Sue Halpern setting up for the Cinderella Initiative

A few nice what to do in new orleans tonight images I found:

Sue Halpern setting up for the Cinderella Initiative

Image by Jewish Women’s Archive
After the Cinderella Initiative to collect prom dresses and tuxedos for high school students got underway, dozens boxes started arriving at Sue’s home – and she began calling on everyone she knew for assistance.

People’s generosity was legion. In one story Sue told – as this initiative was getting under way, Howard Feinberg had just won a tuxedo in a raffle. When he called the store owneer to have it sent to the prom giveaway, he said he’d be sending some new tuxedoes himself. Sue wrote:

Friday night before our Sunday event, when we thought everything had arrived and we had finally taken a deep breath, a huge rental truck pulled up and the regular UPS driver got out. I asked him what he was doing in this truck. He declared, "Because you had 36 boxes come in and we had to rent a truck to get them to you tonight…." Included were 24 boxes from the "tuxedo man" filled with every brand new color and style tuxedo you could imagine, with shirts, studs, and all accessories that went with them.

Learn more about the Jewish experience of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita at JWA’s Katrina’s Jewish Voices.

The Jewish Women’s Archive organized Katrina’s Jewish Voices in collaboration with the Center for History and New Media. Through the contributions of individuals and organizations nationwide, the project is creating a virtual archive of stories, images, and reflections about the New Orleans and Gulf Coast Jewish communities before and after Hurricane Katrina.

Read more about Katrina’s Jewish Voices.

tonight at the fremont

Image by emdot
Classic movies are shown twice a month at our art deco old-school theater called the Fremont.

Tonight was Easy Rider.

I’d never seen it before. It was one of those "must-sees" that I always wanted to see, but it just hadn’t happened. On top of that, I knew very little about it. Sure, I knew it was a road movie that exemplified the spirit of the sixties; I knew that it made the career of Peter Fonda. I knew Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson were in it; and I knew they were heading to New Orleans. But that was it.

For me, it started out slow and a little cliched (but only because so many other movies had built on this movie themselves) but by the end — the end I was not prepared for — my mouth dropped open and I was just plain floored.

Floored.

The speech that Jack Nicholson gives in his last night with Wyatt/Captain America and Billy was as poignant as ever. It was a sentiment that has not lost its charge, its meaning, its truth or its impact.

But what stayed with me were the words Wyatt/CA (Peter Fonda) uttered in their last night camping.

"We blew it," he says to Billy. "We blew it."

My big question after the movie was what in the heck did he mean. What did he mean. What did he mean. Maybe I’ll peruse the internet to see if some film-buff has put their thoughts online about that statement.

Playing tourist in my own town

Image by Brother O’Mara
I live in New Orleans yet I never go to Bourbon Street. It was somewhere in 2005 when I last spent more than five minutes on the touristy section of Bourbon. It’s just … kind of like a part of the city that doesn’t actually exist to those of us that live here. Still, my wishing that it didn’t exist doesn’t make it so, and I had the realization tonight that I might as well go document it since out of all the types of stereotypical New Orleans photos I have taken, well, I didn’t have a good one of drunken tourists.

Note: this was taken at 11 PM (read: early yet) on a Friday night in the middle of summer (read: the slow season). If you think this is bad you can’t even imagine what it’s like during tourist season.