Quote of the day

For me the quinessential New Orleans moment came during Mardi Gras 2006. I was with my boyfriend, a tightly-wound, vegetarian, health-nut insurance adjustor from the suburbs of D.C. We were on the neutral ground at St. Charles and Felicity, waiting for some night parade or other--Muses or Hermes or Endymion--to roll by. We’d been there since five that afternoon, staking out our spots amid the beer bottles and broken beads and Popeye’s and McHardy’s chicken boxes left over from the previous night’s parades. The boyfriend was growing antsy. “It’s 7:00.” “It’s 7:30.” “It’s 7:45.” “It’s 7:57. What time is this thing supposed to start?”

“Well, honey,” I answered. “The paper said it would roll at seven. That means it will start at 8:15, and that’s up on Napoleon, so it will probably get here at close to ten.”

“TEN! I’m not waiting around till ten o’fucking clock! Why can’t this goddamn city get its shit together? Fucking lazy assholes.” And so on and so on.

And that’s when our parade-going neighbor intervened. I had never met her before and have never seen her since. She had the most terrifically sprayed and teased bangs I have ever seen. She had a tattoo of the Grateful Dead dancing bear on her ankle. She chain-smoked Virginia Slims. She wore a sweatshirt proclaiming she was a Proud Chalmette Football Mom. She had a family-sized box of Popeye’s spicy fried chicken on her lap. She probably weighed close to three hundred pounds and was wedged into an LSU lawn chair, which was rapidly sinking into the mud. And in an accent straight outta St. Bernard Parish, she said to the boyfriend,

“Baby, you gotta settle your ass down. It’ll get here when it gets here. Have some chicken.”

-Leeandra Nolting in her hilarious and touching essay, "Why I Live in New Orleans."