As I sit in my bed with my kitty curled up next to me I can only think of one word to sum up the weekend in Louisiana… epic. Oh my god! I can’t believe I experienced what I just experienced. I will try to get it down into words as best I can.
When I last left off we were resting up for our big show on main stage Friday night. It’s actually hard to rest when there is so much fun stuff going on around you, I tried to but I think I ended up just eating more and hanging out with new friends. And I did some partner yoga with Katie out on the grass while these little bugs called ‘love bugs’ flew around (they were attached at the tail end, in a perpetual state of bliss) and the gentle melody of Russ’s flute and Taylor’s saxophone caressed our ears. So we headed out to the festival in our trusty white vans and did the main stage show. it was so awesome! The sides of the stage were crowded with cameras and video cameras, and our show went famously. The crowd was super excited and the kids up front were going crazy. After the stage set we paraded around the grounds, gathering a flock of people. Keith’s friend Richard from New Orleans was there and he was doing fire blasts as we marched along. We ended in this little grassy field where we wooed them with Nicoletta and then killed it with Lesley Metal. I love the looks on people faces when you storm into a scene and they totally get it. After that I had a wicked headache and all I wanted to do was go back to the hotel. I couldn’t find an advil anywhere but someone gave me a midol… these were dire times. Babylon Circus (the AWESOME headliner band) had asked the dancers to join them on stage for their final song. It was an amazing opportunity so I took the midol and got on with it. Their set was incredible!!! They had the most amazing stage presence, they owned that stage for every second of their set. Plus their band ROCKS, it’s kind of ska/jazz/French circus or something. Totally wicked. M4thers kept trickling in backstage so that when they finally called us on stage we all just bombarded on dancing around and generally freaking out. The crown went totally crazy when we got on stage, and it was complete and total mayhem, strobe lights and all. This was a uniquely epic experience unto itself. But it did nothing for my headache. At this point it was pounding to the point of nausea so I decided it was time to head back to the hotel. On the van ride home a few of us met a band called Samarabalouf, and Francois asked me if I would like to sit in with them the next day. They are from Paris and play Gypsy Jazz. I had never heard them and they had never seen me hoop but we shook on it anyway. So this is how it happens!
When we got back to the hotel I jumped out of the van only to find Mamadou Diabate playing the kora by the pool, accompanied by his Marimba (not really a marimba but it looks like one and I keep forgetting the name) player and the drummer from Habib Koite’s band on jambay. It was so amazing, I forgot all notion of a headache and sat out there for hours clapping and singing along. That night was the sweetest of all for hotel partying, everyone was in rare form and people just kept trickling out to the pool. I made great friends with a band from Quebec called Benwala…. Everyone just got completely toasty, it was like a great big musician/dancer mixer. It was actually kind of funny because most of the bands are all men, we were the only band that had any women except for the tour manager for Benwala, and the all women group Voom that didn’t really make many appearances. And everyone was so damn HOT! I think my head hit the pillow around 4am, which was to be the trend for the next few days.
In the morning I woke up and jumped out of bed, straight into my costume. Robin and I caught the early van out to the festival, I was to go on with Samarabalouf at 1:00. It was SOOOOOoooo fun! They are a trio, and I got to hoop right in the middle of them to a song called BoogieWoogie. The crowd loved it and the guys were so happy… Robin got it all on video so maybe I’ll post it somewhere. The rest of that day we just spent going from stage to stage seeing amazing music and receiving adoration from fans. It was pretty incredible how many people had seen us and came up to us wanting pictures and telling us how much they had loved us. It actually got to a point where we felt like hiding because we were so exhausted from talking to people. I really wanted to see Habib Koite so I figured I had just enough time to see part of his set before our parade at 4:30. Right around 4 I got this feeling that I should head over to the meeting spot, and when we got there no one else was there. As the fear feeling started to grow in my belly we looked to see that the parade was actually at 4:00 across the festival. Shit! We were running through the crowded streets, almost perishing with heat exhaustion. When we made it to the parade we were about halfway late. Oops! After that I was super tired but of course there was too much good music to slow down! There was good down time to be had in the hospitality tent, there was always amazing food flowing and all the artists were there so it was a good time to connect with people. That night we had and incredible parade. There was this one moment where we were stopped by this gorgeous fountain, I ran to the other side of the fountain so I could hoop for some folks and I looked back and saw the fountain with M4 in the background, the stilters in silhouette, the crowd jumping up and down… uh! It was so amazing. Then we proceeded to this little acoustic stage where we ROCKED IT until long after the horn players lips were fatiguing and the stilters legs were shakin…. It was totally epic. After that I think more partying ensued at the hotel… I can’t quite remember. It all becomes a blur at some point. I do know that it was another 4amer though…
The next day we were headed off to New Orleans. Our drive there was…. Wet. It was raining so incredibly hard I thought our van might wash away. We had rented two vans and a box truck to get us around while in the Big Easy. At one point we drove over this really cool bridge through the swamplands, it was 10 miles long. Once again I thought of Louis and Lestat, hangin out there dumping bodies after they have had their fill. I can’t help it, I learned all I know about New Orleans from Anne Rice..When we drove over Lake Pontacharain I recognized it from last time we were there. We had a fat pad to crash, our friend Josh and his gracious housemates let us throw down air mattresses on the floor and generally take over their house for a few days. Jazz fest was going on and we were planning on going and doing a little renegade show there but the weather was totally ikky and the band was suffering from general fatigue, so we decided to nap a bit before our big night. Naptime flew by, as it often does, and suddenly it was time to head in to the city and do our thang. Our gig was in a section of town called the Marinee, across Esplanade St. from the French Quarter. Our plan was to play outside for a bit to gather some people and then go into the venue. When we got there a brass band was already playing on the corner.. we enjoyed them for awhile and even joined in, it felt like a classic NOLA experience. We then decided it would be best to do a march. People around there are definitely looking for a spectacle…. And they found one! As the band was getting ready I started warming up by hula hoopin, and the crowd trickled in until it was a rather large crowd, taking pictures and doing the usual tourist thing… it was pretty cool! At a certain point though I was ready for the band to start, I didn’t want to stop and lose our crowd! It’s easy to work up a sweat in that humidity, I find that I do not have as much stamina as I am used to. They started in the nick of time, they played one song and then the cars that were being blocked by the crowd started to get impatient and started honking, so we decided it was time to march. We marched down the sidewalk in two lines. I took the back right in front of the bass amp. As I looked at my band in two perfect lines in front of me I fell in love again. How many times have I fallen in love with the band? Countless. It was incredible. We marched onto Esplanade St and stopped in a little alcove and played a few songs. The people were flowing into the street and across the street in the median. It was one of the greatest moments of my life thus far. It is extremely hard to capture the moment in words but I just felt like I was the luckiest person in the world to be a part of this project. And in this moment a man who lives in Portland and happened to be at Jazz Fest this weekend came up to me and offered me a job! Ask and the universe shall provide. We passed the hat and made over $400. We marched back to the venue and played a raging set. No room for dance pieces but it was one of my most fun March Fourth shows regardless. And after the show we all poured into the street and enjoyed the brass band on the corner, bought veggie burittos from the roaming buritto prophet, and enjoyed moments of mystery from the burlesque girl selling moments of mysteries in little plastic eggs. Russ jammed with a keyboard player right on the sidewalk. It was one of those nights that you never want to end. But of course 4:00 rolls around and everything starts to feel a little slooooooooow. I think I slept really good that night. A few people had flights that morning so they went straight from the Josh’s abode after party to the airport, tequila breath and all…
The next day a few of us decided to take a little tourist trip to the French Quarter (even though I vowed not to go back there since I spent 3 days there last time) but I just needed to stop by the lingerie store there and buy a couple more ruffle butts. They have such good ones! We wandered around for awhile and then it was time to head back home to go to the airport. After a series of unfortunate events which I will not go into here because it is long and boring (unlike this blog), I ended up missing my flight out by 1 MINUTE!!! Luckily they got me on a flight the next morning so I hung my head and called John and Dan to come pick me back up…. Bonus night!!! There were a few stragglers flying out either today or Wednesday so I had some partners in crime. Me, Dan, Aspen, John, Jenny, Richard, Taylor, Scarlett, Russ, and Babs headed out to Tipitinas where there was an allstar lineup of Little feat, Galactic, and the Rebirth Brass Band. Unfortunately you had to be a millionaire to actually get in the show but they had closed off the street and there was a New Orleans band and a block party. It was pretty fun. Then we headed over to Babs’ sweet pad downtown and chilled there for awhile before going to the Marinee and shakin our butts to the Klezmer Allstars, an incredible klezmer/funk group that has been together something like 18 years. Oops! 3am… better get home, I had a cab picking me up at 7:45 the next morning to get to the airport… (I set 3 alarms!) oh.. glad I remembered, I better turn those off…. Needless to say I made it to the airport and zonked out all the way home. I woke up to ‘flight attendants, please prepare the cabin for landing…..crosscheck!’
And again, I will sum it with…. Epic. So epic. I can’t believe how incredibly lucky I am.
Thanks for reading this far, I commend you for your dedication to the life and times of a March Fourth hula hooper…. Until next time~
When I last left off we were resting up for our big show on main stage Friday night. It’s actually hard to rest when there is so much fun stuff going on around you, I tried to but I think I ended up just eating more and hanging out with new friends. And I did some partner yoga with Katie out on the grass while these little bugs called ‘love bugs’ flew around (they were attached at the tail end, in a perpetual state of bliss) and the gentle melody of Russ’s flute and Taylor’s saxophone caressed our ears. So we headed out to the festival in our trusty white vans and did the main stage show. it was so awesome! The sides of the stage were crowded with cameras and video cameras, and our show went famously. The crowd was super excited and the kids up front were going crazy. After the stage set we paraded around the grounds, gathering a flock of people. Keith’s friend Richard from New Orleans was there and he was doing fire blasts as we marched along. We ended in this little grassy field where we wooed them with Nicoletta and then killed it with Lesley Metal. I love the looks on people faces when you storm into a scene and they totally get it. After that I had a wicked headache and all I wanted to do was go back to the hotel. I couldn’t find an advil anywhere but someone gave me a midol… these were dire times. Babylon Circus (the AWESOME headliner band) had asked the dancers to join them on stage for their final song. It was an amazing opportunity so I took the midol and got on with it. Their set was incredible!!! They had the most amazing stage presence, they owned that stage for every second of their set. Plus their band ROCKS, it’s kind of ska/jazz/French circus or something. Totally wicked. M4thers kept trickling in backstage so that when they finally called us on stage we all just bombarded on dancing around and generally freaking out. The crown went totally crazy when we got on stage, and it was complete and total mayhem, strobe lights and all. This was a uniquely epic experience unto itself. But it did nothing for my headache. At this point it was pounding to the point of nausea so I decided it was time to head back to the hotel. On the van ride home a few of us met a band called Samarabalouf, and Francois asked me if I would like to sit in with them the next day. They are from Paris and play Gypsy Jazz. I had never heard them and they had never seen me hoop but we shook on it anyway. So this is how it happens!
When we got back to the hotel I jumped out of the van only to find Mamadou Diabate playing the kora by the pool, accompanied by his Marimba (not really a marimba but it looks like one and I keep forgetting the name) player and the drummer from Habib Koite’s band on jambay. It was so amazing, I forgot all notion of a headache and sat out there for hours clapping and singing along. That night was the sweetest of all for hotel partying, everyone was in rare form and people just kept trickling out to the pool. I made great friends with a band from Quebec called Benwala…. Everyone just got completely toasty, it was like a great big musician/dancer mixer. It was actually kind of funny because most of the bands are all men, we were the only band that had any women except for the tour manager for Benwala, and the all women group Voom that didn’t really make many appearances. And everyone was so damn HOT! I think my head hit the pillow around 4am, which was to be the trend for the next few days.
In the morning I woke up and jumped out of bed, straight into my costume. Robin and I caught the early van out to the festival, I was to go on with Samarabalouf at 1:00. It was SOOOOOoooo fun! They are a trio, and I got to hoop right in the middle of them to a song called BoogieWoogie. The crowd loved it and the guys were so happy… Robin got it all on video so maybe I’ll post it somewhere. The rest of that day we just spent going from stage to stage seeing amazing music and receiving adoration from fans. It was pretty incredible how many people had seen us and came up to us wanting pictures and telling us how much they had loved us. It actually got to a point where we felt like hiding because we were so exhausted from talking to people. I really wanted to see Habib Koite so I figured I had just enough time to see part of his set before our parade at 4:30. Right around 4 I got this feeling that I should head over to the meeting spot, and when we got there no one else was there. As the fear feeling started to grow in my belly we looked to see that the parade was actually at 4:00 across the festival. Shit! We were running through the crowded streets, almost perishing with heat exhaustion. When we made it to the parade we were about halfway late. Oops! After that I was super tired but of course there was too much good music to slow down! There was good down time to be had in the hospitality tent, there was always amazing food flowing and all the artists were there so it was a good time to connect with people. That night we had and incredible parade. There was this one moment where we were stopped by this gorgeous fountain, I ran to the other side of the fountain so I could hoop for some folks and I looked back and saw the fountain with M4 in the background, the stilters in silhouette, the crowd jumping up and down… uh! It was so amazing. Then we proceeded to this little acoustic stage where we ROCKED IT until long after the horn players lips were fatiguing and the stilters legs were shakin…. It was totally epic. After that I think more partying ensued at the hotel… I can’t quite remember. It all becomes a blur at some point. I do know that it was another 4amer though…
The next day we were headed off to New Orleans. Our drive there was…. Wet. It was raining so incredibly hard I thought our van might wash away. We had rented two vans and a box truck to get us around while in the Big Easy. At one point we drove over this really cool bridge through the swamplands, it was 10 miles long. Once again I thought of Louis and Lestat, hangin out there dumping bodies after they have had their fill. I can’t help it, I learned all I know about New Orleans from Anne Rice..When we drove over Lake Pontacharain I recognized it from last time we were there. We had a fat pad to crash, our friend Josh and his gracious housemates let us throw down air mattresses on the floor and generally take over their house for a few days. Jazz fest was going on and we were planning on going and doing a little renegade show there but the weather was totally ikky and the band was suffering from general fatigue, so we decided to nap a bit before our big night. Naptime flew by, as it often does, and suddenly it was time to head in to the city and do our thang. Our gig was in a section of town called the Marinee, across Esplanade St. from the French Quarter. Our plan was to play outside for a bit to gather some people and then go into the venue. When we got there a brass band was already playing on the corner.. we enjoyed them for awhile and even joined in, it felt like a classic NOLA experience. We then decided it would be best to do a march. People around there are definitely looking for a spectacle…. And they found one! As the band was getting ready I started warming up by hula hoopin, and the crowd trickled in until it was a rather large crowd, taking pictures and doing the usual tourist thing… it was pretty cool! At a certain point though I was ready for the band to start, I didn’t want to stop and lose our crowd! It’s easy to work up a sweat in that humidity, I find that I do not have as much stamina as I am used to. They started in the nick of time, they played one song and then the cars that were being blocked by the crowd started to get impatient and started honking, so we decided it was time to march. We marched down the sidewalk in two lines. I took the back right in front of the bass amp. As I looked at my band in two perfect lines in front of me I fell in love again. How many times have I fallen in love with the band? Countless. It was incredible. We marched onto Esplanade St and stopped in a little alcove and played a few songs. The people were flowing into the street and across the street in the median. It was one of the greatest moments of my life thus far. It is extremely hard to capture the moment in words but I just felt like I was the luckiest person in the world to be a part of this project. And in this moment a man who lives in Portland and happened to be at Jazz Fest this weekend came up to me and offered me a job! Ask and the universe shall provide. We passed the hat and made over $400. We marched back to the venue and played a raging set. No room for dance pieces but it was one of my most fun March Fourth shows regardless. And after the show we all poured into the street and enjoyed the brass band on the corner, bought veggie burittos from the roaming buritto prophet, and enjoyed moments of mystery from the burlesque girl selling moments of mysteries in little plastic eggs. Russ jammed with a keyboard player right on the sidewalk. It was one of those nights that you never want to end. But of course 4:00 rolls around and everything starts to feel a little slooooooooow. I think I slept really good that night. A few people had flights that morning so they went straight from the Josh’s abode after party to the airport, tequila breath and all…
The next day a few of us decided to take a little tourist trip to the French Quarter (even though I vowed not to go back there since I spent 3 days there last time) but I just needed to stop by the lingerie store there and buy a couple more ruffle butts. They have such good ones! We wandered around for awhile and then it was time to head back home to go to the airport. After a series of unfortunate events which I will not go into here because it is long and boring (unlike this blog), I ended up missing my flight out by 1 MINUTE!!! Luckily they got me on a flight the next morning so I hung my head and called John and Dan to come pick me back up…. Bonus night!!! There were a few stragglers flying out either today or Wednesday so I had some partners in crime. Me, Dan, Aspen, John, Jenny, Richard, Taylor, Scarlett, Russ, and Babs headed out to Tipitinas where there was an allstar lineup of Little feat, Galactic, and the Rebirth Brass Band. Unfortunately you had to be a millionaire to actually get in the show but they had closed off the street and there was a New Orleans band and a block party. It was pretty fun. Then we headed over to Babs’ sweet pad downtown and chilled there for awhile before going to the Marinee and shakin our butts to the Klezmer Allstars, an incredible klezmer/funk group that has been together something like 18 years. Oops! 3am… better get home, I had a cab picking me up at 7:45 the next morning to get to the airport… (I set 3 alarms!) oh.. glad I remembered, I better turn those off…. Needless to say I made it to the airport and zonked out all the way home. I woke up to ‘flight attendants, please prepare the cabin for landing…..crosscheck!’
And again, I will sum it with…. Epic. So epic. I can’t believe how incredibly lucky I am.
Thanks for reading this far, I commend you for your dedication to the life and times of a March Fourth hula hooper…. Until next time~
