Nawhlens

My weekend in New Orleans started out with the most unusual meal on an airplane ever. I haven’t had an in-flight meal in um…forever, so I was not sure what to expect when the stewardess offered me “meat” or “nothing (as the vegetarian option)”. Nowadays, you can’t even get a complimentary package of peanuts let alone a whole meal. I wondered how scaled down the food would be. Well I received one small salad (full of red tinged iceberg lettuce leaves which basically has the nutrient equivalency to packing peanuts) and a bag of chips. Okay, the bag of wasn’t labeled “chips” but it looked like the typical 99 cent bag. Imagine my surprise when I opened the package to find a gooey cheeseburger inside instead. I think my exact words were “holy crap, a burger”.

The weekend trip was in hour of my Chicago friend Emily’s bachelorette party. I’ve never been to New Orleans, but I have heard plenty of stories about the “big easy”. Yeah, the sorority college friends of mine would return after spring break and be like “look and all the collector glasses we got (ie we are actually proud of our giant plastic yard of alcohol that we drank and later vomited up all over some guy trying to make out with us)” and “oh my God, Stephanie and Becky were total sluts and kept flashing their boobs at guys, I mean the rest of us did it only once or twice but those girls would show their boobs even if they were not getting beads” because you know beads are priceless and totally worth loosing all dignity for.

The first thing on the agenda was getting our palms read/tarot card reading at the renowned Bottom of the Cup tea shop. Now I don’t believe in any of that psychic crap, so I decided to not give the reader any hints about my personal life. Yes I would simply sit there with my hands folded in my lap and not give any responses unless directly asked a straightforward question like “are you wearing pants….why yes, yes I am”. Some people divulge waaaaay too much information which makes it easier for the fortune teller to give a generic reading….”I see love in your life…why yes, my cat you must mean my cat, I love it so much…yes, I see that love ending in heartbreak because your cat will die, someday”. Granted I was trying to be open minded when the reader started off with general observations like “you are a leader, you are well respected, you have a lot of joy in life, blah blah blah”, you know, all the things people like to hear about themselves and think about themselves but are not always true. Then he looked at my palms and said I talk with my hands and am very animated. Hmmmm, go on. He flipped over some tarot cards and said “oh, I see you are moving in August and will be switching jobs and you will be seeing a lot of new faces”. Actually, I AM moving in August (back to Chicago) and switching jobs sort-of (I’m returning to the Chicago company that I worked at before I moved to NYC, although my paycheck origins do not change, the projects will be much different), and the old office has doubled in size so there will be a lot of new faces there. Starting to get scary. In the end, he revealed a lot about my personality, my relationship, and my life in general all without me saying one word.

Friday night we all had dinner in the Foundation room at the House of Blues. Okay, they should have just called it the sex room. All the walls were adorned with karma sutra poses and there was even a giant wooden statue of a naked man! He’s got WOOD! Needless to say, after several cocktails, we all started acting like 13 year olds at a sleep-over.

We moved on to Bourbon Street, obviously for more drinking. I love the open container rule (or lack thereof)! Nothing like hitting a to-go drink station and wandering around with your giant 42 oz Styrofoam big-gulp. I am an idiot for looking at all the crazy cocktail names and deciding that 151 Chill sounded the tastiest. Yep, Everclear, a whole shitload of it! Here is a conversation that I was told about:
Girl 1: Man Lindsay is sure nursing that drink
Girl 2: It’s everclear you asshole
Girl 1: Oh shit, rock on sister (and high fives me).
Yeah, I was told about a good portion of the evening having fully reset my memory. I do remember being on a balcony overlooking Bourbon Street and seeing all sorts of slutty women. No, none of the bacholorette party, just strange girls from the street. One girl was dressed as a naughty school girl and I wondered why she was dressed at all since she insisted on showing us her tits and cooch every five seconds. Also there were these black fraternity guys doing this circle chant elephant walk thing for hours in the rain. Oh wait maybe it was a soul train?

The next day we went on the Voodoo tour of the city. The guide was the leading expert but I couldn’t help staring at this giant growth on his neck. You know, like pimple that you can’t wait to pop. I would stand there nodding my head while he spoke, but honestly I was just biding my time till I could get my hands on it! One interesting fact that managed to seep into my booze soaked mind was that women would mix menstrual blood into their man’s food and drink as some form of a love potion. Yeah, how could you explain that if you were caught by your husband…..”oh honey, I was just cooking, naked, and tried to keep the dish warm by sitting on it like hens or penguins”. I guess that goes up there with the guy’s excuse of why he is covered in glitter…”no honey, I wasn’t at a strip club, I was making you a card, love you”.

Our Voodoo guide took us to the St. Louis cemetery (aka the city of the dead). It is a popular destination, so we ran into several other tour groups. Granted we had the renowned expert, and he rightfully pointed out who was full of shit. Yeah, one enthusiastic guide was all going on about not thinking the voodoo queen was really buried in the tomb when our guide shook his head and said he has seen the documentation…asshat! Score one for the giant neck boil!

The guide also took us to meet a real life voodoo queen. Now yeah she is a voodoo queen, but she was all whacked out on crack or something. She talked for an hour about nonsense. All of us were doing the uncomfortable don’t make eye contact otherwise you will have to pay attention to her and she will talk for another 15 minutes about nothing dance.

The afternoon we spent shopping and did I mention I love the to-go drink! Yeah, if you are not in the mood to shop, then might as well get drunk! Courtney took us to this Paris hat shop and the sales guy was gunning for us. He scolded Rachel and I for “touching” the dresses, he asked us to handle them by the hanger. Meanwhile, Emily made it a point to touch every dress behind his back while he was reprimanding us. Ah ha ha ha prick. Turns out he was not even a dress designer but the guy who put feathers in hats or something else totally gay. In his final remark, he said to us “well thank you for stopping in ladies” which was his passive aggressive way of kicking us out. Yeah, never been asked to leave a store before….well not without a good reason like having visible genitals.

That night we had dinner at a Jazz place with the world’s most nonexistent waitress. She was preggers and you would think she was running back and forth from the hospital between her few and infrequent visits to our table. Later we scored a table at a hookah bar. I’ve never smoked before, so it was really hard for me to get the hang of hookah. The girls were all gathered around telling me to suck more, suck harder, now hold it in your mouth. Talk about a man’s school girl slumber party fantasy. On our way back to the hotel, we hailed a cab driven by the most buff Egyptian man ever. The little guy was maybe 5’ tall and all biceps. The girls started chanting “guns” to him. Oh and his cab was all pimped out with a disco ball and flashing lights…or maybe that was just the hookah playing tricks on my mind. The next day we actually ran into “guns” again and were able to score a picture.

We finished off the visit by touring the Garden District which was gorgeous! Yeah, Anne Rice’s house was huge and super scary mansion like.