In high school, I couldn’t go to a forensics competition without hearing someone perform a Dramatic Interp of Marsha Norman’s play called ‘night Mother.

It was an easy trick, like shooting fish in a sappy barrel: contemporary dialogue, only two characters, a mother and daughter, neither of whom is crazy. Plus, there’s a movie with Sissy Spacek and Anne Bancroft to watch for inspiration. It’s a far cry from Equus (my go-to piece at the time).

Today, Marsha Norman turns 64, and as a birthday present, I would like to offer her my own version of ‘night Mother, reimagined as a sitcom starring Reese Witherspoon and Delta Burke. It’s shorter than the original, which is probably an improvement. And at least it’s better than Norman’s The Red Shoes, which was the early-90s equivalent of Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark.

The scene: nighttime in a suburban kitchen. MAMA is reading a magazine while JESSIE clears the plates from the dining table… 

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When I first met my sister ten years ago, I knew Tiff had a flair for the dramatic. I knew it from her friends (many of whom we had in common), and I knew it from her photos, but most of all, I knew it from her music.

Around the time we met, Tiff had adopted a persona called “Crazy Girl”. Under that guise, she cranked out a stream of songs, including two of my all-time favorites, “Miss USA” and “The Rebel”.

Now, Tiff has entered a new phase in her work — and she’s adopted a new persona to go with it. Crazy Girl is being killed off to make way for Grande Dame. And of course, given our shared New Orleans roots, Tiff is throwing a bigass funeral to celebrate:

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Many of us bitch and moan about the commenters on NOLA.com. To the site’s credit, it’s doing a better job of moderating these days, but it’s still pretty easy to find racist, homophobic, inflammatory remarks lurking below the fold. I mean, I’m not asking anyone to curtail her right to free speech — if you want to expose yourself as a bigoted asshat, that’s your prerogative — but for Pete’s sake, STAY ON TOPIC.

More troubling than the folks at NOLA.com, though, are the people who comment on New Orleans stories found elsewhere on the web. This piece on CNN.com about the marsh fires generated some fairly representative remarks. For example:

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Six years after the fact, you’d think that most of us in New Orleans would be tired of talking about Hurricane Katrina.

We are.

That’s not to say that everything’s as it was. That’s not to say that everyone has come home. And that’s certainly not to say that people, communities, and the city we call home haven’t been deeply, deeply scarred by a particularly forceful force of nature.

And yet, we don’t want to talk about it. I certainly don’t. None of my friends talk about it. My family doesn’t. In fact, the only time it comes up in conversation is when I’m out of town, and someone finds out that I’m from New Orleans — as happened while I was paying a visit to my birth mother, Callie, this past weekend.

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Since New Orleans isn’t directly in the path of Hurricane Irene, I haven’t heard as much discussion about the storm and all that she threatens to disrupt as I normally would. But of course, Irene is likely to cause a lot of damage, and at the very least, she’ll put a serious damper on people’s weekend plans along the East Coast.

One of the biggest disruptions is undoubtedly the official dedication of the Washington, D.C. Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial, which is scheduled to begin on Sunday at 11am — almost exactly the time at which Irene will be giving D.C. her most powerful stink-eye. It looks as if the storm will be downgraded to a category 2 by then, but that’s more than enough to flood roadways, knock out power, and force cancellation of all outdoor events. Continue reading

Two years ago — nearly two years ago to the day — a certain cueball-headed mayor of New Orleans announced that Jazzland/Six Flags was coming back. The theme park where so many of my friends had worked before the storm, performing to crowds of dozens (on a good day), has done nothing but gather mold since Hurricane Katrina swamped it. Which wasn’t hard to do, since the whole thing was built on a swamp anyway.

But I digress.

On August 19, 2009, Nagin stood for a photo op with Spongebob Squarepants and announced that Nickelodeon would be redeveloping Six Flags. But like a good souffle, the deal didn’t keep, and now the city is looking for a new partner to rescue the property.  If you’re the sort of person with a dream in your pocket and several million dollars in a Swiss bank account, you have until October 10 to submit your proposal.

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My skill set may be limited, but I’m a monster when it comes to filing.

I’ve wasted hours — days, weeks, even — sifting through my collection of photos and music files, organizing them into directories, assigning tags. As a kid, I did the same with books, arranging my sci-fi, fantasy, and young adult novels alphabetically by title. My friends loved to annoy me by moving books around and watching me hunt, squint-eyed, for the ones that were out of place.

Facebook works the same. I’ve arranged my Facebook friends into lists — by city, by state, by school, by era (there’s a big group called “Lucky Cheng’s” for all the acquaintances I made during those boozy years).

I tell myself that I do this so I can track them down. Our theater company is doing a show, and we have some last-minute comp tickets to spread around? One quick message to my New Orleans list, and I’m done. Someone from my fraternity gets married or suddenly passes away? Boom, taken care of.

Every so often, I’ll meet someone who doesn’t use Facebook, and they’ll tell me, “I hated high school. Why would I want to remember all those people?”  And I reply, “But that’s just it: you don’t. Facebook helps you forget them.”

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At the moment, Louisiana is run by Republicans: we have a Republican governor (a terrible one, IMHO) and the party holds a majority in both the House and the Senate. As elsewhere, many of these GOP legislators are first-timers, and they’re pissing off the elders with their arrogance, their Tea Party-naivete, and their frequent ineptitude*.

And yet, there were some good things to come out of the 2011 legislative session that wrapped up in June. I’ll start with the bad, though:

• As of today, there are more obstacles standing between women and safe, legal abortion: “Abortion clinics must give more information to women before they can terminate a pregnancy, including new signs telling pregnant women that they cannot be coerced into abortion, that fathers are liable for child support and that adoptive parents may pay for prenatal care and birth expenses.” [AP]
• New Louisiana residents used to be required to wait six months before receiving a concealed handgun permit. Not anymore.
• And of course, Representative Austin Badon’s anti-bullying bill was defeated on the House floor, which tickled the backward-looking Louisiana Family Forum pink (a very butch pink, I assume).

And on the plus-side: Continue reading