Festival International de Louisiane

The start of this trip suddenly finds me jobless and a little perplexed at the state of affairs, but I’m feelin good just back from an energizing trip down to Ashland where I got to watch Mary Poppins and take in a play at one of the many beautiful theatres. All too quickly I watched the Chai Hut disappear through my rearview mirror and I was off on another crazy M4 adventure. 4:30Am found Me, Robin, Benny, and Jenny Pancake on the early bird cocaine express to the airport, where they confiscated my yogurt at security ☹ ‘it’s considered a crème’ she says... bah! I will get you with my yogurt!!!!! The flight to Dallas was uneventful but it was made up for in the propeller plane from Dallas to Lafayette, Louisiana. I thought we might be done for when we started to fishtail as we landed, but spirit had other plans in store for these M4thrs. When we got here it was 80 degrees and about 88% humidity, not too bad but definitely a little h-o-t... we were picked up at the tiny airport by Ted, who would soon prove himself to be our trusty driver, and he whisked us away to the hotel, which has been transformed for this weekend into the ‘hospitality village’, ALL the bands from this festival are staying here. It’s pretty cool, though most of the bands are French or African so there’s a lot of languages being thrown around and I often feel in the minority... it’s great! We are staying 3 to a room, and it seems to be working out pretty well. We are all in the same section of the hotel and all the doors lead to the outside so everyone brought out their tables and chairs and we just have a block party all the time.
When we got here we had about 4 hours till showtime, which really means 1 ½ hours to relax, 1 hour to get ready, and then 1 ½ hour to hang out backstage and wait to go on. Having only managed a couple hours sleep the night before I was ready for a nap but no such luck. We have a couple of big ol vans that cart us all around. When we arrived at the stage there was absolutely no one there! I think I saw some tumbleweed roll by... but, we figured no one knew us and we were opening up the show so... oh well. As soon as we started to play people started to show up and all of a sudden the place was packed and they were SO diggin it! People seemed genuinely surprised to see us there. After the show when we went into the crowd I got some of the best feedback ever! Then we had a chance to really check out the festival, and it was so much more amazing than I expected. They have closed off like 10 city blocks and the festival is right in the middle of it all. The town of Lafayette is very cute and the people are especially gregarious. The festival sees 350,000 people! Most of the bands are French or French influenced. Last night after our show we watched the Mamadou Diabate Ensemble from Mali, they were fantastic. As typical of March Fourth there was much partying going on both at the festival and back in hotel land, but I was genuinely tuckered so I headed off to bed around midnight (I know!! Can you BELIEVE it?) complete with earplugs and facemask, I had a great night’s sleep. Which is good because we were roused at 8:00 iN THE MORNING to get up and go play a kids show! I don’t know what we were expecting but I think it was bigger than we expected! It was at the main stage which is a huge stage with a huge soundsystem with a HUGE crowd! They had bussed kids in from all over the place to come see us... we put on an awesome show and I think I spent a half an hour after the show in the crowd answering kids’ questions getting in pictures, giving them hugs and receiving their adoration. One kid said ‘last year, this wasn’t good. This year, it was good!’ I thought that a supreme compliment. It is so incredibly sticky here, if you are not just out of the shower then you wish you were. During the shows the sweat just comes pouring down, no real way around it. And I find that no matter how much I eat, I am instantly starving after a show. Right now everyone is resting up because we are playing tonight on the main stage, a slightly daunting but exciting opportunity. Then after tht we are marching around the whole festival for an hour or so. Ok I’m going to go rest up now.... I’ll let you know how it goes. And pictures to come!