New Orleans 6

Toward the end of the week, we got an invitation from Jana!  Remember her?  I know the beginning of this chapter is an AWFUL long time ago now, but do try.  She invited Caro and I over to her Shotgun House for "brunch".  

Jana arrived at our hotel and escorted us back on the trolley to her place, which was a wonderful old house.  Leonard had already explained to us that a shotgun house was one where the front and back doors lined up perfectly - like in those cartoons where Tom tries to batter down the front door and then Jerry opens it and the back door at the same time and Tom goes on running right through the house demolishing Butch's doghouse in the back garden instead.  Or as Leonard put it, "You can stand in the garden out front, get a shotgun and shoot a chicken dead in the backyard."
 
Lunch consisted of Vichy Soise, which was so posh that I don't even know how to spell it properly.  This was followed, Jana announced, by "a true Southern dish" which turned out to be chicken and dumplings.  It was all delicious, and topped off with a rum pudding thing with a cherry on top.  Oh, and vodka.
 
Did I mention the vodka?  If I forgot it's because I now have an aversion to the stuff thanks to Lisa Mackinnon.  However, Caro had mischeivously told Jana that it was my drink of choice, and so Jana got some in for me.  (Fortunately, she assumed it was Caro's as well, so she had to have it too, ha ha ha ha.)  Jana was, to put it mildly, A Bit of A Character.  She poured HUGE vodkas for us all (poor Caro was on neat vodka by the end of the night, while I wisely started pouring for myself) and kept us 
entertained with her stories.  She tried to teach me to speak with an American accent.  "I can't do it," I explained.  "No, no," she insisted like Henry Higgins, "you mean ya CAIN'T do it!!"  I repeated that, indeed, I CAIN'T do it, and she seemed happy with that and moved onto teaching us how to say, "What are ya - CRAZY?!??" like a New Yorker.
 
She filled us on her exploits that week.  As you may recall she had decided to take part in the Decadence Parade.  She insisted we see her costume and scuttled off to her bedroom, returning with a tiny bright red chemise.  "One of my insignificant bosoms fell out at one point," she admitted, "and I had to be helped back into it by a Young Man," she added proudly.  “It’s such a shame he was gay,” she sighed.

At 71, you had to admire her spirit, which it seems she's had all her life, having spent 14 years with a professional gambler who "adored" her.  "Although we fought - our fights were legendary!"  He took her all around the world, from Edinburgh to Cannes to Puerto Rico, where she had some "amazing" fights.  "I was once taken aside by the manager of our hotel in Puerto Rico about the fights.  I apologised of course, but he told me it was the best floorshow they'd ever had."  Her favourite thing about the hotel in Puerto Rico had been the dolphins that had lived in a lagoon outside.  "It was cruel, I know, but one night I swear I went out to talk to one of them and he understood me."  

She had lived an amazingly glamourous life with this guy, and had met all sorts of people including Gene Kelly.  "I was reading the paper and asked him if he wanted the Sports page.  He turned to me and asked, 'Do you know who I am?'  I just said, 'Yes' and went on reading."  

She was considerably less cool when she met Gregory Peck though.  "I had dropped a pile of papers when he came up beside me to help me pick them up.  As soon as he spoke I knew who it was.  I was so excited I punched him in the stomach and winded the poor man completely."
 
But then she walked away from it all when Frank, her professional gambler, had wanted to get married.  "Never again, I told him.  And I meant it.  He never understood."
 
For Jana had had a previous marriage which hadn't ended particularly well.  "Oh well, never mind," she added, "I never liked him much anyway."  He had taken her on a world cruise during which time she decided to spend all her time with a rather dashing German man instead.  She sort of remained friends with her husband, until he remarried a rather neurotic woman who was prone to calling her up, complaining about him.
 
"I never knew what to say.  So I just used to make noises," Jana explained.  "One time she calls me up, and I say "Hello?' and she just launches into this whole torrent of abuse about him, and I just said, 'Oh' and 'Really?' and 'Hmmm', the whole time."
 
"Eventually, she asks me if I would like to meet her for lunch, and I said, 'That would be nice' - this being the first actual word I'd used since, 'Hello?' so we arranged to meet.  When I got there I found my ex-husband - who I never liked anyway - there telling me to leave his wife alone.  And SHE called ME.  I never spoke to either of them since."
 
So after her marriage and Frank, Jana turned her back on the glamourous life, and went down to live in New Orleans which she loves.  Her house was amazing, full of interesting and tasteful bric-a-brac.  Of course, the dinner (and the vodka) weren't free so Caro and I did a couple of chores for her.  "It's so hard to do things for myself now," she said.  She was seventy-one after all - though you wouldn't have known it to look at her.  "The thing is, I don't feel seventy-one," she complained.  "I still get hot flushes and erotic dreams.  It's quite disturbing."  Caro loved Jana and all her stories.  She loved how Jana had been one of the first people to protest against the fur trade and had thrown red paint at Saks Fifth Avenue.  Jana had also been arrested for protesting the Vietnam war in Redskin stadium.  "I've never been treated like that in my own country!" she snarled, still smarting over it, three decades later.
 
But even if she doesn't feel seventy-one, it's catching up apparently.  She told us she'd been in the hospital a couple of times already this year, but she seemed pretty philosophical about life now, "When the next hurricane hits, I'm not going anywhere - what, try to evacuate along with the other 1.2 million people who live here?  What are ya?  Crazy???"  

Caro and Jana ended the evening talking (or by this stage, slurring) about reincarnation which Jana believed in, ("Next time, I'll be taller".)  But it was her Puerto Rican dolphins that she really wanted to be with again. "I've never been able to swim in this life, but I'd like that.  In the next life, send me to the dolphins."
 
So, after an afternoon that turned out taking up most of the evening as well, we said our goodbyes and Jana called her "personal taxi driver".  She had the usual endearing little old lady habit of assuming that everyone else in the world is there for her at all times and demanded of her driver, "Okay.  Where ARE ya??  I've got a couple friends here need a ride.  When can ya be here??"
 
Her personal taxi driver was also a bit of a character.  He told us that his wife can't WAIT to meet Jana, and that they refer to her privately as "Miss Daisy".  It was yet another warm and funny conversation in New Orleans, and we'd had more of that in that one week than pretty much the rest of our whole time in the USA.  There's just something about the place that I can't put my finger on.  New Orleans, with its history and character is closer to Edinburgh than to any other city I've been to.  The people seem to accept you and chat like you've known each other for years.  I don't know why this is.  Perhaps it's something to do with holding onto potatoes.