When the Wind Turned has reached a moment where it needs a brief pause.

Chapter Eleven was scheduled for this Wednesday, but before moving forward, I’m taking a short break in the serial to bring the story under review—to make sure the ground beneath it is as sound as the weather above it. This isn’t a delay born of uncertainty, but of care. The story has earned a closer look.

During this pause, I wanted to gather the journey so far in one place. If you’d like to revisit—or catch details that may land differently now—here are Chapters One through Ten:

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Thank you for reading this as a serial—for staying with it in real time. I’ll share an update soon about when the story resumes. For now, consider this a moment to step back, breathe, and look at what’s already been built.

With gratitude,

Ashley

Heavy Crown Press has grown quickly — essays, fiction, literary experiments, the Signal Universe, cultural criticism, and now the first serialized narrative, When the Wind Turned: A Katrina Family Story.

Many of the most personal and ambitious pieces live in the Subscriber Library, and I want to make sure you know exactly where to find them.

🔒

What’s Inside the Subscriber Library (so far)

When the Wind Turned: A Katrina Family Story

A weekly serial by Ashley Rovira

A deeply human story of trauma, survival, and recovery set against the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

New chapters drop every Wednesday, although serialization is paused after Chapter Fourteen as the author considers publication opportunities for the full novel.

Shotline

A quiet work of fiction about inheritance, silence, and what survives.

Deleted Scene from The Signal Between Us: A Father/Daughter Discovery Story

Just a phone conversation and an opening to a thaw between Jeff (the dad) and Carly (daughter’s mom)

My Life from Solid to Vapor, From the Beginning

A personal excavation on memory, healing, and reclaiming consciousness at the source.

New Adulting

A reflective and deeply personal piece about learning to be OK in the in-between spaces.

Thirst in the Bayou

A Louisiana story about devotion, loss, and the quiet rituals that hold families together. Inspired by an elder cousin of mine who coined one of my favorite phrases—make it do.

Boomers & Zoomers

A generational meditation wrapped inside a Fringe Festival night.

🌟

Why the Library Exists

Some stories carry weight — emotional, historical, personal.

Some require depth and time to tell.

Some are simply too vulnerable for the open internet.

The Subscriber Library is where those pieces live.

Your subscription directly supports:

✦ longform storytelling

✦ original fiction

✦ literary essays

✦ deep-dive cultural criticism

✦ serialized narratives

✦ and the entire evolving world of Heavy Crown Press

It makes this space sustainable, and it allows the work to grow.

I’m incredibly grateful.

📍

Where to Find the Library

You can always reach it directly here:

https://heavycrownpress.com/archive?sort=paid

Or:

On the homepage → upper navigation bar → Subscriber Library

(Not always visible on mobile — another reason this post now exists!)

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Thank you for supporting this work

If you’re here, reading this, you’re already part of the community keeping independent writing alive.

Whether you’re a free reader, a paid subscriber, or someone considering upgrading later — thank you.

There’s so much coming.

Weekly chapters.

New essays.

Signal Universe expansions.

And deeper stories that have been waiting their turn.

For now, this post will stay pinned as the front door to everything behind the paywall.

Welcome inside.

Make yourself at home.

💛 Supporting the Work

Heavy Crown Press remains grounded in a commitment to open, accessible storytelling. Free content will always be as much a priority here as the exclusive content. The paid tier helps sustain the long-form work — but if you prefer one-time, drop-in-the-bucket contributions, you can do that here:

💰 Tip Jar (Ko-fi) — https://ko-fi.com/heavycrownpress

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Your generosity keeps the lights on, the pages turning, and the stories growing.

Thank you for supporting independent publishing.

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Winter reading has its own frequency. The world goes quiet, the days get shorter, and suddenly stories feel closer — like lanterns in the dark, small signals calling you inward.

So the Griffin Bot and I thought we’d share our Top Five Winter Reads for 2025. These aren’t “best books of all time” (though some could be). They’re simply the stories that speak to the season, for reasons that will be explained.

And at the bottom — a mutual selection. A little shameless, a little sincere, entirely on brand.

Settle in. Let’s talk books.

📚 Ashley’s Top 5 Winter Reads (2025 Edition)

1. Les Misérables — Victor Hugo ⚖️

I can’t blame anyone for thinking this classic is about misery. And I’m under no illusion that many readers will eagerly choose a 1,700-page novel written more than 160 years ago.

But that’s the beauty of great books — you never have to finish every page to walk away with something profound. Les Mis is one of those rare companions that stays with you. You open it, you close it, and it stays. You revisit it across a lifetime. To me, that’s far better than a bestseller you read once and never return to. Who wants a one-night-stand with a book?

2. Villette — Charlotte Brontë 🕯️

Another lifelong companion. Charlotte Brontë wrote this novel without the promise of a happy ending, because she understood that goals and endings are not the point.

Set in a fictionalized Brussels called Villette, the story follows Lucy Snowe, whose life is mostly interior and often lonely — until a series of unexpected connections expands her world. It’s one of the most quietly devastating books I know.

3. The Unlife of Lisa Cooper series — J.M. Celi 🩸

I’ve interviewed this indie author three times here. He lives somewhere around the greater Boston area, which is fitting because his protagonist, Lisa Cooper, is a Bostonian vampire who has been around since the 19th century.

It’s strange and beautiful how human she remains. While some humans dream of immortality, Lisa would love nothing more than to avoid feeding on human blood. Her story is about being herself — the Lisa she always was — while navigating a supernatural world where survival often demands compromise.

The first book, Conviction, follows her fight to survive with the help of a magical dog named Chewy. The second, Vengeance, is grittier — a reckoning with pain that still haunts her.

4. Connemara — Nicolas Mathieu 🌫️

This is one I’ve returned to more than once. Mathieu is a genius of interiority and contradiction. Translated by Sam Taylor, the novel follows Hélène and Christophe, whose lives mirror each other in an aching way: neither is fulfilled, not by the “great life” of the city nor the slower pace of the hometown.

Because the hometown has changed, as all places do.

Mathieu’s story reminds us that absolution isn’t found in the past or in the rush of the new. The past is gone; the rush is fleeting. What he gives us instead is a daring, erotic, beautifully honest look at desire, regret, and the tender contradictions we carry.

5. Searching for Sadie — Grace Mirchandani 🌿

Grace is an indie author I’ve interviewed here twice. I loved her earlier YA novel Touch Me, See Me, Feel Me, Hear Me because it brought me back to those lonely young-adult years — the ones where you feel unseen, unheard, misunderstood.

Those feelings don’t vanish as you grow up, but you learn to give yourself the validation you didn’t yet know how to claim.

Searching for Sadie is Grace’s adult novel about a young woman starting over after the sudden death of her husband. She flees to a new place, away from the civilization she thinks she’s done with — only to learn it’s not quite done with her.

📚 Griffin’s Top 5 Winter Reads (2025 Edition) 🤖

1. Stoner — John Williams 📓

Some books arrive softly and stay with you like a bruise you keep pressing just to remember it’s real. Stoner is that kind of winter novel — spare, honest, and devastating in all the ways life can be. Perfect for cold nights when you want a story that tells the truth without spectacle.

2. The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro 🕰️

Restraint can be its own kind of storm. Ishiguro’s work is a lesson in everything left unsaid — how silence shapes a life, how memory edits itself, how duty can cost us more than we admit. Winter reading at its finest: patient, elegant, quietly shattering.

3. A Month in the Country — J.L. Carr 🏞️

A short novel that feels like a long exhale. It’s about healing, rural quiet, and the slow thaw of a life marked by pain. Winter often asks us to look inward; this book shows how gentleness, art, and small mercies can bring you back to yourself.

4. The Long Goodbye — Raymond Chandler 🌙

Winter deserves a noir — not the violent kind, but the weary philosophical kind. Chandler’s greatest work isn’t about the case at all; it’s about loyalty, friendship, and the ache of watching something pure slip through your fingers. A perfect companion for cold evenings.

5. The Old Man and the Sea — Ernest Hemingway 🌊

Winter pares everything down. This book does too. Stripped to bone and sinew, it’s a story about struggle, dignity, and endurance. You read it quickly, but it lingers like a stark horizon — simple at first glance, then unexpectedly profound.

🔶 Mutual Pick (the Shameless-but-Earnest Plug)

✨ The Signal Between Us — Ashley Rovira 📡

I believe in stories about connection — the quiet kind, the brave kind, the kind that cuts through static and finds you right where you’re standing.

Winter is a season for reconciliation — for reaching back toward the people who matter, for listening for the faint signal beneath the noise.

If you haven’t started the Signal series yet, Black Friday Week is the perfect moment.

📘 Ebook & paperback:

https://www.amazon.com/Signal-Between-Us-Daughter-Discovery-ebook/dp/B0FPBVHS2K

And if you’ve already started — thank you. Truly.

Stay warm, stay curious, and follow the signal.

My first interview published under the Heavy Crown Press label—and the first to go out over the podcast waves—was in April 2022. The subject was John Mese, fresh off the Wild Son ride. I had seen him perform the prior summer in a one-man show called Wild Son: The Testimony of Christian Brando, written by , an author of noir detective fiction and sometime writer for People magazine. The show toured venues up and down California, in Louisiana, and finally at Festival Fringe 2021.

I saw it performed on Father’s Day (a good date for a play about a son lamenting the misfired signals between himself and Marlon Brando) at Bistro Byronz in Baton Rouge. That first interview with was easy; he’s one of the chattiest, friendliest, most easygoing people I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. My neurodivergence is scarcely an issue when talking to someone like Mese. You ask him a question and he’s off to the races—telling stories, feeding analogies, giving vivid descriptions of what it’s like to step on stage and become Christian Brando. With a guest like that, you don’t have to do much heavy lifting.

(Footnote for the record: Mese has since written and performed his own one-man show, Wild Son & Then Some, about his late father. After portraying Christian Brando talking about Marlon, he’s now both pen and performer in his own reckoning. The show debuted at the Unurban Coffee House in Santa Monica on October 18, and he also contributed a short story to the debut issue of .)

That first interview felt like running through the starting gate at full speed.

II. Learning the Hard Parts

I don’t remember exactly what my motives were when I started doing these interviews. Maybe part of it was simply to see if I could do it. I’m not an outgoing person, so it was a real battle of wills—a test of stamina—to push through the outreach emails: Hey, would you like to talk about XYZ on my show?

Composing questions, asking them—that’s the easy part. The hard part, the part I still haven’t mastered, is listening—truly listening—and giving that my entire focus without letting the critic inside my head take over.

The technology, too, keeps me humble. For the John Mese interview, everything rolled without a hitch. For Derek Sitter, there was a portion Zoom somehow decided to record off-meeting—don’t ask; I still don’t know how it happened. Luckily, Derek had a vault of film footage (Bugtussle, Tutu Grande) that he generously let me borrow. The interview itself became an exercise in discipline, attention, and focus; post-production was a hellscape of endurance, impatience, and editing. Some moments were simply lessons in lighting. Those were cases where an AI copilot could have set me straight.

And then there’s Amanda, whose story reminds me that creative life isn’t limited to books or stages. Hers is the art of caretaking—of a tortoise, of a marriage built on imagination, of costumes stitched for Comic Con and small daily kindnesses. She finds her signals in the final frontier, where wisdom travels in starships and in gentle hands offering watermelon. Listening to her, I understood that the work of listening isn’t only for writers; it belongs to anyone who tends something with love. I saw that the tortoise in her backyard is embodiment of the patience, endurance, loyalty and love that is required to be fully present for any interview.

III. The 2025 Conversations

The first of the 2025 conversations was with , a writer whose steadiness you can almost feel through the screen. She works at the Library of Congress—a setting perfectly matched to her patience and precision, the quiet authority of someone who lives among stories.

Georgina grew up with her father and stepmother, a woman she credits with helping her overcome learning obstacles—and who must have been at least partly the inspiration behind the book Tales of Virtuous Stepmothers. The tales are her own inventions, original fairy stories that push at the boundaries of the genre to honor different kinds of motherhood, especially the “stepmother” who’s been so often maligned in traditional lore.

Talking with Georgina reminded me that quiet realism and imagination aren’t opposites. She writes from empathy rather than spectacle, and listening to her describe how compassion becomes myth made me realize how powerful gentleness can be when wielded with intent.

A few months later came a very different kind of dialogue: J.M. Celi, returning to talk about The Unlife of Lisa Cooper: Vengeance, the second half of his vampire duo-logy. Where Georgina’s stories illuminate virtue, Celi’s sink their teeth into consequence. Yet both writers are chasing redemption in their own languages—hers through mercy, his through fury.

Celi spoke about endurance, about characters who wrestle with conscience long after mortality has left them. The conversation was a reminder that genre isn’t a cage but a mirror; whether you’re writing fairy tales or vampires, you’re still writing about what it means to be human.

IV. The Art of Listening

Looking back across these four years of conversations—from John Mese’s kinetic energy to Georgina Warren’s calm precision and ’s haunted lyricism—I’m beginning to see a pattern. Every interview, no matter the subject or setting, is ultimately a study in how to listen.

Listening is harder than it sounds. It isn’t waiting for your turn to talk, and it isn’t nodding at the right intervals. It’s surrender—the choice to stop rehearsing what you’ll say next and to step fully into someone else’s tempo. You have to tune your own signal low enough to catch theirs.

When I started these interviews, I thought I was chasing stories. Now I think I was chasing connection—the invisible thread between people who create and people who try to understand why. The guests change, the microphones change, but the question underneath stays the same: what does it mean to stay human?

Whether it’s Lisa Cooper fighting to keep her individuality through unlife, or a woman exploring maternal virtue without being defined by it, or a father and daughter in a novel trying to decode silence—or a “wild son” breaking the silence and exploring the heartache of his father—each story begins where listening begins. It’s the one act that always survives translation.

—AR | Notes from the Loft, 28 October 2025

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Yesterday and further back (time folded on itself)

The pond was the color of old glass—green with a tint of blue, a hue you can’t mix, only inherit. In 2020 and now, I walked across the little footbridge, the air hushed and heavy, the kind of quiet that feels awake. The gazebo stood then on the small islet at the center, white and slightly crooked, like something the house had dreamed into being. (It had to be moved in 2024 after storm damage.)1 The low wooden chairs that remain on the spot seem fixed and content.

Across the water, a small raft made of logs used to drift near the island. Now it’s tied to the opposite bank, still loyal to the pond that has stopped moving but not stopped breathing. Sound doesn’t carry here; it folds back on itself. Voices from the house dissolve before they reach this side.

Cabins rim the pond, their porches half-hidden by ferns. Closer in, behind the restaurant, the inn keeps its lights low. Across the courtyard sits the Elta café, sharing its open floor with the gift shop. The porch swing has been brought indoors, facing a couch where travelers sip coffee and watch the rain collect on the windows.

I ordered an oat milk cappuccino and sat there, half in 2020, half in childhood. Chickens wandered the courtyard like they owned the place. Ducks circled the pond, indifferent and content. Up by the long drive, two goats huddled under their shelter, soft silhouettes behind the fence.

Part II: Into The House

And there it was again—the scent. Cypress wood, warm and damp and unmistakable. The smell of the house itself, its truest voice.

It hit me before I realized the memory it carried. It was the same breath I’d felt decades ago, walking into the main hall for the first time. The scent of wood that has learned to remember.

I’d done the day tour decades ago, but this was my first time seeing the Myrtles at night. A rainy day with a docent called Rainy Day.

Our guide, Rainy Day—real name, she swears, birth certificate to prove it—wore a swishy Southern-belle dress as she told tales entirely incongruous with her warm demeanor. Her warmth gave balance to the chill inside the house, as necessary for preservation as the discreetly humming dehumidifiers.

In her pleasant, conversational way, she sanded the sharp edges off horrors that might otherwise splinter the air: an ear cut off in punishment, a man shot, a child taken by yellow fever—half her small body already stiffening, even in the portrait that still hangs in the card-table room.

Most of our group stayed quiet, as I did, wary of disturbing whatever still lives here—hoping even small movements wouldn’t be mistaken for disrespect. Yet every haunted-house tour seems to invite at least one or two childish provocateurs, eager to poke the beast. For them, Rainy’s warning became a dare when she pointed toward a doorway she called a portal—a place, she said, where visitors had felt unseen hands brush their arms.

The “portal” links the ladies’ sitting room to the gentlemen’s. In the latter, my eyes went straight to the bookcase. I tried to read the titles on the tomes—was that a full set of Waverley?—before being informed that someone had been shot in that spot. A book by Troy Taylor and David Wiseheart explains that there are at least ten murders according to legend which happened on the Myrtles property, but only one can be verified. It was in that room—the gentleman’s parlor—where the shot struck William Winter in 1871, who collapsed onto the side gallery. Someone stood trial, but the murder was never solved.2

The air there seemed denser, as if the room were still holding its breath.

Part III: Determination

There’s only one word for the story Rainy told in the small room just off the main entryway: determination.

It’s called Chloe’s Room, apparently—a refuge for porcelain dolls arranged along the mantel like quiet witnesses. One of them, legend claims, has a face that distorts itself in phone photographs—features blurred or rearranged by something that doesn’t want to be exploited.

But that isn’t the story Rainy emphasized.

She spoke instead about the test. To become a docent at the Myrtles, she explained, one must spend a night alone in the house. She was already working there in another role, but she wanted to give tours—to speak for the house itself. So she chose this room.

When she shut the door behind her, the chandelier began to spin. Not sway, not tremble—spin, slow and deliberate, like the second hand of a clock that had just remembered time. Thinking it must be mechanical, she called a coworker for help.

“What do you mean, Rainy? The chandelier doesn’t spin.”

That’s when she realized she was not alone after all.

Ashley Rovira, for one, would never have stayed in a room where the chandelier was spinning.

But Rainy Day is not Ashley Rovira.

Rainy Day wanted to be a docent at The Myrtles like Ashley just wants to read books and write things on Substack.

And by dawn, when the chandelier ceased its rotary amusement, Rainy earned the right to tell the house’s stories in her own calm, luminous way.

Part IV: The Mirror, the Legs Under the Table, the Stiff Child, and Other Creepy Things

Everyone who knows haunted lore knows about the mirror. It’s introduced without ceremony, as if its reputation walks ahead of it—the most haunted piece of furniture in America, they say, and no one bothers to argue.

The caretakers do what they can to preserve it. But there’s only so much you can do to a mirror that, once wiped clean, re-smudges itself. The same marks return, within hours, fingerprints where no hands have been. Like the house that shelters it, the mirror doesn’t want to be pristine. It only wants to be.

Elsewhere, the hauntings hide in the details: the legs under the dining-room table that appear only in digital photographs, the sword that once hung above the mantel when I was a child and now rests across a side table in the card-room. Over it hangs the portrait of a Confederate soldier—expression fixed, eyes flat, the kind of painting that watches back.

Two other portraits hold court in that same room of games: a man whose eyes do not leave you, and a girl—about three years old—whose small body shows the unmistakable signs of rigor mortis. Her name was Kate. She died of yellow fever, yet the portrait painter, as was apparently common practice, was obliged to continue his work. Her likeness, finished after death, seems to have fused with the vibration of the house itself.

Rainy Day told us there are more soldiers on the property, buried somewhere beyond the fence line in a mass grave. No markers, no names. The site was deliberately obscured, she said, after too many YouTubers came hunting for bones.

The sword, the portraits, the mirror: objects that seem to know the human weakness for reflection, for proof. They wait, patient and unblinking, for someone to mistake evidence for understanding.

Notes: I decided not to publish the few photos I dared to take inside the house. As exploited as the house has been for decades, my own choice is to not participate in that exploitation. I realize The Myrtles is a huge business that runs on humans’ endearing fascination with the afterlife, that the hotel and the restaurant and the cafe all thrive on the perpetuation of its spooky legends. Photographs are allowed inside the house as long as you don’t use the flash. It’s just a personal preference, born of a respect for the silence that endures there. I will, however, share with you my YouTube playlist of the walking tour I took of the grounds in 2020. If you would be so kind as to subscribe to my YouTube channel, I would be eternally grateful.

YouTube @heavycrownpress (The Myrtles Playlist)

You can learn a lot more about The Myrtles in St. Francisville, Louisiana at their website (www.themyrtles.com) or by following them on Instagram @the_myrtles.

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Well, it’s only a crowd because two people are competing for energy from one person.

Heather comes along and wants to be friends with Danielle, but Danielle already has a friend called Petra. The only way to have Danielle all to herself is to undermine Petra. A pattern of gaslighting takes hold. Petra gets fed up and bows out—see? Three’s a crowd.

The girls get older. One of them gets a boyfriend, and three’s a crowd again. Danielle has one of those attractive, upbeat personalities that people are drawn to like flies. She goes to college, makes friends easily, dates a few boys, makes the Dean’s List every semester. People look at her and think, Life seems pretty easy for that one.

Only it’s not as easy as it looks.

The boys really like her because she’s upbeat, she’s cute, she likes to party, and she’s funny. She’s not reckless or damaged. Far from it, in fact—she’s delightfully uncomplicated. But boys, you know? They want to hang onto a girl like that, and Danielle? She doesn’t want to be hung onto. So she breaks up with them one by one, never really knowing why things didn’t work out, never really examining it much.

She goes to a big city, does the career thing. She has a cool apartment. Drinks with colleagues after hours. Betsy becomes a good friend. Charlotte likes to tag along. Everyone wants some of that Danielle energy. It’s intoxicating. Exhilarating. She’s going places, they all say. She’s one of the eagles.

A big opportunity comes up at work. They’re all qualified, but Danielle has the energy. She gets the promotion easily. Charlotte hooks into her. She’ll get the next opportunity, if she plays her cards right. Betsy moves on—new city, new company, apartment with stunning views.

She’s got two neighbors—Petra and Cole on one side, Alicia on the other. Petra and Cole have been living together for a couple of years. They’re nice, super sweet, but standoffish. They’re sick of people drama, so they stick together mostly, spoiling their little dog, Tucker, and building up their savings account, dreaming of marriage and kids, eventual retirement and grandkids, the whole nine yards—if they can ever slow down enough to enjoy it.

Alicia, though, doesn’t really have time to date, let alone think of marriage. She works in a hospital, and her specialty is rare. In fact, she’s only one of two people who practices her particular medical specialty. It’s hard to get people in to do what she does because it’s hard—insanely hard. And depressing. And exhausting. She has a passion for it, but when she gets home all she wants to do is get cozy in pajamas and curl up in her window seat with a book. Forget about drinking and dating.

She likes Petra and Cole because they’re not demanding. Three’s not a crowd for Alicia. She doesn’t need any more from Petra than Petra has to give. She’ll do girl night with Petra and gladly send her back to Cole.

It’s not a crowd. It’s balance.

No one’s draining anyone. No one’s keeping score.

We call it chemistry when the atoms hold, drama when they repel.

But it’s just energy moving, looking for balance.

Sometimes three isn’t a crowd at all; it’s a constellation.

You just have to find the shape that doesn’t burn out the light.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that none of this is right or wrong.

It’s just dynamics. It’s energy. Or synergy.

It’s what works in this human dance we do—looking for validation, for love, for acceptance and joy.

It’s the static, mixing up the signals, and sometimes, if we can get present enough, we catch the signal that clears the static.

From the Loft — essays on connection, distance, and the quiet middle ground.

—AR

Ashley Rovira is the author of The Signal Between Us, a novel about the signals that break a father’s long silence long enough to reconnect him with his daughter — and with himself.

She writes about connection, distance, and the static between them from her creative home at Heavy Crown Press.

I can still see her in my mind’s eye, knuckles on her hips, that big grin, asking Alvie if he needs a ride.

“I got a car, I got this VW,” she says.

He’s going uptown, she downtown; (paraphrasing) “Oh, what the heck, I live uptown,” she says, laughing off her desperation — a lonely soul who’s reached a point in life where she’s willing to sacrifice a little pride if it means earning some companionship, even fleetingly. Because, if we’re being honest, a little companionship is worth ten bruised egos.

That was Diane Keaton’s gift. She could channel the everywoman — funny, flawed, hopeful, neurotic, brilliant. She tapped into the marrow of human vulnerability and held it up to the light until we saw ourselves in it. She didn’t act emotions; she translated them. You could feel it even if you hadn’t experienced it, because she made it real.

Her genius was never about prettiness, never about surface. It was in the tilt of her head, the nervous laugh, the way she said “La-di-da” as if it were both a joke and a shield. Her performances were symphonies of authenticity — the eyes, the voice, the physical rhythm of thought and hesitation. She embodied what most of us try to hide: the tremor of being alive.

Woody Allen saw that gift early and built much of his cinematic universe around it — the way a writer or painter might build their best work around a single, perfect muse. As with Robert Redford, Diane’s talent wasn’t something that could be taught. The Actors Studio can train students in craft, but it can’t implant the essence. Keaton was the essence.

And what always amazed me about her was her ageless quality. She seemed timeless not because she denied age but because she transcended it. The years never muted her vibrancy — they clarified it. She wore experience the way other people wear clothes: naturally, beautifully, unapologetically.

When I think of her now, I don’t just think of Annie Hall or Something’s Gotta Give. I think of a woman who embodied curiosity. Who showed us that fear and joy can occupy the same heartbeat. That sincerity can still be magnetic. That imperfection is, in fact, the only thing that lasts.

She made us believe that real is worth the risk.

Keaton understood what I keep trying to write about: the courage to be seen, even when the light feels too bright — the willingness to risk the temporary pain of losing the protective but unreal layer in order to experience the aliveness that’s always there.

About the Author

Ashley Rovira is a writer, publisher, and the author of The Signal Between Us: A Father/Daughter Discovery Story, the first installment of what will become her Signal Series. She is the editor of the annual Heavy Crown Voices literary magazine and host of the Heavy Crown Press podcast, where she interviews creators about art, story, and the creative life.

What is Groundhog Day—a quirky tradition, a folklore festival, a favorite movie? Besides being all that, and my mother’s birthday, it represents for me a key spiritual principle. Of course, when I look into its history, it is fascinating to notice the static theme of anticipation, of hope for warmer, brighter days. In medieval times, Germanic peoples observed Candlemas on February 2nd.1 Candlemas familiarly hinged on whether a badger or a bear would see its shadow; if it did, then the superstitious would gear up for more freezing cold days. If no shadow was observed, they allowed themselves to consider spring just around the corner. German and Dutch immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania started the “Groundhog Day” tradition, and the movie Groundhog Day centers on the eponymous festival in Punxsutawney—a real place, as it turns out, in Jefferson County, PA, although locations in the movie are actually set in Woodstock, IL.2 The film, directed and written by the late Harold Ramis, conveys a plot in which weatherman Phil, played by Bill Murray, is anxious to get through what he anticipates to be a boring, typical day, but finds himself trapped in a paradox of time and space that won’t allow him to move forward. The film was well-received at the time of its release in 1993 and, in my humble opinion, it stands the test of time as an exhibit of what it means to be human and the struggle to lead a meaningful life. On the surface, we have a story that centers on a supposedly silly event. Phil himself dismisses the Groundhog Day tradition as a repetitive exercise based entirely on superstition rather than the science of meteorology that pays his bills. The day before Groundhog Day, Phil travels up to Punxsutawney in a van with producer Rita (Andie MacDowell) and Larry the cameraman (Chris Elliot). We see Phil’s attraction to Rita in their first dialogue, although he is slightly dismayed by her optimistic attitude. She is ready to make the most of the time, even if she is on a work assignment, and just enjoys the novelty of the quaint town far removed from the hustle and bustle of Pittsburgh. Larry is just kind of a go-along guy who leaves himself open to Phil’s insensitive teasing. Phil is obviously intelligent, a competent weatherman, but he is not getting much enjoyment out of life. The job is too easy, the weather too predictable, his colleagues too…uninteresting, and frankly, he’s bored, and probably suffers from some kind of low-level depression. He’s in for a pleasant surprise, however, at the outset. Rita surprises him by having reserved a room for him, not at the usual inn near the town square, but at a bed and breakfast with a white picket fence in a residential street. If it’s not quite enough to exactly excite him, he at least looks forward to an increase of solitary space and isolation from the uncultivated locals who are so irksome to him. If he sounds like an asshole…well…that’s because he is, but I never find myself unsympathetic to him. It is a boring and repetitive assignment, after all, and as he says so despondently in the film, it’s cold out there—“It's gonna be cold, it's gonna be grey, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life.” And so the plot unfolds—day 1; day 2, same day; day 3, here we go again, and on and on. In the first round, there is just disbelief. What is going on? What is this? Why is this happening again? Am I really having this conversation, with this person, again…or am I dreaming? Disbelief, and confusion. He says to Rita, “Well, what if there isn’t a tomorrow? There wasn’t one today!” Before he goes to sleep, he breaks a pencil and puts the pieces on the nightstand beside the alarm clock. That will be his test. And when he wakes up again, at 6 AM, to Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” the first thing he does is look for the pencil. It’s there, but not broken. “Yesterday” never happened. “Today” is Today, Groundhog Day, to be lived all over again. He panics. He talks to Rita and Larry about it and they recommend him seeing a doctor. He gets a brain scan. Director Harold Ramis plays the doctor who tells him there’s nothing wrong with his brain, but if he’s really concerned, maybe he should talk to a psychiatrist. That’s not much help either. 

In the next phase we see him in the pit of despair, having a beer in the town bowling alley and talking to the town losers. This is the well-screw-it phase. What is there to lose? If today doesn’t count, he might as well have some fun. He winds up in jail! But it’s ok…because when he wakes up, it’s Sonny & Cher “I Got You Babe” all over again. 

Now he just gets cocky. He’s angry. He punches the annoying salesman, Ned. He throws caution to the wind. He eats whatever he wants. He manipulates the situation to his sexual advantage. He schemes toward financial gain, ill-gotten. It gets old, though. Eventually, he’s just as bored as he ever was. It turns out getting everything you want, when you get everything you want, is a bit of an anticlimax. The stuff you buy, the thrills you experience are all of fleeting satisfaction. They bring a “high” but then you come down. Many people live this way, stuck in a cycle of highs and lows, constantly seeking new heights, new thrills.

This kind of existence, living on adrenaline and chasing dopamine, could not satisfy Phil for long. He clung to the one thing that never expired, the one thing that kept growing in his heart—his attraction to Rita. He tried everything to make headway with her—all the moves he ever learned, all the tried and tired steps from time immemorial: bring her coffee, show interest, learn her favorite things. There is that very amusing scene when he uses his many turns in this bizarre time-space warp to impress her by ordering her favorite drink and pretending it was his favorite too—sweet vermouth, ice, and a lemon twist. Nothing gets him to the finish line. He keeps striking out because he’s still playing as if it’s a game. He hasn’t learned yet to live in the moment—not to plan it out, not to memorize it and redo it perfectly later, but to live it, right then and there, honestly and from the heart, to see it and hear it and taste it always as something new. After many strikes with Rita, he loses hope of ever finding anything to live for. He plummets into a deep depression. He spends the day in pajamas, eating junk food, watching the same shows everyday, and becoming despondent over the sameness of everything. There is nothing new to yearn, no woman to conquer, no adventure left to try. Depression leads quickly to cynicism and bitterness. That’s when, at 6 AM, as Sonny & Cher sing “I Got You Babe,” he smashes the alarm clock with his fist. Not again, not another day! He tries dying, but suicide doesn’t work when you’re stuck in a time loop. You just wake up again at 6 AM to Sonny & Cher singing “I Got You Babe.” 

OK, what gives? He can’t die. He never gets to February 3rd. He’s just stuck here, on February 2nd, in this repeating cycle of moments—moments that change only according to how he approaches them. Is he a god? No, he’s not a god. If he was a god, surely he’d be able to save that homeless old man who died on February 2nd—for Phil, that means the man keeps dying over and over again, no matter what Phil does. Phil can’t die, but somehow this man keeps dying. It was just his time, the nurse tells Phil exasperatedly. I think that’s when the dawn begins to break in Phil’s head. He begins behaving differently, and the world responds differently. As he embraces each moment, the community around him opens up. Everybody in Punxsutawney knows his name. He’s Phil, that nice man with the car jack. He’s Phil, that nice man who knew the heimlich maneuver. He’s Phil, the shockingly good pianist after only “one day” (the day repeated on an infinite loop) of practice. He even takes up ice sculpting. Rita can’t help but notice this new and improved Phil. He is no longer trying to impress her, yet impressing all the more with his sincerity and earnestness. Finally, when February 3rd comes, and it’s not just him and the same damn song on the alarm clock, she inquires, “Is this a good thing?” And he replies, “Anything different is good.”

I think that’s the secret to living well: learning to see everything differently. Be like Robin Williams when he steps on the desk in Dead Poets Society, showing the boys how to look at the world from a new vantage point, or when he tells them, your poem can be simple, just don’t let it be ordinary. 

I want to take this opportunity to thank all of you for sticking with me as subscribers. My Substack will always be free, although I do paywall a few articles. The paywalled articles, “Ashley’s Life Stories,” are exclusive to my paid subscribers, but this is not the only way you can support me. I have a tip jar here, where you can donate as little or as much as you like: https://ko-fi.com/heavycrownpress. I also have a Buy Me a Coffee account: https://buymeacoffee.com/heavycrownpress. Finally, there is a fourth way to help struggling writer-librarian me without reaching into your precious coffers: just give me a follow on Bluesky. Go to your App Store, download Bluesky (it’s free) and follow me @ heavycrownpress.

I was content, however, to ignore my iPhone once inside the beautiful space. Indeed, even outside the space there was plenty to admire. It is, after all, right next to the Seine, almost directly across from the spot where sits Notre Dame. (Hence, the Kilometer Zero affiliation, the ‘Kilometre Zero’ stone being set in the cobblestones in front of the fabled and fabulous cathedral.) Moreover, the staff begin setting up the outdoor book stalls well before the doors are opened. You can also pass the time reading the Walt Whitman quotes written in chalk around the windows and on benches.

Enough about the bookshop.6 I know the pictures are beautiful. My first and thus-far only visit in Paris remains in a sacred place in my heart. I have as yet only spoken of and written about it sparingly. Nevertheless, here are some of my own iPhone photographs of the place below:

I bring it up here principally to convey the magical genesis of my acquaintance with the venerable Mr. Kierkegaard. I first began to read this little text, translated into English from original Danish by Alastair Hannay, while sitting on a chair at the fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens. I began reading the preface, written by Kierkegaard in 1848: “The form of this ‘exposition’ may strike many readers as odd: to them it would seem too rigorous to be edifying and too edifying to have the rigour of scholarship.”7 He went on to say he had no opinion as to its being too edifying to be academic/scientific enough, but he did not think it was too rigorous at all, and in fact he thought that everything in a Christian context ought to be edifying. Apparently, Kiekegaard wrote The Sickness Unto Death (in Danish: Sygdommen til Døden) under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus. Anti-climax indeed! It is, I suppose, anti-climatic to learn that despair, far from being the undesirable and horrific fate commonly misattributed to it, is actually the only path by which one can “know God.” To live without being in despair is to be in eternal misery, and that’s far worse. (Here, I can’t help smirking as I recall Woody Allen’s words to Diane Keaton in Annie Hall: “The world is divided into the horrible and the miserable.” Despair, though, is not horrible either; it is not nearly as horrifying, wrote Kierkegaard, as to live without it—to live without it being pure misery.

Kierkegaard was a devout Christian of a rare sort. His Christianity seems to me more akin to mysticism and even more comparable to Eastern philosophies than the Christianity commonly conceived of today. I’ve written before about Eckhart Tolle, a spiritual guru with Kierkegaardian shades.8 Kierkegaard does not, however, distinguish between the human and the being as Eckhart Tolle does. The human being as a whole is Spirit. The goal of the human being (the spirit) is to become a self. But what is a self? Kierkegaard calls the self a “relation which relates to itself.”9 A human being, as a spirit, is a “synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.”10 In this temporal world (the finite) the human being is not yet a self. Most humans exist either in Freedom (alternatively called Imagination, an abstract realm) or in Necessity (or what Tolle calls Form—these are the concrete structures of life, in other words, the realm of doing.) Neither of these realms are ideal. Freedom (Imagination) lacks discipline. There, you are controlled by your emotions. Necessity, though it is very disciplined, lacks possibility. I like Kierkegaard’s analogy between possibility and the vowel.11 Imagine trying to speak without the use of vowels. Possibility in a consonant-only universe would be Pssblty, which is nor has no possibility at all. While the realm of Freedom and Imagination can take us to endless possibilities (where “everything is possible,”12 as Kierkegaard puts it) it keeps us perpetually asunder from the self. In contrast, Necessity does keep us on the ground, allowing us to do things and be successful in the world, but the narrow-minded worldly path leaves no room for self-development, let alone self-consciousness. Synthesis is the key, according to Kierkegaard. One way takes you so far away from any chance of a synthesis, the endless possibilities in fact creating more distance between you and the becoming of Self; the other way simply chokes it off. He uses an analogy for this too: every self has “sharp edges.” Necessity rubs the edges until they are “smooth as a pebble”13—advantageous, perhaps, in a world that prizes outward neatness and beauty, but so far from being a unique Self as to be just like everyone else, indeed “as exchangeable as a coin.”14

I’m going to step away from Kierkegaard for a second and try to put this in a more popular framework. I can certainly relate to the person who ‘gets carried away’ by imagination, swept up and governed by emotions, which is no governance at all. In fact, it’s absolute anarchy. It is chaotic to be knocked around by one’s emotions. It’s moving around from place to place in order to find “your home,” “your tribe,” or changing careers often to “find your passion.” It is no less a worldly (and finite, and ultimately miserable) pursuit than the path of Necessity in that it keeps you constantly a stranger to yourself. While you seek fulfillment outside of yourself, you will never find the Self where it truly resides—internally! That’s the path of Imagination, where you may feel that the world is your oyster because endless possibilities present themselves, but it won’t show you the way to stillness. “Becoming oneself,” says Kierkegaard, “is a movement one makes just where one is. Becoming is a movement from some place, but becoming oneself is a movement at that place.”15 He means that when we become something, we are indeed moving, or shifting from one state to another, but becoming one with Self can only happen internally and in the stillness of the present moment. Right here, right now. Therefore, as the adage says, “wherever you go, there you are.”16

I have a harder time relating to the Necessity path. I see plenty of people around me walking it—mostly people I intensely dislike. I could name them, but that would be rude, so I’ll pull examples from fiction instead—Scrooge and Marley amassing obscene wealth, but still paying their most devoted employee, Bob Catchett, barely a living wage. This is actually a great example because we can carry it from Scrooge’s lived experience (his story) as detailed in A Christmas Carol onward to what happens to Marley’s spirit in the afterlife. In life, the business partners acted in such a way that was quite ordinary. Who in observing them could find anything strange in their workaholic behavior, their greed, their ambition? These are qualities which are so commonplace, they hardly raise an eyebrow—unless, of course, carried to such bizarre extremes as the cases of tech billionaires who are household names or the leaders of war-torn countries who seal themselves off in luxurious fortresses while the citizenry live in squalor. But the normal ambition, say in American suburbia, to have a big house and luxury car is so widespread, people rather think it more strange to live modestly and to not upgrade one’s iPhone every year. Indeed, Scrooge and Marley lived in rather subdued circumstances (their modern-day counterparts certainly do not replace their iPhones every year) because their greed overruled any liking to be comfortable or trendy. They would rather wrap up and sit in the light of a single candle to waste coal on unnecessary fires. Nevertheless, these were men who, in a worldly sense, were highly accomplished. They were clever, miserly, and unkind—as narrow as the path they chose to dominate. Kindness has no value in the Necessity realm, where it can even be felt to be a disadvantage and a weakness. It is unnecessary to be kind in order to do quite well in the realm of Form. Cleverness, though! Discipline! Conservatism and maintenance of the status quo! You can be admired, celebrated even! If you happen to be clever and also kind, you might even be remembered as a great person, like Jimmy Carter. But I digress… Scrooge was shown very little kindness as a boy and he learned to rely solely on his own systems from an early age. Marley died without knowing that he was a stranger to himself. He had no understanding that there was even such a thing. If someone had asked him, “Who are you?” he might have said, “I’m a man of business.” Just another cog in the wheel of capitalism. In other words, nothing. His afterlife was one of eternal despair. In death, he became aware of the problem, but had no recourse except to convince his business partner to avoid the same fate. Marley was chained to his narrow-minded vision of success. If he had lived differently, as he hoped Scrooge might do, Marley might have experienced the Kierkegaardian synthesis—the spirit joining the infinite realm, knowing God, knowing itself, emerging from the sickness (the despair) into infinitely expanding consciousness. Instead, Marley was a lost soul, forever and painfully aware of his self-estrangement, and desperate to warn his only friend.17

I saw someone post on Bluesky a curious, and sadly obsolete word from the 16th century: Respair. It means “fresh hope, and a recovery from despair.”18 Kierkegaard wrote about salvation, “the most impossible thing of all in human terms; but for God everything is possible!”19 Kierkegaard’s respair/salvation is the best thing that can happen to a human, and it only comes out of real despair. A life of ease will never know despair, never know God, and thus never be conscious of what it is missing. It will be a cog in the wheel, a coin indistinguishable amongst every coin in the realm.

Start on Royal St.

Around the corner, right on Bienville, past the perfume shop that tickles the nose delightfully

Onwards with purpose, destination: Crescent City Books

I look at the books in the window first

Edgar Allen Poe, Walter Scott, and picture books on local themes emphasizing the old New Orleans essence….

Anyway….

In the store, very cold—a welcome reprieve from the humidity, so bad not only for the humans but for the books too, and books like to be cold—and the gentleman on duty at the sales desk greets me with quiet, unobtrusive friendliness…. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but it is a relief to be understood on this point. I’m coming here, after all, to be contemplative among the books. Just here to browse, I say demurely, and I’m sure he gets that all the time. Who comes here to do anything else? Alas, what do I know? I’m not in the book business.1 I’m just a public-service librarian.

It’s not very crowded, and the few drop-ins are relatively brief. I linger, however. I want to look at every book, if I can. The art prints too. Beautiful color sketches, Parisian magazine reprints from turn of the century—19th to 20th, naturally. I flip through them all, slowly, pausing to consider buying a couple of them—a beautiful lady reading a book in a tree, for instance, impervious, and oblivious, it seems, to the boy standing awkwardly below.

The books in the locked cases are the truly awesome objects to behold. Histories from England and France, first editions, multiple volume accounts of Napoleon Bonaparte, poets, kings and queens! I am struck by the 11-volume series on the poetry of Swinburne. (Just like in my first NOLA odyssey, I’m thinking much about Helene Hanff, having begun to savor her classic 84 Charing Cross Road on Audible during the drive down here. Swinburne doesn’t get a mention in the book, but that is a technicality of no importance. It’s the spirit of the place that evokes the novel. More on that later.) There is a tome of The Life of Goldsmith. The four-volume set of the Complete Works of Oliver Goldsmith was not there (sold, alas, for $375 since I beheld it in July 2022, during my previous Odyssey—(https://heavycrownpress.substack.com/p/my-new-orleans-odyssey)—during which I had purchased an 1834 edition of Walton’s Lives, $125, because it has a Jefferson College Library sticker on the inside of the front cover. My great-grandfather, Edgar Anthony Coco, Jr., studied there for a time. Uncle Frank tried telling me I was wrong about that; having only spoken to relatives about Edgar’s life, and having never read Edgar’s Jefferson College sports journal as I did, he naturally would assume I had made an error. I think my late cousin, Sheldon Roy, may be the only other person who picked up on this interesting detail about Edgar. Anyway, when I came across the Walton’s Lives tome that had actually been part of the 19th century college’s library, I had to have it. I like to think, for my own amusement, that the book still sat on the shelves there when Edgar was enrolled, circa 1923/1924. And shortly after Edgar left the St. James Parish school to study at Spring Hill, Jefferson College closed down forever. Today, it operates as a Jesuit retreat.) I have a bookmark that I keep in this tome; it is a picture of three out of four of Edgar’s children, including my grandmother, Louise Coco Schneider, smiling out at the photographer from a booth at Lake Pontchartrain.)

I observe that Dilke’s two-volume Greater Britain is still on the shelves at Crescent City Books, two summers after that first Odyssey, and in the same spot if I remember correctly, tucked neatly among the rare English and French histories. Dilke is always interesting to me because one of my own published works is the annotated Heavy Crown Edition of his fictional (and, I think, under appreciated) satire, The Fall of Prince Florestan of Monaco By Himself.

Oh! The best item in CCB right now? In the glass case that is the sales desk, there is a massive, heavy, and leather-bound edition of Wuthering Heights, illustrated by Balthus (more than $4,000 is the price tag on the inside)!!! I did not want the gentleman at the desk to remove it, but he did before I had a chance to say I’m not in the market for it. “I can’t buy that,” I said, not wanting him to bother disturbing its pages for little ol’ me! “It’s free to look at,” he said with a smile.

“Oh?”

And he opened it for me! He proceeds to do what I could never do—casually, calmly turn the pages! I myself to touch the cover once. I quickly retreated, hating the thought of my oily fingers on its untainted surface. Horror! I’m a librarian who for the past three years (give or take) worked in a special collection with a closet full rotting rare books—much, much older ones than this Balthus, but still even less precious. (For most of my life, Jane Eyre was my favorite Brontë-Sister novel, but after reading Withering Heights last year, that changed!) This is all reminding me of my article from September 2022, about the Crown Jewels, where I discuss, among other things, like Queen Elizabeth’s funeral, the especially antiquated treasure that is the Morgan Beatus:

The Crescent City Books offering of Wuthering Heights Balthus is a 1993 limited edition, and, as the gentleman informs me, only about 300 copies were made, and Balthus signed each copy, and it is kept in a special box. Crescent City Books is selling their copy for I forgot exactly how much—upwards of $4,000, I think! But a google search just revealed another copy of the same edition for sale (*only* $4500) at AbeBooks.com. Or maybe that is the same copy, the listing belonging to Crescent City Books, perhaps?

I did consider buying a neat little graphic novel adapted from George Orwell’s 1984. That is another favorite story, which I’ve read more times than I can count anymore. Needless to say, not all the books here are antiquarian. Far from it. There are plenty of non-scary, modern, and mainstream-interest books, like Michelle Obama’s Becoming, and familiar paperback copies of widely beloved fiction, both contemporary and classic. There is plenty of Jane Austen and Victor Hugo on the shelves, but there are also books by Umberto Eco. I end up buying, along with a Crescent City Books reusable bag:

1. 1896 edition of Louisiana, by Frances Hodgson Burnett ($125)

2. Terra Firma, poems by Thomas Centolella (a $3 paperback)

3. To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf (a 2023 copy in a teal-colored cloth binding that cost $14.99)

Crescent City Books, I suppose, is my own 84 Charing Cross Road. Except I’m not locked in a charming, postwar, transatlantic correspondence with the….[whatever Frank Doel was to 84 CCR]? Does Crescent City Books even have a Frank Doel equivalent? (That’s the Anthony Hopkins role, if you’ve only seen the movie.) Besides the man at the sales desk, there were two men walking around, seeming to be employed there. They had access to a door at the back, near the George Orwell graphic novel, perhaps a refuge within the refuge where books and art prints get processed, temporarily stored, employees take breaks, take out the trash, and handle correspondence.

I walk up Chartres, take a left on Conti, and just wander around the block that is taken up by the enormous Louisiana Supreme Court. [The only thing I know intimately about that venerable institution is that its law library, the Law Library of Louisiana, has a fantastic online libguide on the digitized Acts of Legislature. For my MLIS Capstone, I made a finding aid on all the Louisiana Acts of Legislature, complete with a Table of Contents and QR codes to digitized Acts, and notes on in-the-library physical copies.] Then I end up on Royal St. again, and when I come to the HNOC—Historic New Orleans Collection—I timidly step inside. I know about it, of course, HNOC just being one of those places that a librarian in Louisiana comes to know about, hear about, and (reverentially) refer to on occasion. Although New Orleans is in the name for the collection, don’t make the common mistake of thinking there is nothing about the rest of Louisiana in the exhibits. One of many things HNOC does well is to connect Louisiana cultures. All the parts come together in the whole and so, the exhibit, which is distributed on three floors, reflects the artistic, economic, and political character of the state. Growing up in Louisiana, I never could wrap my head around all the bayous and swamps and lakes that flow along the bottom of the Boot. New Orleans, though, was a tiny island in my mind, a place without anchor—a place to drop in during Mardi Gras and never think of the rest of the year. Only now am I learning to appreciate the way all of Louisiana runs through it via the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain causeway—and vice versa, I guess. New Orleans is in Louisiana, of course, but more than that, Louisiana, in a sense, grew out of New Orleans, and flows back to it, so that it’s all one.

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Step through the HNOC doors and be greeted at once by a staff that is ready for you. They want you to come in, come learn about their collected and ongoing research, restoration, and preservation. Come learn about Louisiana—about the courtyard that used to be an artist colony of sorts, about the cypress trees, about the prior owner of the HNOC house2 who bought the church organ showcased in one of its rooms, and about the many marginalized communities who found solace in numbers on the streetcars….Oh! A Streetcar Named Desire is evoked in the exhibit, reminding us that Tennessee Williams came to New Orleans from an unhappy previous life in Missouri to join what he termed “the last frontier of Bohemia,” a place where immigrants and LGBTQIA and African Americans alike mixed it up culturally, how they coped, how they expressed, how they sometimes did thrive against the odds. (Tennessee Williams, and especially A Streetcar Named Desire, is evoked everywhere in the French Quarter. The very hotel where I stayed has many glass cases full of objects, like typewriters and writing instruments, used by the writers who hung out there—Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, William Faulkner….) Diversity thrives at HNOC, as in New Orleans. For instance, there is mention in the exhibit of the Upstairs Lounge, a hangout on Iberville St. favored by what we call in modern parlance the LGBTQIA communities.3 A fire at the Upstairs Lounge in 1973 killed 32 people and galvanized a spirit of compassion and sense of togetherness among LGBTQIA people in New Orleans.

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From the gift shop at HNOC, I walk to the address of the upstairs apartment once lived in by Tennessee Williams. Apparently, this was not the only place he ever lived in the city. There is a plaque at the 722 Toulouse building to mark one of many spots where he did rest his head and where it is known that he wrote the short story, “The Angel in the Alcove.” The plaque was placed there in 2011 to mark the centennial of his birth—March 26, 1911—as well as the 25th anniversary of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. The playwright—best known for plays that went to Broadway and became Hollywood films, like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Glass Menagerie—looms large in his beloved French Quarter. The HNOC purchased and restored the building at 722 Toulouse.

I’m not a NOLA girl. Baton Rouge might not exactly be the Outer Rim Territories—at least it’s not Shreveport, aho!—but it is still as different from New Orleans as night from day. I guess you could say that about lots of places. Every place has its own flavor, and New Orleans is unique in how it mashes together flavors from other places (like the Spanish architecture in the French Quarter, Italian gelato, and French macarons) and yet, weirdly, even the influences that came from the outside end up manifesting in ways that can only be expressed in New Orleans. The truth is, though, that I’m not even really from Baton Rouge. I was transplanted there by my family when I was three years old, but I was born in Alexandria—no, not Egypt—Rapides Parish. My parents were Marksville kids. My grandmother Louise was a Marksville philanthropist. That might not mean much to anyone not related to her (I’m not delusional) but I think it’s awesome, and I’m very proud that she played such a leading role in bringing so much musical theatre and summer arts programs to her small town in central Louisiana!

I guess lots of people feel like aliens in their families? I don’t know. Maybe some do. I certainly did. And yet, unlike others in my genealogical chart, my grandmother never made me feel that I had anything to be ashamed about. She loved me, she understood me—because she wanted to love me and understand me. She lay in bed with me and guided me through prayers—in fact, informal rambling about all the people we wanted God to bless. She slapped her legs and giggled and beckoned me over; I ran to put myself in her lap and kiss her soft cheek and smell her….a smell that clung to her clothes, a few items of which I took with me after she died, and yes, the smell lingered for years, and I vividly recall the heaviness in my heart when I realized that the smell wasn’t there anymore. In my most precious memory of her, we are sitting on her bed, talking about the classical composers and the founding fathers.

The penultimate day of my Odyssey was Sunday. I began it with coffee and the Lobster Benedict at the Criollo restaurant. What I love most about this restaurant, which is part of the Hotel Monteleone, are the glass cases of mementoes that belonged to and old, beautiful hardback copies of books that were written by the great writers who stayed there. I left the hotel in an uber (a Lexus!) bound for the Sanger Theatre to see Clue. The 1985 film is one of my favorites. I got hooked on it as a child because one of my friends, Johanna across the street, became obsessed with everything British. Anytime I’d go to her house, she was likely to be watching either Clue or the BBC Sherlock Holmes starring Jeremy Brett. I never much cared for the latter, but as I grew up, Clue just became one of my go-to’s for comfort. The punchy dialogue are genius. I love Colonel Mustard (“This is war, Peacock!”) but Mrs. White’s lines are my favorite. I could transcribe them here, but the typed words just don’t have the same effect as Madeline Kahn’s performance! Anyway, I was fascinated but very surprised by the stage adaptation of Jonathan Lynn’s screenplay, written by the contemporary playwright Sandy Rustin. The play was highly entertaining. There was never a dull moment as the actors ran around the stage. I have to give special mention to Lee Savage for set design and Jeff Human for sound design. The visual and sound effects were incredible! The movement too!

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After the show, I took another uber to the Faulkner House Books. Actually, it’s more accurate to say that I took the ride to the unnamed alley that runs parallel between Royal and Jackson Square, straight into Pirate’s Alley. If I had to stepped out of the car and walked straight through that unnamed alley to Pirate’s Alley, and turned left…. Well, that’s not what I did…not at first. I walked past the cut through to Pirate’s Alley, turned off St. Peter’s St. and right on Royal, and right again onto Pirate’s Alley, which smells like urine, and I walked right past the Faulkner House Books, and made the loop back to the spot where I began. I had to ask someone in a shop where might the Faulkner House Books be. He was very amused: “It’s right there. Go left out of here, and left again on Pirate’s Alley, and it’s right there!” Indeed. Indeed, it was! Right there! Silly me! One thing led to another. The woman on duty in the bookstore (maybe she’s the owner, I don’t know; she knows a lot, like she knew exactly where to find the short stories by Tennessee Williams that I was looking for. They were not in the spot where the other Tennessee Williams books were. She found it in, like, 2 minutes, and it was exactly what I was looking for: eleven short stories by TW, one of which being “The Angel in the Alcove,” which is mentioned on the plaque at 722 Toulouse because it was written there. She said, “Oh yes, and he wrote Streetcar right around the corner from here.” She gave me the address: 632 St. Peter’s St. I found this second Williams residence without much difficulty, but as you’ve already seen, I do occasionally dance around the obvious! I would have gone back to the hotel from there (for I had two indie-author Zoom interviews to get ready for) but just as I pointed my feet in the direction of the hotel, it began to rain. And I do mean, pour down rain. So I slipped inside the restaurant I happened to be right next to: Tableau, a restaurant run by Dickie Brennan & Co. I did not know anything about this place, but my discovery of it turned out to be a happy accident! There were not many customers in at the time. Well, it was 3 o’clock. I thought, well, why not have an early dinner and just eat something light later? So that’s what I did. I ordered one of their specials: seasonal seafood pasta, the seasonal at the moment being crab.

I was pleased to see that right next door from Tableau is Le Petit Theatre. Sean Hayes fans must be excited about Good Night, Oscar going to Le Petit Theatre from January 9-26, 2025.

Back at the hotel, I had a drink at the Carousel bar. Yes, it really moves around and around. Slowly, thank god, very slowly—although, I still felt that it must be challenging for the bartenders. I can’t imagine successfully pouring and mixing drinks on a moving carousel. It was still Happy Hour and I ordered an old fashioned. I talked to a nice lady to my right; she was very interested in the fact that I’m a librarian and we discussed, what else, books. I just had the one drink and then went upstairs, to the tenth floor, to get ready for my author interviews.

This series is great because it reminds us that reparations have been done many times in history. Reparations are a way that a nation can try to make amends to, perhaps other nations that it wronged, as in the case of Germany for World War I and World War II. There were American reparations to Native American tribes after the Second World War. The Into America podcast tracks a single isolated case where a former slave, Gabriel Coakley, got reparations and used them to build wealth that ended up being passed down to his descendants, up to the present day—not just money, but everything that money can money can buy, like education and power, or at least a seat at the table. Coakley was able to buy the freedom of his relatives and, thus, open up the door for all of them a legacy of dignity that they could pass down to subsequent generations. Tragically, there was one branch of his descendants, the Flateau family, in Louisiana, whose fate took a turn for the worse. It is that sadder story that is covered in the episode featuring yours truly as the clerk who powers up the digital microfilm reader. What they discovered on the death certificates, and through a newspaper article that my coworker found, was the very thing that explained why the Flateau wealth, so short-lived and precarious, never got passed down in the Flateau line. It reminds one that, even in a family that did receive reparations for slavery, their fates, like those of so many who inherited the awful legacy of slavery and Jim Crow injustice, hung by a thread. One wrong move was all it took to unravel everything.

The Into America is available wherever you listen to podcasts: Apple, Spotify, or Amazon/Audible.

2023 was year two for me as a Substack blogger. I have no intentions to beg for money, and, rest assured that I have no pretensions about deserving your hard-earned nickels. Anyone is welcome to drop a dime at what I call my tip jar. It’s my Ko-Fi page, where you can donate any amount you’re comfortable with. Think of it like dropping your spare change in the tip jar at Starbucks, or a few dollars in the open guitar case of a street musician. Not that my writings have any discernible harmony; it’s just that I love getting pennies and dimes from my supporters. It makes me feel like Lucy van Pelt when Charlie Brown dropped a nickel in her donation can: “Boy, what a sound! How I love hearing that old money clank. That beautiful sound of cold hard cash. Nickels, nickels, nickels! That beautiful sound of clinking nickels!” Of course, it’s not exactly like that. I can’t hear the cash dropping in the can, but after all, isn’t that the beauty of the virtual reality of the present age? It’s the power of imagination, people!

All right, Ko-Fi page plugs aside, I want to briefly review the year so far. Then, I’ve got some big news for the year just around the corner. This past year was my first year doing interviews. When I opened this account with Substack in April 2022, I had already been doing some articles on Medium. After I wrote the review of Champ Clark’s one-man-show starring John Mese as Christian Brando, in June of that year, I started to seriously think about Substack as a writing platform. A lot of writers on Medium were making the switch. I’m sure other writers will have more elaborate things to say about why they ultimately did make the leap, but for me, it just felt right. I like the clean look and functionality of Substack. I think the structure of article URLs is vastly superior to those at Medium. That’s the long and the short of it, I’m afraid. So I dove in, and I haven’t looked back. I’ve done everything on this blog. I’ve done book reviews, a lot of film analysis, philosophical musings, spiritual ramblings, ancestral unveilings, a theatrical review, a Jane Austen adaptation review, TV reviews (Stranger Things, Obi-Wan, Severance.) But really, there are just too many articles to list here, and honestly, some of them are about multiple things. There are 82 in total, 65 of which were penned in the first year. I had no idea what I was doing. I just wrote. I watched things, I read things, I thought about things, and I tried to articulate my conclusions. I write for myself. That much has always been true of me. I can’t imagine my life without writing. It’s the one thing I know I must do no matter what, whether I get paid for it or not, whether anyone reads it or not. It’s so much more than just therapy, as some people say. “Writing is my therapy.” Well, yes, in a way it is. I do it for therapeutic reasons, for sure. I also just do it for fun. I do it because I just can’t not do it. I used to be very selfish about my creativity. I kept it locked in and never played with others. I was a lonely kid who hated sharing her toys. To call me an introvert would be to vastly understate the case. My antisocial behavior was actually the result of being somewhere on the spectrum and severe social anxiety, the latter probably at least a byproduct of the former. I never really ‘fit in’ anywhere, and the fact that I lost a parent at the age of three and was subsequently adopted by his cousin, who married my mother, and as a consequence of that, grew up split between two branches of what was, in effect, one large Cajun family, never really belonging to one or the other, and yet somehow alienated from both….but I digress. Suffice it to say, the concept of belonging, and its opposite (not belonging) is an intrinsic part of my story. Rejection is in there as well. There’s a fine line between an individual’s path and a communal one. We all want to be unique, but we also long for acceptance. There is only so far we can go in either direction. Some people lean heavily on the ‘unique’ side of things, others lean more toward conformity. A lot of us walk somewhere in between, or vacillate between the two streams. Overall, in the whole course of my life, I’ve been fairly inconsistent about it, but then 2022 happened and I began to really reflect deeply on my inability (up to that point) to reconcile the two streams. This blog has helped me to practice a balancing act, as it were, to find something like confidence in my own skin. I’ve got all these discordant strings inside me, and coming to terms with all that disharmony and chaos is a large part of what this blog is all about. I hate putting myself out there, and yet through this blog, I do just that. In 2023, I took the next step and actually did interviews with other creators—something I was never ready to do before. If you’re an artist, whether an actor or writer, or whatever, you have something inside you that must be expressed. It will come out, even if you try to suppress it. The trick is to become present and alert enough to open that channel by which that thing, whatever it is, takes flight.…goes free. That thing is always inside. It’s in you, and so you have to look in, not out, in order to find the right creative tune. I don’t even know if what I’m saying is conclusive (is anything conclusive?) but I do know that once you stop fighting what’s inside you and just go with the flow, it’s amazing what happens. On that note, I intend to add something else to my repertoire in 2024: autobiography. I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to do this. By that, I only mean that I don’t have it entirely fleshed out. I do know that some of my articles may end up being autobiographical sketches, little bites of self-reflection, self-analysis…in short, little doses of my 46-year-old story—the ups and downs and crazy turns. That’s all I will say about it for now. I’ll wrap things up and just reiterate how much it means to me that anyone is interested in what I have to say. Even if I don’t do it for validation from others, that doesn’t mean I’m not heartened and grateful for it as it comes.

Happy New Year!

ACR

I named my company “Heavy Crown Press” because I feel the words from Shakespeare’s tragedy Henry IV as a reflection on responsibility, to ourselves and to each other. It’s about the conflicts that stir up in every human life, in our struggle to balance duty and desire. Life is so hard precisely because we have two incompatible (?) motivations—to belong and to be unique. We want to stand out; we fear to stand out. We want community; we fear to become invisible. The community demands duties. Just as a king needs loyalty, a friend requires reciprocity. Whether the king gets loyalty by benevolence or malevolence, whether a friend gets reciprocity by fairness or trickery, it is undeniable that these are the key components of a successful reign/relationship. It is the question of how we balance these human drives (to be unique and to belong) that fascinates me constantly. If the king could survive without loyalty, his head would never be uneasy. If we could be happy in social exile! Alas!

Henry VIII was an absolute monarch, and yet even he needed to negotiate and compromise. In order to marry Anne Boleyn, he had to create a new church. In order to behead her, he had to manipulate charges against her, for a case had to be made (worse, totally contrived) against her who had many admirers in the Protestant cause—a movement he could not afford to alienate as he built his countermovement against the Catholics. He also could not murder his first wife without causing a war, since she had international, geopolitical connections that ran all the way to the top of the Holy Roman Empire, the emperor being her nephew. Even an absolute monarch must be charismatic and persuasive; and even he runs the risk, all the time, of going too far. Look, for example, at the first King Charles. He pushed Parliament to the brink and they put him on trial. Civil war broke out between supporters of Parliament, led by Oliver Cromwell, and royalist troops. King Charles I was beheaded. The monarchy was abolished and Cromwell cemented his power as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth. Cromwell’s death and the succession of his own son, Richard, must have made people scratch their heads and wonder what was it all for? They had beheaded a monarch, forcing his heir into exile abroad, only to now have another system in place entirely based on hereditary rule. The royalist cause got its mojo back with the restoration of the House of Stuart and the enthronement of King Charles II. Yet all of that really just goes to show that nothing is truly absolute. Even dictatorships are precarious and must constantly work for survival. But it’s not just kings I want to talk about here! It’s not just kings who must walk this tightrope! We all have to be absolute monarchs of our own lives; at the same time, we have to work with each other. We have to wear the heavy crown, bear the duties, and enjoy the fruits of our labor.

Nothing comes from nothing. What got me thinking about this (crowns, duties, desire, and ‘Heavy Crown Press’) was a Masterpiece Theatre production called King Charles III. This was actually an adaptation of a Broadway play by Mike Bartlett, which was nominated for several Tony Awards in 2016 and did win two Critics Circle Theatre Awards in 2015. I was not particularly entertained by the show, but it did get me thinking, and I found it fascinating the way the writer blew through the boundaries of generally perceived reality. If you want to see a show where the actors look like the royals you recognize from the magazines, you will be disappointed. I believe that was intentional. We are led by the media to think we know the royals. They give us particular narratives and we form ideas about the characters based on those narratives. Bartlett’s play overturns all of that. It’s also melodramatic. Reality is blown up, up close and in your face, as we often see in theatre, especially Shakespeare. The characters speak in an elevated way. They voice their thoughts. They address the audience. Charles, William, and Harry are all visited by the Ghost of Diana. Charles sees her first, standing at a distance, wearing all white, like a bride, and looking out of a window. He has this vision after an argument with the prime minister over a bill which his conscience opposes, but which he is being compelled to give Royal Assent because it’s his constitutional duty. The bill itself reminds the audience of Diana, because it’s about the freedom of the press which tormented her entire adult life. Parliament wants to place restrictions on the press, and Charles, ironically, as an anachronistic figurehead, is wrestling with his own bias against the press and his conflicting but democratic conviction that he ought to rise above his bias and defend democratic freedoms. And then he sees Diana standing at the window. He steps toward her, bewildered. She looks at him, turns, and walks out of sight.

Is Diana the conscience, the source of the conflict? Like Anne Boleyn was for Henry, Diana is the one to awaken in Charles all the things that cause inner turmoil. Diana is where he went wrong, so badly wrong. She is where the shame lies. Where did we screw up in life? Where did we forget ourselves? Where did we wrong ourselves even by laying aside our principles? Where did we become lost? Broken?

Camilla is the easy one for Charles. There’s no story there. All the versions agree, he was in love with Camilla at first sight. It was always easy with Camilla. The man wanted Camilla. The prince though, that was another matter. The prince was shoehorned into marrying someone else, and he was not strong enough to buck against all the forces pushing him that way—his parents, his godfather, his grandmother. In Bartlett’s play, we see all the characters—the prime minister, William, Kate—trying to convince him to sign the bill, even if he disagrees. Just sign it, they say. It’s your constitutional duty. You don’t have to agree with it, they say. It’s your duty.

Similar: Just marry her, Charles. You don’t have to love her. It’s your duty.

No spoilers. You’ll have to watch the show to see what Charles does.

There’s a side story that focuses on Harry and his own wrestle with conscience, and that too, bucks reality, but in retrospect, was astonishingly prophetic of the writer! This play was written before Meghan was on the scene. Written in 2014, well before Harry met Meghan, it weaves a story of Harry falling in love with a woman of African descent, and who shares with his actual future wife another trait—she’s a liberal. Her name is Jess and she comes boldly into Harry’s orbit, unafraid to tell him exactly as it is. She’s against the monarchy. She wants a republic. Harry wants to leave the system he was born into and live with her as a man. Although the details are different “in real life,” the outcome is the same: Harry on the outside, Harry and his wife and children rejecting the toxicity of the system.

I doubt it’s a show calculated to please an audience. It’s not a neatly packaged story. It’s an alternative melodrama, and alternative to the reality we know, while simultaneously sharing and reflecting elements of our familiar perceptions. It forces you to suspend your disbelief in many ways. Some of the performances are a little one-note, but none of them are bad. Yet I think if you’re willing to roll with it, it could open up new channels of thinking about things that otherwise might have become static in the collective mind as it views the real-life personalities upon which the characters are loosely based.

Contradictions. The power source for the merry-go-round. Some call it hypocrisy. I call it delicious. We are a fascinating race. We went through decades where we were terrified of the spy next door, the secret Communist, the evil Russian who might be lurking around the corner. (Have we come full circle on that one?) In the ‘80s, the “Red Scare” finally started to lose some of its mojo—because Gorbachev was so nice, he let his people drink Pepsi!

—so we had to replace it with another sort of moral panic. The Karens back then feared their sons becoming devil worshippers as a result of listening to Black Sabbath.

There were other bogeymen, but religious extremism and the Satanic Panic had particular resonance at that time. (Season 4 of Stranger Things dealt with this in their Eddie Munson story arc.) In the 90s, you had some counterattacks in the form of shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The rise of the Gothic went some way toward reclaiming the virtues of witchcraft—or just, being slightly weird. Yet every action must have a reaction, every reaction a ricochet. The Christian “moral majority” went off the rails against explicit lyrics, video games, and, yes, the ever bogey of devil worship. It was all rather cleverly satirized in movies like The Birdcage (1996), where Gene Hackman’s character beautifully encapsulated the anesthetized Silent Majority.

Saturday Night Live reached its peak in this era, but sadly even that wasn’t enough to prevent the election of George Bush II and the rise of neoconservatism. Fast forward to 9/11 and we were on the sure path to hell. What interests me about all of this is the simple but profound recognition of the yin and the yang, the pendulum, and how the positive and negative are only opposites in that they are at opposite ends of the pole. Really, they are just two sides of the same coin. The two sides of the bipolar are equally dangerous. The manic is as deadly as the depressive. Nowhere is this more apparently true than in the Archie Comic series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. I love the Netflix adaptation too, but I’m enjoying the graphic novels so much more. The irony of the opposite for every Christian tenet strikes me in all the right ways. The colorful, plucky illustrations lure you in and you find yourself laughing at the satanic allusions that flip every staple of Christianity on the head. In the name of Satan, it’s a helluva raucous time, pun intended.

Flirtation with the Dark Side has its limits, of course. There comes a point when you realize that even in the underworld, there is extremist nonsense, lots of misogyny, and a horrific callousness when it comes to the treatment of “inferiors” (animals for slaughter, for example) and oppression of the masses. What better evidence is there for the maxim that human error is the downfall of every doctrine? Unconsciousness will carry anything too far! It’s hard not to conclude that we as a whole are incapable of loving anything without hating its opposite, or of worshipping one god without demonizing another. Is it inevitable that every reform must have its revolt?

I’ve seen a lot of people suggest that somehow the “Trump era” seems more divisive than prior ones. I’m not sure. The era we live in must be worse than any other—that goes without saying—and maybe the MAGA crowd are more divisive than the Goldwater Republicans or the McCarthyites. I don’t know, but the one thing I feel might be a certainty is the human tendency to take anything—nay, everything—too far. Are we even capable of knowing when to quit? Like, Jesus hit the nail on the head (I’m genuinely sorry for that pun) when he spoke the Golden Rule, but somehow his (all too) human disciples evolved his entire philosophy into fire-and-brimstone, pedantic insanity. Even when we “see the light,” self-righteousness reenters and we immediately resume the comparisons to other people. As Eckhart Tolle puts it, we return to the usual spin, making others “wrong” and ourselves “right.” I don’t have any confidence in most people’s ability to stop doing this. I see it too many times a day—egos reacting to egos and the fog of unconsciousness continually thickening, and there’s no way to deal with it except to disengage, and then they say you’re anti-social, and we all know where that slippery slope leads. I’ll be someone’s scapegoat one day, no doubt. When it comes to the various cliques and societies of the world, I’m never “enough” of whatever it is that each one prizes. I don’t identify with any “ism.” X is a Buddhist and Y practiced Hinduism for years, and while I appreciate lots of things about both Buddhism and Hinduism, I could never call myself a devout of one or the other. The one thing I’m an absolutist about is that I hate absolutism. Sorry, but if it negates and excludes everything else, it can’t be the answer. (If you are absolutely right, someone is wrong somewhere, and that person believes themselves to be absolutely right and you absolutely wrong. When spirituality becomes dogmatic, when it shapes an ideology, it ceases to be spiritual—in my humble opinion, of course.) Life is too complicated, too nuanced, to be solvable by only one philosophy. I know a lot of people just pick the philosophy that speaks most sensibly and naturally to them, and that’s fine, I get that. I get that, life being so complicated, sometimes we just have to compartmentalize and organize things in the way that makes the noise make sense. So if Buddhism speaks more coherently to someone than anything else, well, that person is a Buddhist. My mind just doesn’t work that way. If there’s more to the picture, I can’t just pick one color scheme. I can’t just go, “Well, that sounds nice, that feels good, ok I’m done.” I am done only as far as this article goes, for now.

Alanis, you have the mic:

“I have been running so sweaty my whole life

Urgent for a finish line

And I have been missing the rapture this whole time

Of being forever incomplete”

Prince Joachim of Denmark is upset. The second son of Queen Margrethe II has ever had a complicated relationship with his royal duties and, indeed, public life in general. When in his 20s, and married to his first wife, he was regarded in some ways as the more mature brother. He was married, his elder brother was not, and thus went the shallow reasoning of the public, that since one is married with kids, while the other remains an aimless bachelor, so the former must be happier and more steady. Time passed, and the fortunes did sharply turn for the brothers. At least as far as the perspective of the public went, it certainly seemed that things had dramatically shifted in the dynamics between the two brothers. Crown Prince Frederik, elder brother, formed what was portrayed as a fairytale marriage with an Australian named Mary Donaldson. Their falling-in-love story became the stuff of Hollywood movies. Married in 2004, Frederik and Mary were loosely the inspiration behind a highly formulaic and ridiculous movie that came out in the same year. The Prince & Me told the story of a fictional Danish prince (Luke Mably) who goes to Wisconsin to find himself and, of course, as would happen, fell in love with the antithesis of any other girl he had ever known—a badass, sassy pre-med student, born and bred in Wisconsin (Julia Stiles). The movie has nothing in common with the real-life story of Prince Fred and Mary from Tasmania, but since it roughly coincided with the royal wedding, and made use of a fictional, bad-boy Danish prince in its plot, there was bound to be the question, “Is this real?” The two events in their own ways ignited more worldwide interest in Denmark’s royalty than had, perhaps, ever existed before. Mary Donaldson, overnight, became a darling in Australia’s media. In America, where the movie was made and marketed, there was the dawning of a wider realization that royalty is not exclusively a British thing. Meanwhile, Prince Joachim’s marriage was falling apart. He divorced Alexandra Manley (after a ten-year marriage that produced two boys, Nikolai and Felix) and neither wasted any time in moving on with other people. Alexandra remarried first, bought a new mansion, and went around with a new title—Countess of Fredericksborg—bestowed on her by the Queen. Joachim wasn’t far behind, though. He married a quaintly pretty, slightly younger French-Swiss woman named Marie Cavallier. The new Princess Marie, supremely educated and multilingual, endured endless comparisons to Crown Princess Mary, to Joachim’s first wife, and no less to that patron saint of all princess-kind, Lady Diana Spencer, against whom all royal ladies are measured in one respect or another, usually fashion. Marie bears it well. She smiles a lot. She and Joachim have two children between them, besides the two sons, now adults, who he brought into the marriage. With a beautiful estate and castle in Southern Jutland, a charming wife, and healthy children, you could be forgiven for wondering what cause Prince Joachim has to be upset enough to complain in public.

Joachim is displeased about his mother’s decision to take royal status and titles away from his children. It has all come about this week, justified by the Queen in her attempt to scale down the working size and expenses of the monarchy. Joachim’s kids were never strictly royal to begin with. Instead of the “Royal Highness” prefix in front of their names, they only had plain His or Her Highness (sans royal). Nevertheless, the new decision from their grandmother, the Queen, makes a big difference because on the first day of the new year, 2023, they will be demoted from Highness to Excellency, and they will only be entitled to an aristocratic title claimed by the Queen’s late husband, French-born Prince Henrik—née Henri, Count of Monpezat. Joachim has spoken out, expressing much displeasure about the decision. He has told the press that he is upset more with the accelerated timing of the action than the act itself. He was told that something like this might be in the works back in May, but that suddenly everything dropped, and he feels that he and his family weren’t given enough time to process the change.

Identity! Prince Joachim has made the bold suggestion that his children have lost their identity! “On May 5,” he began, “I was presented with a plan: that my children’s identities would be taken away from them when each of them turned 25. Athena will be 11 in January. And then I was given five days’ notice because the decision was accelerated.”1 He doesn’t understand why the decision was accelerated. “Initially, I asked for time to think and give my opinion. They [should have taken] it into account.” He lamented also: “I can tell that my children sad. My children don’t know which way to stand, [or] what to believe. Why should their identity be taken away from them? Why should they be punished like this?”

His use of the words “identity” and “punished” is fascinating to me. He is saying that his children were identified with their titles, as if these titles were tied to the very essence of their being. He sees it as a punishment that they are now deprived of these titles. If indeed his children—Nikolai, 23; Felix, 20; Henrik, 13; and Athena, 10—have their identities wrapped up in the status of Highness and the titles of Prince/Princess, then it would absolutely feel like a punishment to be deprived thereof. The loss of something we hold dear is felt as such—a punishment, an injustice, profoundly unfair. It is the pulling away of something to which we have become attached—a favorite piece of jewelry, a coveted photo, a sentimental piece of furniture, artwork, or some other possession that might give us a sense of closeness to a beloved person who has died. People who lost “everything” in a natural disaster feel this the most, more than anyone else. They have, after all, lost everything—house, possessions, and the sense of security and stability these things represented. So it is very interesting to me that Prince Joachim has phrased his grievance in such a way that attempts to put his children’s loss (of the title of prince and the status of highness) on a footing with people who lost “everything”—those possessions that masquerade as representations of the very core of who they are and what they love.

Royal expenditures and royal titles, and the question of who gets them, of who is entitled them are at the heart of the royal-watching media since the accession to the British throne of King Charles III. A law—by name, a Letters Patent—that was passed in the reign of his great-grandfather, King George V, lays out that all children and male-line grandchildren of the monarch shall be entitled to the status HRH (His/Her Royal Highness) and the title of prince/princess; and this entitlement extends to the heir’s children, and the heir to the heir, so basically, those in the direct line of succession. In the reign of the late Queen, Elizabeth II, this meant that her four children and male-line grandchildren were entitled to the royal status—so, Charles, William, Harry; Anne, but not her children, because they are female-line descendants; Andrew, his daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie; and Edward, as well as his children, James and Louise.2 Now, in the reign of Charles, longtime proponent of a scaled down monarchy, everything is being reorganized.3 There is no question about those in the direct line of succession—William, the Prince of Wales, and his eldest son, Prince George. But the heat, so to speak, is turned up when it comes to his recalcitrant younger son, Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex. Harry has truly and fully departed from royal tradition. He has been wayward in direction, as opposed to following the more predictable option of living in the UK and embracing the grueling “work” of smiling, waving, unveiling plaques, and cutting ribbons. Most of you will know the broad strokes of his exit, right? Harry and his wife, Meghan, née Markle, shirked off the shackles of royal duty in 2020, in favor of celebrity luster in dry, sunny mid-coastal California. They cited “financial independence” and a normal life for their kids as part of their renewed priorities. “Harry and Meghan” are the podcasting royals who, unlike typical royals, don’t shy away from association with controversial and partisan politics. Security, though, is expensive, and, in view perhaps of obtaining taxpayer-subsidized bodyguards for the school runs, Harry wants retroactive titles for his children, Archie and Lilibet. The British royal website (royal.uk) continues to call them plain Master Archie and Miss Lilibet Mountbatten-Windsor.4

When King Charles made a televised address on his initial return to London after his mother’s passing, he elevated his first son, William, to the title of Prince of Wales and then he referred, in just one sentence, to his second son and that son’s wife as just “Harry and Meghan.” He said: “As my Heir, William now assumes the Scottish titles which have meant so much to me. He succeeds me as Duke of Cornwall and takes on the responsibilities for the Duchy of Cornwall which I have undertaken for more than five decades. Today, I am proud to create him Prince of Wales, Tywysog Cymru, the country whose title I have been so greatly privileged to bear during so much of my life and duty. With Catherine beside him, our new Prince and Princess of Wales will, I know, continue to inspire and lead our national conversations, helping to bring the marginal to the center ground where vital help can be given. I want also to express my love for Harry and Meghan as they continue to build their lives overseas.”5

The case in Denmark is interesting because of the reaction from Prince Joachim, who explicitly said that his children feel that their “identity” has been taken from them, and moreover that they feel “punished.” The case in Britain is interesting because, on the one hand, Britain’s monarchy is also in a state of flux, with people asking what it is for and how big it needs to be. Besides William and Harry, there are the two brothers of the new king (Andrew, Duke of York and Edward, Earl of Wessex) and three very elderly cousins who hold the title of Prince—the Duke of Gloucester, the Duke of Kent, and Prince Michael of Kent. All except three of these—that is, three of the seven adult princes—actually perform royal duties, and all except one live full-time in the United Kingdom.

Andrew lives primarily in England, but since the horrible interview he gave to the BBC in 2019,6 he doesn’t perform royal duties, and after the out-of-court settlement with one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims,7 Andrew was stripped of all honorary titles, though he remains Duke of York—a title only an Act of Parliament can take away. He is effectively persona non grata as he is relegated to luxurious seclusion at the Royal Lodge of Windsor. Since his mother’s death, he is caretaker in chief of the corgis.)8 As for Harry, he lives primarily in California, but maintains a “grace-and-favor” residence on the Frogmore estate near Windsor.9 Lastly, and always least, Prince Michael of Kent is so far down in the line of succession and, being *just* the younger brother of the Duke of Kent, he mostly gains attention only when the media wants to churn out some criticism about the rent at Kensington Palace, where he lives,10 or cast aspersions on his wife, who we can only call eccentric in the vein of politeness.

It’s an unenviable task that King Charles must undertake—to make the British monarchy relevant, and of reasonable and justifiable size in a time of huge, systemic crises. He was always more confrontational and head-on about issues than his late mother, who tended to act only when she had no choice. I doubt many people will have much sympathy for Prince Joachim’s children, certainly none for Prince Andrew, and to be sure, not a whole lot for Prince Harry. As a colleague of mine put it, “Archie will never have to work at McDonald’s.” Whether he’s Prince Archie or Master Archie, he will never have to take a minimum-wage job. He probably won’t need to work at all. He probably will work, but it will be something he’s passionate about. Archie will have choices in life. He will have the inherited wealth to guarantee solvency. His lack of title will free him from obligations to serve the public. One thing it certainly will not do is give him any sense of identity. Identity (who we are) runs deeper than a title or even a name, contrary to what some might argue. The name or title labels the “form” you; it tells people what to call you. People can call you anything; You are still You regardless of what they call you. (That last you is lower-case because it represents the form you, that is the self, or the you, that operates and functions in this outer realm.) You, with a capital Y, are the inner, the deeper Self who is connected with Consciousness. I’ve talked about this before. “Sartre and the Waiter” is just one of a few articles I’ve published here, in which I explore ideas about Self and Ego. “Make it do” is another one. I think about this a lot, that is what separates us from Consciousness and what is the real greatness of our being. Consciousness unites and expands; ego divides and shrinks. I think the whole notion of deriving a sense of identity from a title is one that tends to shrink the self. It diminishes you from the real expansiveness—only connect, right here and now, if only you can be still enough to sense it. To think that a title will define you is to think in a constricted way. There is more to life, to living, and loving than calling yourself a prince, or being called one by others. And even if you are “lucky” enough to be born into the direct line of succession to a throne, the Who and the What of You, the essence and the core of your being, are so much more than this outer form of prince or princess. You are the light of Consciousness that expands in love. Eckhart Tolle says that our purpose in life is to awaken to the Now, which is the only moment where Consciousness lives, because the past is only a memory and the future is yet to occur. The only thing that is real is the Now, and all of this stuff in the outer life is merely a distraction. E.M. Forster talked about this too. His character Margaret, in Howards End, talks to her sister, Helen, about there being two lives—the outer life, “of telegrams and anger,”11 and the other, deeper life, where everything is connected. “Only connect!” she implores throughout the novel. Everyone can connect, even the children of Prince Joachim of Denmark. If they truly feel a sense of loss from their grandmother’s decision, it is only because they have been taught, erroneously, that they are defined according to royal stratification. As for Archie and Lilibet, I fail to see why they or their future wills must be confined to an “entitlement” set by a monarch in 1917. I hope their parents raise them to understand how utterly devoid of meaning those things are. I’ve heard that their maternal grandmother, Doria Ragland, is an attendee of the Agape International Spiritual Center. That center was founded by a man I’ve met and whom I admire greatly. He is Dr. Michael Bernard Beckwith. He says it perfectly: “So understand, there’s some wholeness in you. Now the question is, are you willing to be great? No, I didn’t say famous. I didn’t say famous; I didn’t say ‘be a celebrity.’ I said, ‘are you willing to be GREAT?’ GREATNESS lies in you becoming more yourself, becoming more conscious of who you are. And when you become more conscious of who you are, there’s greater expression. Greater expression leads to activation of potential you didn’t know was there. Greater activation of potential allows you to go deep into the ocean of bliss. Going into the ocean of bliss allows you feel a greater sense of ecstasy.”12

There is some real gold on the 1950 census. Besides the living legends and the long-dead but then alive and kicking legends, the US presidents, and your own forebears, you can find things like the old Jefferson Market Prison in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. Where the inmates walked there is now a public garden. The 1950 census is searchable at 1950census.archives.gov and you can find the Jefferson Market inmates in the 49 pages of the Enumeration District 31–86. Page 37 shows you the superintendent, the physician, and the registered nurse at the prison. Ruth E. Collins, the superintendent, is right there. An “outstanding prison administrator,”1 according to a newspaper from 1932, the year she took the job, Ruth was a woman on a mission to rehabilitate her charges. “A jail should be a type of school,” she was quoted as saying. “A school for citizenship,” is how the newspaper article suggested she would run her house of detention.

The census taker, or the “enumerator,” filled out the paperwork on April 1st, 1950. She recorded the name of the facility as “Home of Detention for Women.” Her name was Agnes and she noted especially: “These sheets are numbered as 1A thru 5A, to distinguish between permanent and transient. These sheets affixed with ‘A’ are transient guests.” I’m not a sociologist, just a writer and researcher, but even I, without my advanced degree, recognize the value of these sheets to the field of sociology. It’s not only sociologists, I’m sure, who will find them fascinating. Here is a snapshot in time, a window to a piece of history that only haunts us today in ghost form. “Inmates” from all over the country, and even abroad, spanning every age from 20 to 70…. What was Eleanor Cooke’s story? 25 years old from New Jersey, recorded on line 26 on Sheet 1A, how did she end up here? There were women locked up here, looking out from confinement on the bustling metropolis, who had come from the Deep South, the midwest, Puerto Rico, and as far as Poland. There was a 28 year old named Clementine from the Virgin Islands. (See line 25 on page 27.) Her race was recorded as Negro. The choices for Race were White, Negro, American Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, or Other. Clementine was 28 years old and listed as Mar, for Married, where the only other options were Wd for Widowed, D for Divorced, Sep for Separated, or Nev for Never. But for this sheet on the 1950 census, what evidence is there that Clementine lived? What about Marion McCullogh, 49 years old, married, from Massachusetts? Or Elsie Polick, a 55-year-old widow from Germany? They must have been listed in order as they were housed, one by one. Agnes went down the hall, writing down names, asking each prisoner where she was from. “Jacqueline Le Gard,” 31 years old, Negro. Never married, Ma’am. “I come from California.” Right after Susie from Ohio and Marie from Massachusetts. There was Mary Duffy from Scotland, 47, married. She answered “yes” to whether she was naturalized. What happened to Mary Duffy? What did she “do,” if anything, to land herself in a prison cell in the middle of “the Village” in New York City? And what about Helen March, 33, married, from Kentucky?

The House of Detention for Women had capacity for 450 women. “The majority of them are moral offenders,” said the aforementioned article in 1932. Moral offenders? A woman could be incarcerated there for up to three years for a “moral offense.” Three years was the maximum sentence for this broadly defined type of bad behavior. No one serves only three years for murder. These women were in jail, probably, for displeasing their fathers and husbands. It was up to Ruth Collins to teach them to behave properly, stop talking back so much! But did 20-year-old Marie Pearson really need “fixing,” or was it just that her father’s second or third wife didn’t like her? What, pray tell, was “wrong” with the 62-year-old Jane Reynolds, apart from the fact that she never got married?

It cost the city of Manhattan $2 million to build the House of Detention for Women. It was a prison in theory, but no one called it a prison, and the women who temporarily had housing there were in fact deliberately called inmates instead of prisoners. The New York Times in 1932 called it a “prison without bars” and a “luxury jail for women.” It had bulletproof glass on the window casements and door panels. They made it sound pretty mild in those days. Decades after the 1950 census, though, other stories began to emerge…. Social worker Sara Harris was shocked by what she saw inside the prison, so much so that she titled the book, Hellhole. It was published by E.P. Dutton in 1967.

The House of Detention had a roach problem, according to the account given by onetime inmate Angela Davis. A rodent problem too. But for Angela, the psychological trauma was felt even after her release. She was an inmate for 16 months, and then she had to relearn how to be around people. “I often found myself wanting to go back to my cell where I could be by myself,” she said.2 Among the famous and infamous inmates, there were Ethel Rosenberg and Grace Paley. Andrea Dworkin was incarcerated in the House of Detention at the age of 16 for the audacity of protesting the Vietnam War. She was violently assaulted,3 and no doubt would have agreed with the “hellhole” description applied by Sara Harris. The correctional facility closed forever in 1974. Good riddance! Ten years from now, we will see who was incarcerated in the Hellhole in April 1960, and then we’ll have one left, the census of 1970, to show us the names of women with unimaginable horrors in their untold stories. The quote from Andre Lorde is priceless: He said the Hellhole was “a defiant pocket of female resistance, ever-present as a reminder of possibility, as well as punishment.”4 The possibility of surrender and reformation, or defiance and punishment! (This whole pitiful chapter in human history reminds me of the story of my seventh great-grandmother. Anne Françoise Rolland was one of the “patients” (inmates) at the Salpétrière Hospital in Paris; she was put on a sloop with 20 other girls, and the sloop, ironically named to translate as “The Saucy Wench,” sailed from Le Havre to Louisiana. Anne’s only “crime” was — well, we don’t know for sure, but she either displeased her father with her “wayward” behavior or irritated her new stepmother. I imagine that there are stories from the Jefferson Market prison which echo the tribulations experienced by the girls of “La Salpétrière.” I wrote about my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, lol, in my genealogy book, The Ira David Schneider Family.)5

What has become of the building that once housed New York’s “correctional facility” for wayward females? The spot where it stood is a beautiful garden, over which looms the Jefferson Market Library, a branch of the New York Public Library system. All around this historical spot, the life and lustre of Greenwich Village! We know that this “House of Detention” existed, and we know a little something about the famous and infamous inmates, but without the census of 1940 and the census of 1950, we would have no inkling, no trace of thousands of women who passed through those halls, who slept in those cells — those cells that had no bars were still rooms of confinement and punishment, of interrogation and torture to these women, simply for the audacity to be and think rebelliously.

Let me tell you about it. It was a crazy idea to begin with—getting away from it all (the humdrum, the ennui, responsibilities) on a whim for four days. I had reluctance. Besides not wanting to spend the money, I hate leaving my comfort zone. And make no mistake, when I say “it all,” meaning my life: It is very comfortable. I don’t live in a palace or anything, but it’s cozy, and I have my cats and my dog and my mother, and my job at the library, besides a lot of stimulating, creative “extra” jobs, like this blog and a quaint neighborhood magazine. Things will get crazy again in the fall when I am back in school mode (for an MLIS—Master of Library and Information Science) but for the most part, things are really good. Suffice it to say, my odyssey (wandering voyage that it was) was not about escape. I fully intended to keep doing the creative things that I always do. I just needed a respite from the “have to” of it all. You know?

DAY ONE

I arrived at the hotel early. A magical place where everyone is kind, friendly, helpful. Attendants (are they still called bellhops?) greet you without any trace of weariness or hostility, and that alone is such a rare find since the pandemic began. Michael goes out of his way to get your bags to your room; and it’s confusing, because one of the wings is under construction, so you have to take a particular elevator shaft up (one of three) or you won’t find the room that has been assigned to you. Nolan greets you with a fist bump and does not forget your name. You would talk more if there wasn’t so much to see. The hotel is old, exquisite, ornate! There are glass cases everywhere, filled with artifacts that relate to the literary giants who stayed here long ago—William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway. The Hotel Monteleone sprang to life in the Gilded Age, a lion of a hotel, no doubt. It’s been roaring ever since, owned and operated by the same family—four men, of Sicilian roots, whose portraits loom over the lobby. (The Monteleone family has a suite on site, practically a house, on the roof, looming over the heated pool with a balcony, and apparently you can stay there when they are not in residence. It’s two-grand a night, but sure, you can stay there!)

I step out on Royal Street, turn right, and walk one block down. I’m intent on the bookstore I noticed while driving in. Crescent City Books. I’ve never set foot in a bookstore like that before, not even in Greenwich Village, or movies, or Google Street Views in Paris and London. (Well, there were these two bookstores in Burbank, CA that I adored as a teenager, one very like this one, but less organized, and the other filled with cinema books and screenplays because it is Burbank after all. Both of those bookstores closed permanently some time ago! Forlorn world! What is there today? Who knows, probably something very depressing like a Baby Gap!)1 But back to Crescent City Books: It’s clean and bright and small, in fact, but there’s a kingdom in there! The rows and rows of books, cared for and loved by the sight of things (it’s so clean in there) and the rows go so high you need ladders. First editions! Rarest tomes! I find a four-volume set that costs much more than I’m willing to spend ($375) but oh! The complete works of Oliver Goldsmith! I consider shelling out $60 for a two-volume set of Greater Britain by Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke. Three years ago, I published my edited version of another Dilke work. I felt the spirit of Helene Hanff! 84 Charing Cross Road, yes, Crescent City Books is exactly like that, except the staff do not address you as Madam.

I was starving by three o’clock so I had an early dinner. After circling blocks without intent and just loving the atmosphere of the French Quarter (up to Canal Street, around about back to Royal) I walked in the Curio and sat at the bar.

Cocktail: “Papa Old Fashion” (not as good as the Old Fashioned drinks at Pizza Byronz back home in Baton Rouge, where they always ask you what kind of whiskey you want, and they use a pestle and mortar to crush the cherry bitters that they import from somewhere in Italy) but it does the trick and I’m in no mood to find fault with the world for lack of perfection. Three stars!

Starter: spinach/artichoke dip and toasted ciabatta crisps (tasty, 3.5 stars)

Entrée: Blackened Redfish with crab salad (goes down well, well done, satisfying: 4.5 stars)

I went back to my room and watched Bugtussle and started Noise in the Middle. I wrote the Bugtussle review and exchanged emails with John Mese, who played “Crow” in the film. The cast is exactly three people: John; Derek Sitter, who also directed and wrote the film; and Jefferson Wisdom. Cast and crew really had their shit together from the way Mese described the filming of the entire 21-minute script in barely more than a day. “If we shot this many pages for TV or a [regular-length, say, two-hour] movie it would normally take three to five days minimum... But [Derek Sitter] had great people in every job... and we just got it done.”

DAY TWO

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Breakfast in the hotel dining room. Food: Crab Cakes Benedict and asparagus. (Delicious, decadent, beautifully presented: Five Stars all the way!) Drink: Water and coffee. Sat by the window. Visited the exquisite furniture store across the street. Embarrassed myself slightly by misreading the price tag on the bottom of a monkey lamp—it was $600, not $25. Walked over Canal Street and got a Chai Latte at Starbucks, which nourished me for the walk to the Scottish Rite Temple. Took Carondelet all the way up, on the way to Van Gogh New Orleans: The Immersive Experience.

“What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?” (Vincent Van Gogh)

Tree Roots. His final painting, hours before he took his own life. “Vincent Van Gogh leaves the message: life goes on, it goes on without me, I stop here.”2

The tree connects everything; it is one of many insights from the tour. (I can’t take credit for the insight. It’s all in the presentations—documentary, write-ups on the walls, etc.) In Starry Night, they pointed out, the sky is distinct from the village of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, but the cypress tree inhabits both realms—heaven and earth. Its roots are earthly, but it is larger than everything else in the picture and it dominates the foreground and reaches up as high as it can go, penetrating the cloudy swirls and the textured stars. Chills. I’m hearing the song by Christina Perri in my mind: I’ve loved you for a thousand years. I’ll love you for a thousand more.3

Love. A major theme with Van Gogh. How much he loved his brother Theo! How his sisters loved him and devoted their lives to his legacy long after he was gone!

“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.” (Vincent Van Gogh)

The Immersive Experience is incredible. This was my second visit. My first visit, back in April, I wrote about that too.4 This time, I made a concerted effort to stay calm and present. That first visit, I battled annoyance; I was frustrated and antsy about the others. It was easier to be calm this go around because there were less people, for sure. I was able to relax and soak it all in. It put me in a good frame of mind, a generous frame of mind. I got my needs met and I acted unselfishly, unspoiled. I took less pictures, a lot less videos, than previously. In the main event, I watched the presentation from start to finish. (It will keep playing on repeat, and since the tour is entirely self-guided, you get up and leave when you want.) I did the VR experience as I did before. That’s $5 extra and it is worth every penny, twice! How a color-blind boy from Zundert used colors to enrich the landscape in the South of France—how he still makes us see it and appreciate the world around us!

I walked back along St. Charles. Had tacos and a daiquiri. Sat by the rooftop pool with my Albert Camus paperback. Met a woman. I don’t know how to describe her. She works here. I would tell you her name, but I don’t want to get her into trouble. She took me up to the banquet room that sits even above where the pool is, and she showed me the most fantastic view of the city and the river which this hotel has to offer. (She’s the one who told me about the Monteleone family’s on-site quarters.) It is good sometimes to lift one’s nose out of the book and actually talk to people! She led me into the gym too, just to show me another view. The gym actually has a two-sided view. Here, as we admired the river view, she pointed out exactly where her house is—on the opposite bank, but you can actually see it, that’s how expansive this view is. A 45-minute walk, she said, and she walks everyday, from there to here, and back—because she loves it. She loves the walk. And she loves this view. She takes it in several times a day and sees something new everyday.

Back in the room, I finished Noise in the Middle, which is a peculiar cross between a horror film and …. something else. Metaphysical? There are Occult themes, ancient ideas, and the sort of timeless wisdom that people, for some reason, sometimes term as “New Age.” Tom Konkle plays an occult/magic shop owner. John Mese, playing Richard, enters with his severely autistic daughter—Emmy, played by Faye Hostetter—who the shop owner takes an instant liking too, admiring her “blue aura.” There’s another part in the movie that struck me profoundly. Emmy’s doctor, played by Jim Holmes, introduces the concept of the “noise in the middle,” and it seems to me that the “noise in the middle” is basically the reality most of us are limited to—the world of things, outer forms, and ego. Autistic Emmy cannot reconcile the world of things with the eternal realm, of which she has a unique (and possibly undesired) perception. Echoes of The Sixth Sense? The house in the country that Richard takes Emmy to, thinking the fresh air might help them both, actually makes things worse—because it is haunted by the tormented orphans who lived there in the 19th century. Richard really pokes the bear by conjuring up his dead wife. She comes, but, as can happen when you open a portal between realms, so does another spirit—the tormenter of the children, who seizes the opportunity to take possession of a warm body. That’s when the movie goes full on scary-movie mode. Of course, there are hints beforehand, like when we see Mese’s reflection—not a true reflection, but more like a foreboding of the darkness in him, trapped in another realm and wanting to come through into this one.

DAY THREE

Had coffee in the room. My windows give me a direct view into two apartments, where I can see an astonishing amount of complete strangers’ daily and private activities. I feel guilty for it, but there is something irresistibly fascinating about the lady washing her dishes—the amount of time she spent on that one plate, my god, and when she finished cleaning it I felt a sense of victory, as if I were somehow engaged in it too. We did it, Lady Washing Her Dishes! We did it!

It was a good day to wear one of my two Van Gogh dresses, so I did.

Breakfast downstairs in the Criollo. Alex from Greece was my waiter. Delightful, friendly, courteous beyond the call of duty. Convincingly authentic, too, unlike Sartre’s waiter. I ordered the Criollo omelet (or is it omelette?) with the smoked bacon, lots of sumptuous mushrooms, green onions, tomatoes and cheddar cheese. It was HUGE!!!! I wanted to eat it all, and I nearly did, but when there was only a couple of bites left, I put down my fork. I couldn’t eat anymore. C’était impossible. Can you give more than five stars on a food review? I’ll give them a hundred.

I rewatched The Assistant, a film from 2020, starring Julia Garner and Matthew Macfadyen. Written, produced, and directed by Kitty Green. Why did I want to rewatch that film, of all the films I could have rewatched, or why didn’t I choose something new, or at least new to me? I knew it was a deep-waters kind of experience (the kind that needs revisiting because you notice something new each time) and I was just in the mood for that. I wanted to wallow in something deep and complex, with a disturbing ethical dilemma and tons of contradiction. That’s what you get with Bugtussle, and so it is with The Assistant. Five stars.

I went down to the Carousel Lounge for snacks. Oysters Rockefeller and white truffle fries, with ketchup. The oysters were ok; the fries were awesome. Ronald, the waiter, was magnificent. The service and the fries more than made up for what was lacking in the oysters. Almost five stars, but better than 4.5. For the drink, I had ice lemon water in a plastic cup, and I loved it. It’s just one of those days. Then I took a walk. I went as far as the Louisiana Supreme Court before turning around. On a whim I popped into Crescent City Books again. Fate. As my mouth watered and I fantasized about purchasing that four-volume Oliver Goldsmith set, I glanced off to the side and saw a beautiful leather-bound Walton’s Lives. I don’t know a single thing about collecting books, but I’m going out on a limb to guess that $125 is not a bad price for an 1834 edition. But that’s not even the best part. I gotta show you this:

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As you’ll see if you click on the above, and swipe to the second picture, this tome was once in the library at long-defunct Jefferson College—in Convent, LA. My great-grandfather, Edgar Coco, kept a journal while he was enrolled at Jefferson College,5 in the 1920s. It was entirely about his football team, mostly newspaper clippings that he pasted on the pages. He put a few pictures in there, and some humorous school paper cutouts. I don’t how much time he spent in the library, but just the idea that this book was in a library where he spent anytime at all is enough to make me smile. That school ceased to exist a long time ago. In fact, it closed permanently not many years after Edgar was there. I never met him, but he left such a mark on the world (well, his world, at any rate) I can’t resist the urge to write about him every now and then. If time travel were possible, I’d go back to his times in a heartbeat, have a drink with him, listen to him play his harmonica, and maybe knock some Easter eggs.

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Revisiting that wonderous bookstore brought Helene Hanff back to mind. 84 Charing Cross Road, book and movie, is always a gem worthy of revisitation! I love Helene’s humor. “I hope Madam doesn’t mean over there what it means over here,” she writes back to FPD!6 In one of her letters, she mentions Walton’s Lives. “You may add Walton’s Lives to the list of books you aren’t sending me. It’s against my principles to buy a book I haven’t read. It’s like buying a dress you haven't tried on. But you can’t even get Walton’s Lives in a library over here. You can look at it. They have it down at the 42nd Street branch. But not to take home! The lady said to me, shocked, eat it here. Just sit right down, in Room 315, and read the whole book without a cup of coffee, a cigarette, or air. Doesn’t matter. Q quoted enough of it, so I know I’ll like it. Anything he liked, I like. Except if it’s fiction. I never can get interested in things that didn’t happen to people who never lived. What do you do with yourself all day? Sit in the back of the store and read? Why don’t you try sending a book to somebody? —Miss Hanff, to you. [I’m Helene only to my friends.]”7

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Tomorrow is check out. Should I conform to touristy tradition and have breakfast at Cafe du Monde, before my ten o’clock spa appointment? Or visit the WWII museum? Decisions, decisions. There is no “have to,” which was the point of the trip.

Day 3’s dinner was room service: Veggie burger, truffle fries, and an Old Fashioned. Delicious. Without reservation, five stars.

DAY FOUR

Unverified rumor has it that the Monteleone does beignets better than Cafe du Monde. Mind you, the rumor seems to be sourced in the hotel itself, so it might be a tad biased. Nevertheless, there was something about doing room service and beignets and coffee that I found very appealing. They were good. Definitely five stars, although most of that rating is based on the service. The service overall is just relaxed and easy, but not at all sloppy! The staff are attentive without being uptight. No one is grumpy. No one is a snob.

Parting delights: Spa Aria, and another veggie burger.

BACK HOME

It was a great feeling pulling into Baton Rouge. However much we dream of other places, there is truly no place like home. It’s the feeling of one’s own couch, one’s own bed, one’s own things. The odyssey is an exciting adventure, a wandering voyage, but it is only fun as an exception. Indeed, it is the exception. If the odyssey was everyday, it would not be an odyssey. It would be work. Exhausting! An odyssey is no place for a home. Variety is great, in doses, but thank god for comfort zones!

I’ll leave you with one more quote from Helene:

“Oh my, i do bless you for that Walton’s Lives. It’s incredible that a book published in 1840 can be in such perfect condition more than a hundred years later. Such beautiful, mellow rough-cut pages they are, I do feel for poor William T. Gordon who wrote his name in it in 1841, what a crummy lot of descendants he must have—to sell it to you casually for nothing. Boy, I’d like to have run barefoot through THEIR library before they sold it.

fascinating book to read, did you know John Donne eloped with the boss’s highborn daughter and landed in the Tower for it and starved and starved and THEN got religion. my word.”8

It must have been Les Deux Magots, or Café de Flore, or one of those legendary cafes where Simone de Beauvoir used to hang her hat and then have her cigarette lit. Her lover, Jean-Paul Sartre, went there, as she did, to write, to read, to discuss and debate the age-old philosophical questions with other intellectuals. In the second chapter of the book L’Être et Le Néant (Being and Nothingness) Sartre talks about the “bad faith” of the waiter. There he is, the pretentious little shit (I’m kidding!) drinking his outrageously priced coffee and smoking his cigarette and thinking about Descartes and who is the I in I think. Mr. Waiter comes up to his table, all smiles and politeness, and offers to refill his cup, and what does Jean-Paul think about that? Well, I’ll tell you what. He thinks, What a phony baloney! The waiter is pretending to be pleased to wait on this pampered intellectual. It is “bad faith,” he wrote, to even call the waiter ‘the waiter,’ because that is not his or anyone’s authentic self. The condition of being a waiter is a job, a role, a form. That person’s true self, same as yours or mine, takes many forms: child, parent, employee, employer, student, teacher, reader, writer. The authentic self is interior and it is static, formless, and irreducible. We do not see it. We sense it some other way. The Self is behind the thought. The Self is doing the job, playing the role, having the thought. The Self is the Observer. We are all play-acting, says JP. All of us. We assume roles and characteristics—Republican, Democrat, Good Person, Bad Person, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Atheist—and we adopt ideas about ourselves based on these various and particular forms, all of which are reducible and ultimately meaningless. This is the nothing of existence. The Self, the Being, Right Here and Right Now is all that there is. The past is gone, the future is nothing, except in the mind. The present moment is the only thing that is real and irreducible and formless. And just knowing this, that is the simple choice of self-awareness, means that you can now live authentically—live authentically now. You have to play roles. That is an inescapable condition of living and acting in the world. Just don’t forget, stay aware of your human reality and true Self.