For Frank Evans, designer of Lakeside Shopping Center’s holiday display, getting into the spirit of the season this year meant building a Christmas village that riffed on the post-Katrina landscape.
He created a winter wonderland replete not only with churchgoers and trains, but also abandoned refrigerators, houses covered in blue tarpaulins and a storm victim suspended from a helicopter.
Shoppers paused to enjoy the tongue-in-cheek cheer. Some of them did, anyway.
Evans, a landscape architect who has crafted the display for 13 years, removed some of the 2005 features Tuesday on orders from mall management, which said some patrons failed to see the joke. Tricia Thriffiley, Lakeside’s marketing director, issued a statement saying that the mall did not “conceive or install” the decorations and did not intend to “hurt anyone’s feelings.”
Yes, New Orleanians have been through a lot in the past few months: physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Despite that, we’d be well advised to rediscover our collective sense of humor–and fast–unless we wanna spend our remaining years downing wee fistfuls of Prozac, Paxil, and Wellbutrin.
Luckily, a friend of the Minx managed to snap a few pics at Lakeside before the priggish powers-that-be took down the aforementioned display:
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