Finding My Voice in New Orleans

In the party-pooper phase of my life, while living in San Francisco and working on my bachelor's in creative writing, I was constantly busy. It was not so different from my life before, as a music student in a rigorous music program where I had to enter into an obsessed state (8-12 hours of practice a day) just to make the next semester's scholarship. Yet recently, after Hurricane Katrina, I had some time (finally!) to look back at my life, and reflect on my various phases. I am 30 now so it is a good time to reflect. I have had an extremely long period of my life (22-30) when I was essentially just on the go, no vacations, and not much time to let loose and have fun. But life was not always like this. I wanted to look back and remember what it was like to live a more bohemian lifestyle. This was when I was happiest. I had just gotten out of a bad relationship, and started singing at local venues within Sacramento. Singing acapella was a good distraction from the depression and shock I was feeling.

Last month, I got the chance to stay with my good friend, Larry. Larry lives the kind of lifestyle that has been the polar opposite of my own the past eight years or so. He is a DJ at the local strip club, as well as doing music for weddings (the week I had stayed there he had done a wild gypsy or "Roma" wedding), clubs, and other events. He usually knows exactly what songs he will play at these jobs. However, he doesn't know what the scene will be like. His life is like a constant performance...and I believe it keeps him young, vibrant, positive and joyous. Staying at his house was incredible for me. Not only could I experience his artistic lifestlyle, I was also able to re-live my own. I reminisced on my own life when I first met Larry. I was nineteen, self-publishing zines with my creative writing in them. Before that I put out a political zine called, "Zine Queer." When Larry and I started to become good friends, I was just beginning to perform my one-woman shows. What was now blocked within my throat freely flowed, by myself and with others. A couple years later, in music school, classical training helped my voice develop as well as my musicianship skills, however it also hindered something in me as well. The training stopped the conversation with the free-form art that I used to engage with so easily. The critical voice of the classical training silenced my artistic self. And now I feel that, after all these years, I have been cut off from correspondence with a dear friend, one which I have just started to get back in contact with.

The beginning of this artistic voyage occured in New Orleans, eleven years ago. I was only 19, and I was on a road trip with my best-friend Sandra, my boyfriend Dan, and his best-friend Sean. We stopped in New Orleans only to get stuck in that summer's hurricane. Two days turned into a week in a converted parking garage called Monster Island. I connected with a group of artists in New Orleans and did not want to leave. I met Calvin Johnston and I sang to him. My voice was ringing there, bouncing off the walls. I felt that it belonged there.

Everything about the place seemed magical. The street names were all of countries, and the houses and buildings huddled together, leaning in to listen to what the other had to say. Native New Orleanians gave us directions down these narrow streets saying things like, "Go to Poland, then turn right at France..." The world was here, although we couldn't always understand the directions. New Orleanians pronounced the street names strangely. Instead of Bungundy sounding like how you'd say the color, it was pronounced, "Bur-GUN-dee" with the stress on the middle consonant. Because New Orleans had been owned by both Spain and France, the names and pronunciations reflected these languages. Uncomparable to the names of my hometown, names that made you feel as if you were eating paste, ones that when you said them, they sat there dead in your mouth. Names like "Pocket" or the name of the suburb that I came from, "Greenhaven," these street names were merely created because they needed to be. There was no life to them, no history. They didn't reflect anywhere that anyone wanted to be, or had any need to reach. There was no thought or purpose put into the creation of the names. Thus, I had always felt by walking down these streets everyday, that I my life matched the careless creation of the names. And my art followed by having no grounding, no bite, no reason to be alive. So...it didn't. Instead it sat dormant.

The first person who I ever connected to as a fellow-artist challenged me to go to New Orleans. When I commented on how I was enchanted with New Orleans, more than any other place he asked why I wasn't going back. I said that it was crazy, look how far it was yet I then said that I guess I wasn't doing anything in Sacramento. He then said, "Yeah, a lot of people enjoy NOT doing anything." It was one of those defining moments that forces you to be who you really are instead of just wasting time in a space that no longer has anything to offer you. "I am NOT one of those people." I said back. "Oh yeah, well prove it." he retorted. Two weeks later, I was on a plane to New Orleans.

When I first visited New Orleans my mouth relished in the strange pronunciations of their streets, De-CAY-ter, Es-plan-ahhhde, and Saint Claude. And something in me awoke when we drove from country to country, trying to find our destination. These are the streets people are walking on everyday, I thought to myself. Young artists are walking on paths that are paved with the movement of the Artists who walked on them before, Bob Dylan, Marie Laveau, and William Faulkner. I wanted to continue walking these streets and speaking their names. When I moved back, I fell into sync with this place, my steps recreating what music, creativity, and history had come before. I was entering into a conversation with those that had come before.