cancel your dinner reservations
Or: Dance like you're possessed, cancel your dinner reservation, watch the lizards.
Lately: I was absent last week because my brain was also absent from my body. Or so it felt. Organizing your life when you have no boss and only temporary responsibilities is a special kind of challenge. … I haven’t been putting any thought into cooking (or eating) lately. That’s August for you, I guess. … I have, however, read eight books so far this month. Next month’s reading dispatch is going to be a doozy.
My first instinct was concern. It was close to midnight on a Tuesday, August in New Orleans, which meant all of us in the bar had elbow room to spare. Our elbows had elbow room, and here was this woman — this sturdy woman, barely as tall as my shoulder, with gray ringlets and a smile stretched taut — spinning like a human top. Wall to wall, stage to bar, she held onto the hem of her dress and twirled as the rest of us stepped back and forward and to the side, out of her way. She put off breeze like a fan, and I wondered: Is she all right?
She was alone, without a friend by her side or a drink in her hand, and as I tracked her path, it was clear: She was more than all right. She was on a higher plane. She was behaving as if she were watching a Grammy-winning band in a private concert — which, essentially, she was. The rest of us — me, my brother, my husband, the group of young women, the hand-holding couple — we were the ones to worry about. We swayed and smiled and clapped and nodded our heads, following all the wrong rules. When the Rebirth Brass Band stopped playing, the gray-haired woman hustled out the door of the Rabbit Hole, across the courtyard and across two lanes of O.C. Haley Blvd, the 11-block stretch of potholed road that cuts through Central City into New Orleans’ Central Business District. She hopped up onto the neutral ground, where her car was parked illegally on the strip of yellowed grass, and sped off, bump-bumping down over the curb and into the night.
It felt like something out of a movie — but actually, hold on, no. What if most of the fun I have these days, most of the fun I witness, is scripted, and finally, the cameras had stopped rolling?
Here is what I do in my free time: I cook, or I eat in restaurants, some of them old favorites, most of them popular new-ish spots. Or I scroll the Internet, reading about bars, swiping through photo collages of ceviche and lumpia and Detroit-style pizza. I happen upon videos of half the people I follow, it seems like, in Europe to see the Eras Tour. Or maybe someone’s at an antique store. I jot down the name. I visit. Maybe they’re cooking a new-to-me recipe. I bookmark it, and the process repeats.
I don’t even consider myself to be a particularly online person, though it’s clear I spent far too much time lurking in the shadows of Instagram. The night I went to see Rebirth, I’d originally booked a reservation at N7, a gorgeous, casual French restaurant across the city. Ultimately, I decided to cancel, craving a night with fewer commitments en route to jazz. A few hours after I did, I got a message in my Instagram inbox. It was — unbelievably — a video of a food influencer walking into N7. The sender had no idea I was in New Orleans, much less what my dinner plans had been. The algorithm is sentient.
But instead of eating duck under a photogenic trellis, I slurped Earth’s ugliest protein, oysters, and spilled half a frozen margarita down my leg. I walked under a highway overpass to a bar I hadn’t been to in ages, walked again down crumbling sidewalks to the Rabbit Hole, where Rebirth has a standing date on Tuesdays. Band members lounged in the courtyard beforehand, and 10:30, when they were supposed to begin playing, came and went. When they last musician arrived, they began, and the few of us there were rapt. When I took out my phone to snap a photo, I did it stealthily. No one else was letting the whine of the Internet seep in.
Which is, I worry, what I’m still doing now, as I write about that night. Turning it into yet another online recommendation: Do this, wear that, eat those, and here’s the trick to making it all go off without a hitch. But I know I don’t have that kind of power, the sway to send you all packing for the bayou, and if I’m short on specifics, that’s on purpose. It doesn’t matter where those oysters came from or whether the beer I sipped was local or even good. I can’t tell you the schedule I followed. There wasn’t one.
What I can tell you is that a stuffed, skinny cat stared down from a shelf behind the bar at our second stop of the night, and for a second I met its glass eye and shuddered. I can tell you that at the Rabbit Hole, the bartender asked what I’d like to drink and then pulled out from underneath the counter a tray of earrings. “Pick a pair,” he ordered, and I chose plastic, ice-blue gummy bears suspended from metal hooks. I can tell you how the cold beer can felt as it met the swamp air and sweated. How the Cajun pasta we ate, cooked outside under a tailgate tent, was two minutes over-boiled and so peppery, my eyes watered happy tears. How quickly the lizards, no bigger than June bugs, scuttled across the pea gravel.
I can tell you that if you show up there this Tuesday, or the next one, or a dozen Tuesdays from now, none of it will be the same. There will be music, but the notes won’t ring out quite the same, because of someone’s whim, because someone has a cold, because the weather’s cooling and the crowds are growing. All I can recommend is a little less curation. Go somewhere you’ve never visited online. And when you get there, if that sturdy little woman is there, dance with her. Spin into someone, smile, say you’re sorry. They won’t be able to hear you. Who cares?
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻