Fried Chicken and Sazeracs

While I read and type in my southern California mountain home, I stream the audio from WWOZ, a public radio station in New Orleans that plays jazz and local music. My pal TR is a dj there, though I always miss his show. Just now they were announcing that the Tennessee Williams Festival has begun, and good luck to them. I prefer the Words and Music Festival, which developed from the Pirates Alley Faulkner House Bookshop's celebration of Faulkner's birthday (which I share, along with Olivia Newton-John).

Today also arrived a request for a good New Orleans restaurant that catered to vegetarians, particularly Ward Six supporter A.J. Rathbun, whose cocktail book Good Spirits is up for two IACP awards, the ceremony for which will be held in New Orleans soon. I suggested Galatoires, which can assemble a variety of potatoes brabant and stuffed eggplant and broccoli bernaise, and also because it is the launching place for Eudora Welty's great story "No Place for You My Love."

Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table, by Sara Roahen, just arrived via Powells last week and I've been reading through its fine and thoughtful essays about my favorite things, which she discovered about the same time I did, and who also left the city around the time of the levee failure. Among these things: sazeracs and the fried chicken at Willie Mae's Scotch House.

I've never been hog wild about Tennessee Williams, with the exception of this, and most certainly this, mostly because I've never lived anywhere with much theater, I think, or where theater wasn't an accessible thing to me, or the theater where I was seemed silly. I suppose it's in the same boat as serious fiction and any poetry, and that there should be some solidarity or recognition, but I don't much feel it. Do you?