Travelog entry number fifteen

We head south from Memphis toward New Orleans, playing music from the Sun Studio collection. The landscape gradually becomes more tropical and swampier. It gets warmer, even as we are receiving images from Tromsø of people shoveling out cars and skiing. Eventually the highway turns into a causeway over the water, with odd-looking trees and bare trunks poking out and little ramshackle houses on stilts. Some of the houses have docks and small fishing boats in front of them.

The causeway crosses a lake, and we enter New Orleans, the Big Easy. We have heard talk of the mother of all storms brewing somewhere in the ocean and so we find a room on high ground, in a run-down old place of faded grandeur in a nice leafy neighborhood west of the busy downtown area.

 

Vampire Ball

I have a good friend Chris who I know from years back when I lived in California. We lived in a big Victorian house in Oakland and Chris got me a good construction job renovating houses in San Francisco. Chris and I had a lot of great times together, like the time the two of us climbed to the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. I hadn’t seen Chris in years but I knew from Jeff, who we had met in Atlantic City, that Chris was going to be in New Orleans for Halloween.

 

So I had sent Chris a text message and he had replied that he would be at the Vampire Ball at the House of Blues on Saturday night. And now it is Saturday night of Halloween weekend, and all of New Orleans is decked out with skeletons and cobwebs and witches and other scary things.

Halloween and New Orleans are a particularly good mix. New Orleans is the home of a dark mystical voodoo, grown out of a mix of African traditions combined with Catholocism and other strains of magic and communion with the spirit world. New Orleans also has a tradition for dressing up in crazy costumes at Mardi Gras, and it is probably the biggest party town in the US, infamous for the constant Bacchanalia of Bourbon Street.

 

Halloween is a time for dressing up in scary (or funny, or just weird) costumes and having a party, so the combination is simply perfect for New Orleans.

And vampires are also a perfect fit for New Orleans. Ages ago I read some novels by Anne Rice which prominently featured New Orleans as a home of vampires and I thought she hit the nail on the head with the characterization of New Orleans as perfect for vampires. It is dark and sensuous and seductively dangerous, and the voodoo shops and fortune-tellers’ parlors and Catholic iconography remind you  of its potent mysticism.

Now I’m a sucker for  a costume party under any circumstances, but this is a once in a lifetime opportunity and I want to see the Vampire Ball.

But I sense already from the start that this is going to be a tough sell for Egon. He has cultivated a particular image and he doesn’t vary his style much. His rock uniform is recognizable from a distance and has been caricatured, for example in the decorations at the Bukta Music Festival in Tromsø, even though he is not involved in organizing it. He is in fact a bit of a celebrity in Norway. At random places on this trip he has been recognized by Norwegian tourists who can’t resist coming up and introducing themselves, thrilled to meet somebody they’ve seen on TV or read columns by in the paper.

Anyway, I am guessing that Egon is not going to be thrilled about the idea of spending Saturday evening in the company of vampires (or as he would put it, stupid fucking wankers dressed up as fucking Lord of the Rings), so I’m trying to think of an angle to sell him on it.

To be continued…