Half Baked, Twice as Good

I saw a face on television today that told a story. The face belonged to a woman named Kimberly, who stayed in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward during Hurricane Katrina five years ago this weekend. She and her husband didn’t have a car and stayed behind with their families to ride out the storm, climbing to their attic as the flood waters rose and combing the city for days to find shelter and food. Two days before Katrina hit, Kimberly grabbed her camcorder and shot amateur video of her ordeal, catching the eye of a National Geographic producer who hired a film crew to follow her for months afterward. Kimberly is from an impoverished neighborhood, born to a drug-addicted “rockhead” mother and married to a former drug dealer and gang member. She is an aspiring rap artist and though she vowed never to return to the Ninth Ward in the days following the storm, she lives there now with the few of her neighbors that returned.

I saw a face in PEOPLE magazine last week that also told a story. This face is one I know well, and belongs to a woman who has been my friend for almost 15 years. She is a mother, a wife and a lawyer. Before Katrina she had no real ties to New Orleans. After Katrina, she committed her life’s work to representing the underrepresented and in doing so she met her husband, adopted the Crescent City as her home and married there under the lights of the French Quarter. I was there to see her and her fair city three years after the hurricane. I visited Lakefront, a community flooded by the breached levees. I took photographs of water lines above overpasses and houses that probably still haven’t been rebuilt. My friend had her daughter in Louisiana and, with her family, lives near a military base there.

I saw a face sitting next to me in a taxi last week, and this face told a story I’d never heard. As he drove me up Canal Street, from the French Quarter and around to Jackson Square, I listened to his Louisiana accent and saw the lines on his face. I never learned his name, but this man – in his late 60s – was born and raised in New Orleans. He remembered Hurricane Betsy and so he evacuated the day before the storm, per the orders given by the city and state. He left with his family and returned not long after Katrina, coming home only to a little wind damage, but luckily no flood waters. He couldn’t understand why so many people stayed, and further, he couldn’t fathom the “lack of self control” his fellow New Orleans residents exhibited in the days after. This man was ashamed of the fighting, the looting, the reaction of his people, but he never said a word about the action – or lack thereof – of the government. He was proud to be back in his city driving tourists around to see the sights that are still standing, that seemed never to be touched.

When I was in New Orleans last week, I watched the local news in the morning and again at night. There were stories after stories after stories featured on each channel about rebuilding. There were families with new Habitat homes. There were children preparing for a new school year in new schools. There were local politicians cutting ribbons on new businesses in different neighborhoods. There were very few pictures of flood waters, and even fewer pictures of the Superdome and the Convention Center.

My friends and I did the usual touristy stuff. We walked to the French Quarter and ate dinner. We rode the street car up St. Charles, saw Loyola and Tulane, and pointed out The Real World house. We lost money at Harrah’s, took pictures of the Mississippi from the Riverwalk and ate beignets under the shade at Café du Monde. We bought pralines and jewelry, took pictures of the mimes and the jazz musicians and brought home t-shirts to children. I met a friend for drinks in an up-and-coming section of town, and marveled at her historic Garden District home. All of us spent money. We met natives and transplants, asking them questions along the way. Some of them were tired of the questions – the same ones – about Katrina and whether or not they stayed. Had their houses suffered damage? Did they live in the Ninth Ward? Did they know anyone who did? Or who had died? Some of them wanted to talk, and some of them just wanted to show off their town.

I have watched the documentaries, listened to the stories, seen my dear friend fight for the rights of the underprivileged and I am still shocked that a natural disaster could tear our country apart and expose it for what it really is. Five years later, 25 years later, doesn’t matter. I live in a small Southern town, I know what goes on here. You know it, too. As a really ignorant woman once said to me, there are the haves and the have-nots. She was a have, she told me. But she did pity those poor other people. Most of them.

It’s hard to say why, in the last ten years, these horrific things keep happening to us. Yes, to us, I believe. In the South, there are evangelical Christians who are recruiting young people in droves to their mega-churches with coffee shops and rock bands. It gives them comfort to know that their religion and faith in their God will carry them through whatever else is coming. Some people my age, myself included, find themselves past the quarter-life crisis and in the middle of their anxiety-fueled 30s, ever upwardly mobile. We compare ourselves to each other, watching as our neighbors’ houses get bigger, our friends’ cars get more expensive and our own credit card debt gets higher.

Somewhere along the way we have continued to miss the big picture. It isn’t necessarily about the power of religious belief. It definitely isn’t about our own small corners of our own small worlds. It’s about the faces we see every day, that could tell us a story if we listened. How very many of us have forgotten about Katrina victims until we were reminded on television? How many of us take our girls’ weekends to the beach and whine to our friends that our kitchen counters need replacing and that our waists just aren’t as small as they used to be?

I do it and you do it. We forget to look at the lines on the faces of our fellow human beings and think about how those lines got there. From laughing? From crying? From worrying? From mourning? From rejoicing? We don’t stop to think that there is a bigger world outside of our own, and that bigger world has a much bigger story to tell.

My own story is small and forgettable, because I am only one of millions who have traveled to Louisiana in the last five years. I am one of an unfortunately large group of people who didn’t travel to New Orleans to help. I went on business, spent some money and patted myself on the shoulder for shopping because I thought it would help the economy. Perhaps it did. But probably it didn’t, because probably my money would have been much better spent buying a hammer and some nails and helping someone rebuild…something. Anything.

No one likes to be preached to, least of all me. But I found myself in the middle of one of the most open wounds in our country, in the middle of the anniversary of its injury, and I couldn’t come home and blog about the wonderful restaurants I tried or the funny stories of the shit that happened while I was there. It’s not funny and it’s not relevant unless we’re talking about HELPING PEOPLE.

I haven’t done that in a while. It’s time I did.

Justin Timberlake (MTV Hope for Haiti/AP)

So I realize that in the grand scheme of things, my promises have a long track record of going undone. I told you that I’d write such-and-such post and it never showed up. I said that I would webcam myself talking and drinking wine while ranting about something stupid. Never did that either.

Then I told you that for every comment you made on one of my posts last week, I would donate $1 towards Hope for Haiti.

Hallelujah Justin Timberlake I DID IT! I counted up your comments, I added in what I could, and during the Hope for Haiti telethon, I called and waited until I got the greatest celebrity ever! this guy named Josh who happily took my money off my hands. It’s the best money I ever spent, except for the time that I got my mom to give me money for a formal dress, and instead used it to pay off my traffic ticket in Appomattox, VA.

But anyway, thanks to all of you who visited or commented last week. You should keep doing so, even if I don’t give money away this time. It’s just the nice thing to do, people.

An Edwards family portrait

By now it’s made the rounds: the love-child admission heard round the world. John Edwards has admitted to fathering Frances Quinn, the daughter of former campaign worker Rielle Hunter.

SHOCKING.

I mean really. Did we not already know this? Did we not scoff and roll our eyes every single time John Edwards denied a) having an affair, b) showing up in a hotel room in LA holding a baby and c) actually owning up to being that baby’s father. Yeah, we did.

This story interests me for several reasons, the first being that he’s from North Carolina. I live right outside of Raleigh, the state’s capitol. John Edwards is from Raleigh, raised his first set of children there, and had I been attending public instead of private high school, I might have known his child Wade, the son who died in a horrific car accident. Down South, as you probably have already surmised, we don’t talk about this cheating stuff. Sure, it happens. All the damn time. But we don’t go around getting caught (and by we, I mean other people). And we sure as hell don’t go around cheating on our cancer-stricken wives, no matter how reportedly bitchy they were on the campaign trail.

This scandal is bringing undue attention to our fair state. Oprah has been to Chapel Hill to interview Elizabeth Edwards at their “sprawling farm,” which is just a bunch of nouveau riche buildings strung together on a cleared-out tobacco field. The guys from ABC News have been down here several times, first at Southern Village in Chapel Hill where Edwards’ headquarters were based, and then at their old home between Raleigh and Chapel Hill. (It should be noted here that when people refer to this area, it is known as the Triangle. Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill are separate cities. No one calls Raleigh “Raleigh-Durham.” That’s the airport. Not the town.)

I will fully admit here that I think John Edwards is a tacky son of a bitch who got too big for his britches and decided that his supposed good looks entitled him to sleeping around. After his wife was diagnosed with cancer. After he lost a child and had two other children. But this is beside my actual point.

How, someone please tell me, did he get saddled with being a baby daddy? This is 2010. That child is two years old. Even in 2008, there was birth control. Hell, birth control has mostly been around since the beginning of  time, whichever way you look at it, and I’m not going into methods here. What I am going into is the fact that IF you’re going to screw around, don’t be stupid. Don’t be so stupid as to bring a child into your scandalous affair for him or her to grow up forever labeled as “That Jackass Politician’s Love Child.” The number of stories in the press right now about celebrities having children out of wedlock is astounding. And I’m not judging that necessarily; if you’re in a committed relationship, have no plans to marry, but decide you want a child, go for it. Your life is your life. But when you already are in a committed relationship, one which exists in the public eye, one which you tout as strong and hold up as a model for your constituents, cheating is unacceptable.

I was having this same discussion with a friend of mine this morning and she said to me, “Yes, Elizabeth. I agree with you. But he’s human. People make mistakes.” Very true. I make mistakes every day. But I’m not running for President. I am not my state’s senator. I do not hold press conferences with my husband by my side to say that I’ve been married 40 years and we are happier than ever. I do not cheat.

There are those of you out there who will read the title of this post and think that I’m flippant and perhaps a little on the tasteless side, and let me point out that those are lyrics from a 90′s song. Just so you know. But those words never rang so true as they did this morning, when that rat fink liar confessed to lying for years, denying his third daughter and undoubtedly lying to his wife and children. He now has a living breathing reminder, living out in California, being photographed by paparazzi, that he cheated. That he went back on his word and stepped out on his family. And that little girl’s face will always remind people of this scandal.

She doesn’t deserve that and neither does his family.

Here’s a Monday list for ya: Over the weekend something fatastically awesome happened and suddenly I have readers OUT THE WAZOO! (For those of you that can check these things, my numbers are still teensy compared to yours, but it’s MY VICTORY!) Anyway, here’s where I think all of my new readers have come from:

1. A 16-year coma.

2. Out of an Ambien-induced fog.

3. Lady Gaga has put her rabids out to explore the ENTIRE Internet. (Hint: Only ABDPBT readers will probably get that, but that’s OK because that means you all are on this list, too.)

4. E! Online wrote a post about Rachel Zoe with her skinny, teeninsy, bony, leathery self, and showed a picture of her in a bikini and – OH GOD – excuse me because I need to toss my breakfast now. Nothing against Zoe, in fact I kind of love her, but only when she’s covered up head-to-toe and is behind enormous sunglasses. I showed a skeletal picture of her not too far back and apparently THE OTHERS have found it.

5. You’ve been hiding in the Heene balloon and therefore have been confined to Larry King Live for months and months.

6. Out from uh, under, Tiger Woods. Welcome back to reality.

7. With college football behind us and Carolina basketball sucking before us, you fled to the Internet and found comfort with me. You’re welcome.

8. Your Snuggie melted, your gas logs burned out and the only place warm enough in your house is in front of your laptop. I’m here for you, Internet, I’m here for you.

9. You’ve just been released from Celebrity Rehab. Congratulations! Hey, what was Heidi Fleiss really like?

When my husband was a kid, he and his sister fought like siblings do. To really know my husband is to understand his formerly-evil streak. Some call it mischievous, some call it “just being a boy,” but I call it using his powers for evil instead of good. For instance, he once ruined his mother’s bridge club party by going around, bridge player to bridge player, and whispering every four-letter word he could think of in his mother’s friends’ ears. They thought it was hilarious, and in typical five year-old boy fashion, he decided that he could top that in so very many ways. (Did I tell you about the time he was kicked out of preschool and his mother took him to a child psychologist because she JUST COULDN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE?)

Anyway, his career as a trouble-maker went on for years and during one such trouble-making instance, his sister tattled on him to his mother. And when confronted, he looked at his mother, looked back at his sister and said, “Nuh-uh. Look at her. She loves to lie.”

This is a favorite story to tell in his family because it kind of encapsulates Brian at that age, but it’s also funny now because Brian is the type of person who drives 33 mph in a 35. He’s the kind of person you wouldn’t DREAM of telling about how last week you found a lottery ticket and claimed the winnings as yours. Or about the time you called in sick to work when really you just wanted to watch a “Project Runway” marathon. He can’t stand to break the rules.

So imagine then how interesting it’s been in our house this week. Me, the middle of the road sometimes-conservative but more than a little liberal gal who skipped the presidential address because I wanted to watch Melanie Oudin advance at the U.S. Open (it didn’t happen; she lost to Wozniacki). Brian, the always-conservative Rush Limbaugh-listener who gets upset at the mention of poor, underinsured, hungry students of mine but who can’t bring himself to vote for a Democrat. He listened to Obama’s speech out of one ear, but was mostly focused on his statistics homework.

Both of us missed Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” cry the first time around. We caught it the next day though, on Good Morning America, and it sparked a healthy debate: Was Joe Wilson out of line? Should he have stood up for his party on such a public platform or should he have respected his Commander in Chief (and all of Congress) and held his tongue? I know where I stand, but Brian wasn’t so sure.

“Yeah, you shouldn’t really have an outburst like that on live television in the gallery like that,” he said. “But I mean, really, this whole healthcare debacle is just a trainwreck. Joe Wilson’s right.”

I didn’t respond to him, mainly because I absolutely can’t bear to talk politics with his bull-headedness. He stubbornly refuses to listen (most of the time) and believes what he reads in the Wall Street Journal, what he hears on Fox News or what the butcher at the Piggly Wiggly says.

But I’ve been thinking ever since: What if we, like Joe Wilson, called people out every time we thought we smelled a lie? Do politicians love to lie, as Brian claimed his sister did? Sure they do, unless you believe everything they say. Do we, everyday folks, love to lie? Sure we do. Think about everything you said yesterday and how many little white lies you snuck into your conversations.

I’ll go ahead and admit mine right now: I can’t think of the last time I told the whole truth and nothing but the truth all day long. No, sorry, I can’t walk with you after work because I have to get home and cook supper, knowing full well it’s take-out night. Or I totally loved that precious invitation you made for your party! when actually I think that your four year-old could’ve done a much better job. In my case, Sorry I had to sneak out of the meeting early, but I had way too much coffee this morning, when actually I just can’t bear to be confined for another second.

What does that say about us? Are we a country full of liars, cheats and thieves, or are we just humans trying to make it through another day? I don’t know exactly, but yes, this DVD I’m about to burn was downloaded completely legally and through the proper channels, and no, I don’t plan to show it to large groups of people.

Yet.