip. The defining moment for me was far more subtle.

It was only our second day of set up. We ate lunch at a food court by the river. Afterwards a couple of us treated ourselves to Baileys milkshakes at a Hagen Daz stand and we all sat outside on some benches by the river. The convention had not yet opened and there was almost no one else on the entire riverfront. It was rather warm and humid but there was a nice breeze that kept it from being uncomfortable.

We were ahead of schedule with our work in the Convention Center and even though we were sort-of expected back in an hour we sat there by the river watching the barges slip sideways in that tricky bend for at least another hour-and-a-half. No one said much of anything. There was no need. We all felt the mood of the timeless south, like old men sitting outside a barber shop. The river was speaking for us.

To us.

My impending divorce, my old friend who was furious at me for it and his efforts to turn a simple amicable divorce complicated and ugly, my debts, my empty apartment and its empty refrigerator, my lack of health insurance and the lump I had found… all these things were gone from my mind.

There was only the river, the breeze and the milkshake.

I was happy.

It’s a different world now, a different New Orleans perhaps, but my life is much improved since that time. It was simple moments like the one on the river that helped get me through.

Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not this week, but one day soon I might be a little late to work. You’ll find me sitting on my balcony, watching the clouds go by and sipping a home-made (real) Bailey’s milkshake.

By a lazy river is usually best, but the being lazy part, watching life slowly drift by and forgetting your troubles, if only for a little while, that’s the key.