Our Patron Saint of Awesome

This is Lazy Lester. Follow the link for the bio, but the short form is that he was playing the Ponderosa Stomp and he made himself available to anyone who wanted to talk to him about anything at all. He was prone to drop wisdom on the people heading off to the Stomp.

"You girls shouldn't smoke," he told two ladies as they walked by. "It makes you look trashy."

Chris and I decided he is just one of those musical people who has a song pulsing through him every moment of every day. That is some variation on a banjar he is holding. Chris and I wanted to purchase versions of the shirt he is wearing (basically, the shirt off his back) and he invited us back to his hotel room to do so.

"Hang on," he said. "Let me see if my wife is up or if she's asleep."

She was asleep, naturally, but not for long as Lester woke her up to help him find us shirts. We begged her pardon for the intrusion but she just laughed it off as though it happened to her all the time.

New Orleans: Or, How I Learned to Love Being Able to Dump My Cards and Live with the Hotel Firewall (Part I.)

I was sold on Cafe du Monde long before I had ever been -- two decades of hearing about how sticky the floors got in the late afternoon (after a full day of powdered sugar getting blown onto the floor by the gulf breeze) meant that it was a pilgrimage I had to make.

The menu follows from memory,

Cafe au lait, cafe latte, beignets, milk, chocolate milk.

There might be more, but not much more.

Fried dough with powdered sugar and coffee is as advertised -- a calorie, caffeine and sugar bomb of awesomeness, which served me well seeing as how I had arrived at 7:30 in the morning.

The cavalcade of deliciousness in the picture above cost four dollars. The water was best used to wash off your fingertips. I do not recommend wearing black.