New Orleans Part Three [Archive]
We had breakfast in the morning at Cafe Du Monde (and I think that Man’s Ruin went there at least once a day for Beignets, possibly twice a day). A little while later we moved on to our afternoon Cemetery Tour. Again, we had a great tour guide who offered actual insight into the city and her people in addition to just the history of the above ground tombs. According to the guide, when the deceased were buried underground, the Mississippi would just wash them back up and they’d have a merry ole time on Bourbon Street with everyone else. So, they built permanent family crypts which house generations of the dead, keeping them all together, sealed away, not corpse surfing through the French Quarter..
We headed back to the French Quarter and did some moseying around the shops and sites for a bit. We stopped at the Beauregard-Keyes House which was home to Confederate General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard and author Frances Parkinson Keyes. It was then time to head back to the room, hit the pool and change for dinner.
On the way back to the Oliver House The Evil Queen bought a new sundress and I got myself a nifty new shirt. A shower and a change into unsweaty clothes and we were off to The Official Dinner For The Evil Queen’s Inauguration Birthday Dinner.
The ladies all looked rather lovely as we headed off to The Court Of Two Sisters. At first it seemed like a wonderful idea to have dinner in the courtyard but the heat did get me down a bit while sitting out there. Luckily there was a canopy of vines above us that did keep the sun at bay. I do suggest that when travelling to New Orleans, don’t go in the summer. That is unless you really, really like the heat…a lot.
Again, dinner was fantastic. It was topped only by the food at The Alpine. I had an amazing Trout Amandine with a BBQ Shrimp appetizer. The service there was unmatched and I really felt that the place was far too good for me. We toasted The Evil Queen’s birthday with glasses of wine and ate like impoverished peasants in a royal hall.
After dinner we decided to abandon the Bourbon Street area and head down to Frenchman Street. The clubs on Frenchman were much less touristy than the glaring bars on Bourbon St and were bursting with live bands. We first went to The Spotted Cat and listened to a couple of amazing bands. The first was an Olde Time/Blues band with just 3 guys. One was on a worn down, stand up bass, the second on vocals and harmonica and the third on a resonator guitar that was wonderfully beat to shit. After them was played an awesome swing band called The New Orleans Cotton Mouth Kings. We were nearly trampled by the bad dancers, but the really good dancers had an awesome sense of spacial awareness that bordered on preternatural. Feet would stomp millimeters from mine and arms would swing up into my face always missing me.
From there we ended out night at Dominion, a dark and striking Goth/Industrial club. As much as the sites and sounds of jazz are great, there is a certain comfort to finding a place that feels like home. They had an awesome music selection and the girls danced away while Hangman and I creeped on them from a shadowy corner. I was happy drinking the local beer all night, Abita Amber (or TurboDog if they had it) which just felt like the right thing to do.
I do love watching The Evil Queen Dance, but we were all a bit distracted by a local patron who was also dancing…in short, self caressing bursts, by himself, in front of a mirror. The dude looked like of like the love child of Doctor Who’s Tom Baker and Silence Of The Lambs’ Buffalo Bill in the intermediate stage of a sex change operation. He was obviously a tortured soul publicly expressing his pain. And it was quite painful.
