The New York Times' Frugal Traveler columnist, Matt Gross, visits New Orleans in this week's column and finds the city open for business--and visitors. My favorite part of Gross' story was his visit to the Uptown music club Le Bon Temps Roule (he calls it "down-to-earth," which is politespeak for "a great old dump"):
In the back, a piano player was jamming modern Dixieland on an
upright, accompanied by a percussionist who made use of everything
around him: a bucket, a stool, a cardboard Budweiser box. Better yet,
an oyster shucker was slicing open shells and doling them out free of
charge. Was this, I wondered, a post-Katrina deal to lure back
customers? Nope, the manager Laura Vidacovich told me later,
free-oyster Fridays have been a Bon Temps tradition for years. In fact,
she said, the Bon Temps was operating just as it had before the storm.
“We
still have no cover for shows, we still have free oysters,” she said.
“New Orleanians do not like change. They can barely get away with
cleaning up the corrupt court system, let alone changing the prices at
bars.”
Le Bon Temps is why people--frugal or extravagant--will always want to go to New Orleans.
But Gross is worried about one thing that I've heard before:
At the same time, the frugal New Orleans experience can weigh
heavily on your mind: How can you enjoy yourself when ravaged buildings
(and lives) lurk around every corner? In seeking out discounts, are you
exploiting the crippled city’s economic straits? And can mere tourism
really help improve New Orleans’s fortunes?
Yes, it can...particularly when the visitor keeps in mind the dichotomy between the ongoing misery and the human impulse to, well, laissez les bon temps rouler. I had a friend and his wife visit last summer, and they were hesitant for the same reasons. But once they got there, they found people happy to see them, eager to talk about their experiences, and grateful that people in the outside world actually cared.
The writer Susan Straight (who grew up in my hometown) went down in June for the American Library Association conference, the first big convention in New Orleans post-Katrina. Her travel story stuck with me for various reasons, but it was this one in particular that I found instructive:
On
my last day, the young waitress who had befriended me during breakfasts
approached me hesitantly. She said, “Are you with the librarians?” I
told her I was a writer. “Oh,” she said, sounding disappointed. “My
sister told me the librarians might be giving out books.”
The
way she said the word — books — was as if they were gold. “My daughter
loves to read,” she said softly. “But we don’t have any books.”...
At the time Straight met that waitress, only 2 of the city's 12 libraries were reopened. The rest were...well, this. It's a little better today. But 8 of the branches were devastated permanently, and 80% of the library staff was laid off. Hundreds of thousands of books rotted in the slurry.
So when people like Matt Gross wonder if they can (or should) enjoy New Orleans, I think the best thing they can do is go, have fun, eat dem oysters, drink in the music. But, maybe, before they leave, they could take a few minutes and a few dollars, meet someone like the waitress whose daughter had no books to read, and figure out a way to make things just a little better. Because that's part of the whole New Orleans experience these days, too, just as much as those free oysters.
