Tuesday, December 13, 2005

village voice > news > Note From New Orleans by Anya Kamenetz

village voice > news > Note From New Orleans by Anya Kamenetz: "But in the past three weeks here, the following events have taken place in defiance of those words:

At least a thousand people turned up to an exhibition and signing of a photography book to benefit the city at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art downtown. Thanks to private philanthropy, the region's best botanical garden, at City Park, in mostly empty Lakeview, was replanted with camellias and strung with lights for a smaller version of the annual Celebration in the Oaks, where mobs of Catholic schoolchildren sang carols and drank cocoa as a loudspeaker blared “The Cajun Night Before Christmas.” It was absolute gridlock at the reopening of the uptown Audubon Zoo, where children lined up to buy Roman candy from the donkey cart and quieted down to hear the orangutan whistle on cue. Firemen and policemen and church groups and the 'hippies from Mississippi' and forestry activists from Oregon cooked and gave away hundreds of Thanksgiving dinners from the Ninth Ward to Jefferson Parish."

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