Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Q&A with Ian McNulty, author of "A Season of Night"
Posted by Kevin Allman on Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 9:34 PM
Gambit readers know Ian McNulty as a cuisine guy from his weekly look at New Orleans restaurants, but his new book, A Season of Night: New Orleans Life After Katrina is more than that. A look at coming home after the storm, with a special focus on Mid-City, Season of Night has earned advance praise from the likes of Ace Atkins and John Biguenet (see A&E editor Will Coviello's take in this week's paper).
McNulty signs A Season of Night at 5:30 p.m. Thu., July 10 at the Garden District Book Shop (2727 Prytania St.), and at 2 p.m. Sun., July 13 at Finn McCool's Irish Pub (3701 Banks St.).
Q: There've been lots of Katrina-tinged memoirs. How is yours different? What do you bring to the tapestry of our storm stories?
A: The books I've seen so far have been histories of the disaster or individual tales of living through the storm and all the chaos it brought. But "A Season of Night" is about homecoming. It's about the decision to return to a city that, at the time, was utterly broken. My book is a very intimate account of what it meant to move back at that time and live in a place that was unspeakably creepy, depressing, infuriating but oddly joyful and energizing all at once.
Many of the literary agents I contacted early on dismissed the project for the very reason you mention. It seemed like the memo had gone around that there were too many Katrina books in the pipeline already. So I'm very grateful that my publisher took a closer look at my manuscript and decided it was indeed different.
Cynthia Owen, 1963-2008
Posted by Will Coviello on Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 6:56 PM
Cynthia Owen, a longtime star of the New Orleans stage, died Sunday in Las Vegas. She was 44.
Owen spent her life in the theater, starting from an early age working in children’s theater. Equally talented as a singer and actress, she played starring roles such as Sally Bowles in Cabaret, Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun, Charity Hope Valentine (pictured 2004) in Sweet Charity and Eva Peron in Evita. She was to appear in Pal Joey recently at Tulane Summer Lyric Theater but was unable to do so due to illness.
Owen was beloved by local audiences and the theater community. Over the years, she performed in dramas and musicals across the city. She won four Big Easy Entertainment Awards, three times for best actress in a musical – Sweet Charity (1993), Funny Girl (1994) and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (2000). She won best supporting actress in 1996 for her role in Oliver.
Owen is survived by her mother Lyla Hay Owen, her husband Jim Holmes and her sister.
Don't Say A Prayer For Me Now
Posted by David Winkler-Schmit on Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 6:55 PM
After the public uproar that erupted in Terrebonne Parish when a school valedictorian spoke a sentence of her commencement speech in Vietnamese, the Terrebonne Parish School Board is now considering a policy, which would require that English only be spoken at high school graduations. The board will also look at requiring school prayer at graduations.
Enter the Dragon; or, in this case, the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana.
Two Carters Running for Congress — Again!
Posted by Clancy DuBos on Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 5:11 PM
Two candidates named Carter will run for Congress against Bill Jefferson — again — this season, but this time one of them is not Rep. Karen Carter Peterson. Sources say that current District C City Councilman James Carter as well as former District C Councilman Troy Carter both will announce soon. James Carter’s announcement will come out any minute now, in fact.
This adds several strange new twists to the campaign.
Friday Night Film Series at Vintage---80's Teen Movies Rule!
Posted by admin on Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 4:07 AM
“Don’t You (Forget About Me),” by Simple Minds, is the theme song to the 1984 teen hit, John Hughes, The Breakfast Club. Don’t worry Mr. Hughes, this product of the eighties, will never forget this gem of a movie or any of the great stars who fulfilled the classic stereotypes of the high school paradigm. This is a love letter to the heroes of The Breakfast Club, my coming-of-age movie.
Molly Ringwald: I love you as the princess and I still wish for the janitor closet encounter with Judd Nelson (Pretty classy, being a diamond earring and all..) I am sorry, Molly, that we the children of the eighties, sold you out to the Lifetime franchise and even made you move to France for a while.
Ally Sheedy: I love you because you taught the teens of the eighties that a “basket case” can be really cool and that sometimes a make-over is not really who you are. I apologize for the years of movie mishaps such as Maid to Order. The eighties were hard on all of us.
Friday Night Film Series: Dinner and a Classic Movie at Vintage
Posted by admin on Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 2:39 AM
We have all seen some of our favorite television series pay homage to the film that is truly in love with the Big Apple. In Gossip Girls, we see Blair (Leighton Messer) relive the famous “breakfast” scene made popular by the one and only Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly. In another on-screen affair with New York City, we see hints of Breakfast at Tiffany’s revived in scene after scene of the television series Sex and the City. Fashion and the iconic Audrey Hepburn are sprinkled in almost every televised and filmed moment portraying party girls in NYC. Why not see where it all began?
Oh, Lord, don't tell them about Krewe du Vieux...
Posted by Kevin Allman on Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 12:54 AM
Remember last month's media dustup over the Massachusetts high school with the high teen pregnancy rate, and the conflicting reports over whether there was an actual 'pregnancy pact'?
Flash forward to last weekend in the neighboring community of Beverly Farms, which stages an annual 4th of July "Horribles Parade" that's apparently satirical. Among the floats were several that made fun of the baby bump epidemic in nearby Gloucester, and suddenly this year's Horribles Parade is just too horrible for local sensibilities:
Allowing insulting floats in the annual Beverly Farms Horribles parade - including one tossing condoms with candy - has taken the baby bump to a new low, said Gloucester Mayor Carolyn Kirk.“I’m deeply offended, and there but for the grace of God go your daughter or daughters in any community,” said Kirk when told of the salacious satire.
Even after three Beverly Farms judges walked off, the July 4th pregnancy-pocked parade marched on with men in diapers crawling from between a woman’s legs propped in birthing stirrups and a giant phallus sprayed the crowd as parents and their tots were confronted with signs like, “GHS Girls Went to Band Camps, Came Back Pregnant Tramps.”
What the story doesn't make clear is if this is a traditional event for "parents and their tots," or whether it's, like our own Krewe du Vieux, a raunchy satire for consenting adult spectators. (Yeah, I've seen kids at Krewe du Vieux, too, and they don't belong there, either.)
In either case, it seems like a lot of folks around Gloucester are more upset by drag queens with fake baby-bellies than they are by teenage girls with real baby-bellies...and that's a damn shame. Either way, they should probably steer clear of the Marigny a couple weeks before Fat Tuesday.
