the good, the bad and the stinky

we're back from sunny warm new orleans. what a great weekend! my blogmate was, as always, a thoughtful host, filling our time with fun activities, good food and drink, great people. i learned that there are many ways to unhouse little crawfish from their shells at lunchtime, that abita beer distributes to several states but does not bottle their strawberry lager (tragic), that $3 fake dolce and gabbana sunglasses are every bit as glamorous as i'd imagined, and that i am a much better dancer when budweiser is $1.25 a can. hee.

i also learned that new orleans has its share of crazy hippies, whose habits are almost as much fun to catalog as the movements of my creepy neighbor:

- taking the 3rd place award for best hippiewatching was the mild-mannered costa-rica-t-shirt-wearing 40-year-old mullet-hippie who wandered halfway across the audience where papa grows funk was playing at french quarter fest, told us we looked nice, and wandered back. given that we were dirty, drunk, and sitting on a lawn littered with empty plastic beer glasses, i am sure we were faces only a hippie could love.

- in 2nd place for hippiewatch was my blogmate's ex, who we met during my five minutes on bourbon street. when my blogmate was accosted by a hairy bearded manic guy wearing cut-off khakis and a latin-american-fabric-vest, talking a mile a minute about some band who was "the best f*&('in band EVER!", i figured this had to be some crazy she'd dated back in the day... nice guy, who took our ribbing about his man-purse fairly well.

- in a clear first place for hippiewatch came good citizen hippie, a dreadlocked lanky man who passed us on the street in the french quarter. coming the other way was a man pushing his friend in a wheelchair, who was not seen by the minivan driver trying to back out of a narrow driveway. we saw the impending minivan-wheelchair disaster coming, but couldn't react in time to fix it - you know that slow-motion "nooooo-OOOOOOOOOOO...." that happens? that was us. but not good citizen hippie! he sprinted back to the minivan, threw himself between the minivan and wheelchair, shouting until the minivan stopped. at that point, good citizen hippie decided to direct traffic for a little while, allowing the wheelchaired man to pass, as well as a mother with her small daughter in a stroller. i kept looking for old ladies with walkers for the hippie to help across the street.

- related to hippiewatching: honorable mention goes to the guy who sat by us on the plane from new orleans to nashville, who is not really a hippie but works for some advertising group that promotes jazzfest and other hippie music festivals like the one in tennessee where all the hippies come live on the farm together for four days and smoke to dave matthews. note to any man reading this with a music-related occupation: if you name-drop too much while describing your job, women will not believe you, and will think you are full of yourself. it's similar to guys who claim to be djs. they are never really djs, they just have lots of stereo equipment in their car trunks. (i will consider an exception to this for henry at wort in madison, because i don't think the djs there are actually paid anything so it's a little hard to be full of anything, plus it's one of my favorite radio stations besides the diva in new orleans - music for the diva in me? that's great! bring on the rupaul, paula abdul and ryan cabrera techno mixes! who the heck is ryan cabrera, and where did he come from? but now i'm really digressing. back to the hippies.) so the plane hippie organizer. yeah, points to the guy who takes himself seriously describing midwesterners as "good people" when he has never actually been here, and who looks at me funny when i snicker every time he says widespread panic.

hmm... i guess i still haven't said anything about what we did in new orleans. next time: our collective inner turmoil about our stated hatred of chicago's love affair with floofy martinis, standing in unfortunate contrast to our demonstrated fondness for the many many 25-cent key lime martinis we drank at lunch monday. doh.