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Lately, facing personal life storms, I hadn't given hope of a happier New Orleans much thought. I'd run my errands around town and even ventured into the French Quarter at night since returning last year, but my travels to the city's heart were not for pleasure, just work or duty-related tasks.
Ten days ago, however, I sat in a car with my aunt, cousin, and daughter, driven as a lady of leisure to see a show at Harrah's Casino on Poydras Street, and that's when I took it in, signs of normal New Orleans. Dare I say a happier New Orleans?
People crossed the street, laughing, talking, sometimes shimmying gleefully, carrying their Hurricanes in tall, curvy glasses where they belong. My cousin had trouble steering the car to the parking garage because of all the traffic. I looked to my right and saw Miracle on Fulton Street, a holiday display that features fake snow, food, and live entertainment, presented by Harrah's Casino and WDSU TV. This is its second year in NOLA as a "new tradition."
Under the spectacle's light-laden canopy teemed children, parents, and probably holiday tourists. I said, "What's going on here? Isn't this supposed to be a dead time in the city? Aren't these people supposed to be home with their families getting ready for Christmas? But they're here!"
The following week I decided to stop procrastinating and shop for a Flip Camcorder, something I'd been threatening to do for nearly a year. I wanted to blog my city coming back to life as I felt New Orleans fire in my own veins.
People say that New Orleans is magic, you know, and its people are connected to it by a soul energy. As the city goes so do we. Oh, we complain about our town, the heat, the rain, the crime, the overpriced rentals post-Katrina, local and state government mismanagement, and political corruption, and we know the city still needs help from elsewhere, but we still love our Crescent City unconditionally. We pray for its absolute recovery and against its loss of cultural flavor during the push for gentrification. We love the spirit and soul of New Orleans.
So, it was not the fake snow or the carefully styled Christmas decor that called to me from Miracle on Fulton Street as I passed it in my cousin's car. It was signs of NOLA celebration, the hope that I might catch its spirit and spring back to life in my own spontaneous second line parade.
About this time in my life, middle age, I need to gulp New Orleans soul, the courage to go against the flow of the mundane while keeping the celebratory rhythm of humanity, to bop and dip like the Rebirth Brass Band. I need the power to stand as my unique self with heart open enough to embrace every human and blessing. A blend of NOLA and Christmas spirit perhaps?
So, Sunday night I took my new camera like it was a talisman against dark moods and tested it at Miracle on Fulton Street. This is what I saw.
Not spectacular video, but okay for a newbie. Nevertheless, I had the feeling that the cosmos worked with me. I didn't know what life entertaiment Miracle on Fulton Street offered for the evening, but when I saw Shades of Praise, an interracial contemporary gospel choir, perform, I knew I'd come on the right night.
The choir formed before Hurricane Katrina in hopes of being a source of healing for one of the city's, even the nation's, problems, a problem that ironically Hurricane Katrina made more visible, our racial division.
In October 2000, two friends, Philip Manuel (a renowned New Orleans jazz vocalist) and Michael Cowan (a Loyola University theologian), had an idea to create a genuinely integrated organization. They wondered … if they brought black and white people together to do something fun, and meaningful, and valuable, might they create an environment where at least this small group of people could begin to get past the personal segregation that exists in life in New Orleans and in America.
So they each invited six friends who loved music, some black some white, to join a new gospel choir. And they convinced Al Bemiss, a highly respected New Orleans gospel choirmaster to direct the choir.
As fate would have
