Nothing Gained

Nothing Gained
by Donald G. Redman

My resistance to you
is time wasted.
I sometimes struggle
to realize the obvious.
Tethered to the reality of the
photograph before me,
I let it happen.





Nothing Gained is a poem repurposed from a newspaper article of the same title, written by Sarah Bonnette. The article originally appeared September 21, 2016 in the Slidell-Picayune.

Three Haiku

I.

My jagged edges -

A broken heart, shattered dreams -

Cut deep nonetheless.

II.

Unkept promises

like withered leaves in autumn

carried by the wind.

III.

Encased behind walls

Of marble cold to the touch

Inside beats a heart.

Copyright 2016 Donald G. Redman. All rights reserved.

Ernest Gaines: A Timeless Storyteller

Ernest J. Gaines
(Photo by Joseph Sanford, courtesy Ernest J. Gaines Center.)

By Cheylon Woods

In 1933 a child came into this world with so much potential to learn from, be influenced by, and influence the world around him. As the world was slipping in to political and economic devastation, no one knew that a small boy born on River Lake Plantation in Oscar, Louisiana would become Ernest J. Gaines, One of the most prolific and timeless authors of the 20th century.

Growing up on a plantation gave Ernest J. Gaines a unique type of perspective on life. Gifted with the talent of honest observation, as a child Gaines was able to perceive the crux of complicated social issues such as race, gender and class. He was also able to see how people influenced their world around them and how, in return, they were influenced by the world.

As he embarked on his career he used all of the things her learned from River Lake Plantation, adolescence, and San Francisco State University to create honest depictions of how he saw life in the South. Mr. Gaines used the information he gleamed from observing personal interactions throughout his life to create characters that wholly embodied the essence of being alive. Characters like Miss Jane Pittman (The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman), Catherine (Catherine Carmier), Louis (Of Love and Dust), and James and Jefferson (A Lesson Before Dying) all embody a realness that draws you deeper into your own awareness about self and the world you live in.

It is this realness that makes the work of Ernest J. Gaines so timeless and pointed. All of his books paint a complex picture of real life filled with love, sadness, hardship, betrayal, mistreatment, and hope that resonates beyond the Civil Rights Era. His novels and short stories strike at the heart of real issues such as racism, oppression of all kinds, miscarriage of justice, gender inequality,  while showing us that through it all people can still love, learn, be strong, progress, and care about one another and their places that shaped them.

The topics that can be found in Gaines’ writing are not only as old as humanity, but have been driving forces in shaping civilization, both good and bad, as we know it. To this day some are looking for ways to ensure equality for all while others may be looking to secure their personal power. We still look for love and acceptance while there are those who look  to live a life strictly by their own whims, unconcerned with who or what gets hurt in that process. 

Throughout his work, and throughout his career, Gaines strove to show the world a mirror of itself through a Southern lens. He crafted people from different upbringings, with different interests and peculiarities, and showed us both the good and the bad in all. Readers can find some vestige of themselves in all of his characters, and are reminded that they possess as many complexities as those on the page. His work forces us to think about our own perceptions reality and righteousness and how these ideas actually work in our own communities.    

Common themes throughout Gaines’ work are the ideas of justice and accountability. In almost every novel there is some measure of justice and accountability, although often subtle.  A Lesson Before Dying is one of his more powerful novels that directly puts these issues in the forefront for the reader. This book not only looks at the idea of justice and the justice system, but it also calls the idea of masculinity, advocacy, reality, and community responsibility to the forefront of our minds. All of the characters are confronted with their ideas of right and wrong through the incarceration of one man, and throughout the book you see how each character comes to some kind of terms with the idea of justice as it relates to the society that they live in.

Gaines expertly crafted the story and characters of this book in a way that conveyed the true weight such an incident would have on a small community and community leaders today. In 2016 most people who read A Lesson Before Dying can remember at least one time during their lifetime where something similar happened, and their community (physical community or intellectual community) discussed the ideas of justice and personal accountability.

Ernest J. Gaines has created some of the most moving and accessible pieces of literature of the 20th century. He wrote during a time of social awakening which is reflected throughout his work. He strove to show the humanity in all and all of humanity, and succeeded doing so in such a way that is never dated. His characters are not locked in some era from so long ago, distanced from us by a great cultural chasm of days long gone, but are real, breathing and visible to us today. The plots and the characters created by Gaines so beautifully reflect the complexities that is life and humanity that they still resonate with readers more than fifty years since his career began. This in itself is the mark of a great author, and this is the mark of great literature.

 Cheylon Woods is the director of the Ernest J. Gaines Center at University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where she is also the Center’s archivist and ULL assistant professor of Library Science. She received an MLIS from LSU and an MA in Heritage Resources from Northwestern State University.

Editor's note: Cheylon Woods' essay originally appeared in "Prologue," an audience guide for Slidell Little Theatre and is reproduced here with permission. 

Walker Percy Film: Journey from Medicine to Fiction, Agnosticism to Faith

My first introduction to the writings of Walker Percy was Love in the Ruins. I was instantly hooked, and moved on to devour The Second Coming and Lancelot. But I hit a wall when it came to perhaps his most famous novel, the National Book Award-winning, The Moviegoer.

For some reason – immaturity, perhaps – I just couldn’t get into the novel. I tried a couple of times, but I always ended up setting the book down, unread, and moving on to something else. It wasn’t until I was in my forties that I picked up the book again, and it was like I had been hit by a bolt of lightning. I realized for the first time the brilliance of The Moviegoer.

I told that story a few years ago to New Orleans-based filmmaker Win Riley, who seemed nonplused by my lack of appreciation for The Moviegoer. A Percy devotee since his teens, Riley once said that he first read the novel when he was a teenager and that it hit him “like a depth charge.” Thus began a years-long fascination with Percy that culminated in Riley’s must-see biography, Walker Percy: A Documentary Film.

 

With Win Riley (left) during a screening of
Walker Percy: A Documentary Film

In a 2011 interview with Micah Mattrix, Riley explained his interest in Walker Percy: “I’ve been curious about Walker since, as a teenager, I first pulled The Moviegoer from my parents’ bookshelf…. Part of my curiosity came from the fact that Walker was steeped in the traditions and culture of the South, yet his interests led him to people like Camus and Sartre and Kierkegaard rather than someone like Faulkner. That was intriguing to me. And the story of moving from medicine to fiction, from agnosticism to faith, was very, very interesting.”

Three years in the making, Riley’s award-winning documentary tells Percy’s story with archival film, excerpts from his work, and interviews with family, friends and scholars.  

Here, Riley describes the film in his own words:

As a doctor turned writer and philosopher, Percy was concerned with the big issues: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" But he knew his audience was inured to a direct approach. Binx Bolling, in The Moviegoer, is almost allergic to such discussions-––“...if they spoke to me of God, I would jump into the bayou”––yet he is preoccupied with what he calls ‘the search.’ It is a preoccupation that haunts all of Percy’s work.  Part of what makes Percy’s characters like Binx, Will Barrett, and Thomas More so indelible is their wry humor despite being ‘Lost in the Cosmos.’ In Percy’s fifth novel, The Second Coming, the protagonist, Will Barrett, descends into a cave, determined to confront God. He is thwarted by a toothache. For Walker, “humor was an instrument of introspection,” writer Robert Coles says in the film. “That’s what he beautifully combined: that lighthearted sensibility merged with a grave, seriously introspective side. This takes a genius.”

 Walker Percy: A Documentary Film can be purchased or rented here. 

Winston “Win” Riley’s first film, Walter Anderson: Realizations of an Artist, won several film festival awards and was broadcast on PBS. The documentary is absolutely fascinating and I highly recommend it.

Here’s a description of the film from Riley’s website:

Walter Anderson: Realizations of an Artist explores Anderson’s life and art, from his student days to his last trip to Horn Island in 1965, during Hurricane Betsy.
 Using never before seen film footage, as well as artwork and archival photographs, this one-hour biography traces the extraordinary life of the fiercely independent artist. Interviews with family members, artists, and art critics describe Anderson’s struggle to survive during the Depression, his hospitalizations and subsequent escapes, and his eventual triumph as an artist. Born in New Orleans and trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Anderson had a spiritualist side that resulted in a lifelong search. As a student, he set out to visit the mystic G.I Gurdjieff at Fontainebleau, as well as the Paleolithic murals at Les Eyzies. He walked across war torn China in 1949, hoping to visit Tibetan monasteries. And on many occasions he set out from Mississippi on cross country bicycle trips––to West Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, and New York––painting watercolors and writing along the way. “He believed,” says Washington Post art critic Paul Richard, “that somewhere down the road, he would find the enlightenment he sought. It was a religious quest as well as an aesthetic quest."

Walter Anderson: Realizations of an Artist can be purchased here.

Love in Abstract - by Donald G. Redman

Love in Abstract

She wanted something that wasn’t real:

An emotional thing,

An esthetic thing -

Love amid tangled wire

And butterflies,

A white camellia

Crafted out of photographs

Taken of you

At the end.

‘Love in Abstract’ was created by repurposing an article by Sarah Bonnette in the north shore edition of the Times-Picayune. The poem was an exercise in "blackout poetry," a technique introduced by Austin Kleon who created poetry by blacking out words in a newspaper article.

David Armand: An Interview with St. Tammany 'Rough South' Writer

by Donald G. Redman

David Armand
Photo courtesy David Armand

David Armand’s third novel, The Gorge, was released in October 2015 and early reviews are full of praise for the Louisiana native and award-winning author. Armand is among a new breed of writers whose works are classified as “Grit Lit” or  regionally as "Rough South" literature (rough-edged Southern Gothic primed for violence), influenced by the likes of Cormac McCarthy and Larry Brown.

Armand hasn’t forgotten his roots, his old stomping grounds in northern St. Tammany and Washington parishes play prominent roles in his novels. The geographical anomaly and horrific past of Fricke’s Cave in the Bogue Chitto State Park just south of Franklinton was the inspirational setting for The Gorge. Despite its name, Fricke’s Cave more closely resembles a gorge and it was there in 1980 that two ex-cons raped, tortured and murdered a young woman, which later served as the backdrop to Sister Helen Prejean’s book, Dead Man Walking, a biographical account of her relationship with one of the killers on death row.

In addition to being an established writer, Armand is a professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana, where he also serves as associate editor for Louisiana Literature Press. He received his bachelor’s degree in English in 2004 and his master’s degree in 2006.

In 2010, Armand won the George Garrett Fiction Prize for his first novel, The Pugilist's Wife, which was published by Texas Review Press. His second novel, Harlow, was published by Texas Review Press in 2013. Armand's third novel, The Gorge, was published on October 1, 2015, by Southeast Missouri State University Press, and his poetry chapbook, The Deep Woods, was published in September by Blue Horse Press. Armand's memoir, My Mother's House, is forthcoming from Texas Review Press.

Armand recently agreed to a Q& A session with The Redman Writing Project where he talks about his early influences and offers insight into his fiction and poetry.

What were your earliest writing experiences?

ARMAND: The first "real" writing I did was when I was in the third grade and wrote a comic strip for the "Just Say No" campaign. It was an illustrated story about saying "no" to drugs, and it won first place in a contest in St. Tammany Parish. I got a hundred dollars and they hung my winning piece up at the Parish fair. That was the first time I really thought I could actually do something with writing. I had always loved books and reading, so this was a nice motivator.

Did you write for the high school newspaper and did you keep a journal? Did you enter any writing or poetry contests in school? What did you do to foster the writing bug?

ARMAND: I never did write for the high school paper, though I had always wanted to. I just didn't have the motivation as a teenager to talk to the right people to make that happen. Same with poetry contests. I was writing poems in high school, but I just kept them to myself mostly. I wish I had participated more when I was in high school, but I was sort of a loner. I liked to write stories and poems and other sketches, which I kept in notebooks and on scraps of paper in a shoebox. One day, I got so discouraged with the work, I burned it all. Maybe it was a good thing I did because I doubt, now, that any of it was any good.

At what point did you decide you wanted to be a writer? Was there one teacher, one influence or was it just an accumulation of events?

ARMAND: I think it was really just an accumulation of events, and a good deal of luck as well. As I've said, I've always loved reading and writing from when I was a small boy, so it just seemed natural to me that I would start writing my own stories. It wasn't until I got to college and started studying creative writing that I learned how I could do this professionally. 

How did you get your first start? What was your first published piece?

ARMAND: My first published piece was a poem that appeared in the undergraduate creative writing journal at Southeastern Louisiana University, where I went to college. I was writing a lot of poems then, so it was nice to get a couple of them in print. I was submitting poems all over the place then, getting a lot of rejections, so it was nice to get an acceptance.

Tell us about your poetry:

ARMAND: The poems I've been working on lately are generally about my family. They're simple narrative poems, but ones I hope lend themselves to multiple readings. I hadn't written a poem for over ten years, so it was refreshing to return to that form again. They're a nice reprieve from the intensity and time spent writing novels. 

Tell us briefly about your novels:

The Fricke's Cave boardwalk at
Bogue Chitto State Park
Photo by Donald G. Redman

ARMAND: My novels all take place around Folsom, Franklinton, Bush, Sun, and Amite, Louisiana. These are the places with which I'm most familiar and for which I still hold a deep fascination--the people, the landscape, etc. All three of my books deal with people who are desperate, whether it be desperately in love, desperate for escape, desperate for acceptance, and also the idea of maintaining hope in the darkest of situations. I like to think of these novels as a sort of trilogy, even though they're not dependent on one another plot-or-character-wise. 

Asked which of your three novels I should read first, your wife immediately responded, Harlow. Why?

ARMAND: I think I agree with my wife that Harlow is the best exemplar of my work and what I'm trying to do with language and my expression of hope in the face of despair. It's also the most personal of my books, as it is based loosely on my own experience searching for my biological father and the disappointment I had when I did meet him. I was surprised by how many readers have approached me and told me they could relate to this story. I think because it was so personal to me, that it resonated with others. 

Most writers will tell you that there is a particular time of the day they feel they are most creative and do most of their writing. When do you do the bulk of your writing?

ARMAND: Well, I write all the time. Whether I'm physically at the keyboard or not, I feel as though I'm always writing--taking mental notes, observing people, paying attention to conversations, etc. That's part of writing to me--listening and watching, being observant. Also reading constantly--I think doing both of those things are ultimately more productive than forcing yourself to sit in front of a keyboard for four hours a day or whatever. That can produce a lot of uninspired work. I'm more concerned with quality over quantity. When I'm working on a project, though, I try to write every day until it's finished, simply so I don't lose momentum. 

What was the biggest lesson you learned while writing your first novel?

ARMAND: I learned the self-discipline it takes to devote oneself to a project that can take years of one's life with no promise of any reward (in the case of a novel, of course, the reward would be publication). I also learned that I have that self-discipline and patience to keep doing it. Additionally, I learned how to cut--my first novel, as well as my third one, were cut nearly in half before they were ultimately published. I have filing cabinets full of pages that were cut from my novels. 

What advice would you give to novice writers or even those unpublished writers still slugging it out?

ARMAND: I would just say to keep slugging it out. Find some folks to read your work who will give you honest feedback, then keep working on it. At some point, start sending it out. Don't be discouraged by rejections--they're inevitable. Use them to motivate you. Go take a look in a bookstore at some of the books being published and find ones that you think aren't any good. It's OK to tell yourself that, "if this book can get published (whatever book it is), then mine can, too." 

What are your interests? How do you incorporate your interests into your writing or how have they influenced your writing?

ARMAND: Spending time with my family, reading, and watching movies. One day, I'd like to do a lot more traveling. My writing is definitely influenced by film in the sense that I think about things like mise en scene and trying to make my stories cinematic without losing the poetry of the language. I love directors like Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers, and David Lynch. My books definitely try to pay homage to them and the work they've done for the screen. 

What are you writing today?

ARMAND: Right now, I'm working on another novel, The Lord's Acre, which is about a religious cult here in Louisiana. I'm also thinking about collaborating with an artist friend of mine on a graphic novel and also maybe writing a screenplay. 

Where can people find your work and where can they follow you?

ARMAND: Of course, folks can order my books from Amazon or directly from the publishers. They can follow me on Twitter or Facebook by going to my website: davidarmandauthor.com

List five of your favorite authors:

ARMAND: Cormac McCarthy, John Steinbeck, Stephen King, Larry Brown, and William Faulkner

List ten books you’ve read that you’ll never forget:

ARMAND: The Road by Cormac McCarthy, East of Eden by John Steinbeck, 11/22/63 by Stephen King, Dirty Work by Larry Brown, Light in August by William Faulkner, Maus by Art Spiegelman, In the Place of Justice by Wilbert Rideau, Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, The Liar's Club by Mary Karr, and Deliverance by James Dickey.

What are you reading right now?

ARMAND: I'm reading a few different things: Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, which is a biography on David Foster Wallace, Blood and Grits and Madonna at Ringside, two books of essays by Harry Crews, Dynamite, a book of poems by Anders Carlson-Wee, and Trashed, a graphic novel about garbage collectors. My reading taste is very wide-ranged lately. I read everything.

Would you be willing to grant us permission to reprint a poem of your choosing on our blog?

 ARMAND: Yes. "Photograph of My Father" is one of my favorites.

“Photograph of My Father” 

by David Armand

You’re standing in the kitchen of that old trailer
that you rented for us on Davidson Road
and where we lived for a couple of months
while you cleared some land just north of here in Folsom
to put another trailer that you were going to buy brand new.

I remember that one of the toilets in that old place
never flushed right and the whole trailer leaned
on its cinder blocks so that all the doors inside
hung wrong and they would creak open
in the middle of the night sometimes.

But there was a horse paddock in the front yard,
a couple of stalls where once I watched
you help deliver a colt and where another time
I saw you get kicked in the chest by its father.

There was also a great field where we rode Go-Karts
and where one time you pulled my brother and me
behind your truck on our scooters
with a piece of rope you found in the shed.

We hunted quail back there in that field too,
pitched baseballs, shot bows and arrows
at little paper targets. And we went fishing
in a pond that was on another man’s land.

That’s where you caught the fish you’re holding
in this picture. It’s a bass that for some reason
you called “Walter.” Its silver scales and wide mouth
are open around your closed hand and its caudal fin
comes all the way down to your belt—
I swear that fish must’ve been three feet long.

You’re smiling about as much as you ever did here:
your teeth aren’t showing. Just a tight, hard grin
that’s barely visible beneath your beard
and your beer-reddened face and cheeks.

You’re also younger in this picture
than I am now, probably by at least five years,
and have only a dozen more left to live.
But of course you don’t know that here.
How could you?

Behind you the counter’s covered with grocery bags,
a box of Frosted Flakes, some pots and pans
and their lids. There’s a sugar bowl, paper towels
a couple of two liter bottles of Coke, a coffee maker.

You’re standing in front of that counter
and just to the right of a dingy yellow refrigerator
wearing dark jeans and green hospital scrubs
that you got when you went to the Emergency Room
after you nailed your hand to a rabbit cage that time.
Do you remember that?

Anyway, this fish you’re holding is staring out
past your thick, dark arms, past the mess
of our kitchen and the mess of the life you built
for us but that was still somehow pretty good.

Photo copyright David Armand. All rights reserved.
"Photograph of My Father" copyright 2014 David Armand. All rights reserved.
Copyright 2015 Donald G. Redman. All rights reserved.

An Interview with Playwright Rob Florence

by Donald G. Redman

Rob Florence is originally from New York and moved to New Orleans in 1987 only to discover that his father’s family had been in the region since the 1840s. “In doing family genealogical research I discovered the wonders of New Orleans aboveground cemeteries,” says Florence. “In some way, most of my plays are connected to New Orleans cemeteries.”

ROB FLORENCE
Photo by Steven Forster, NOLA.com

He received a Masters in Playwriting with distinction from the University of New Orleans in 2008 and is the Dramatists Guild Gulf Coast / Mississippi Delta Regional Representative.

His body of work includes: Bones; Burn K-Doe Burn!; Mirrors of Chartress Street; Fleeing Katrina; The Key and Holy Wars.

I caught up with Rob Florence for an interview on the eve of Slidell Little Theatre's production of Katrina: The Mother-in-Law of 'em All on the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

What was your relationship with the K-Doe family?

FLORENCE: I was fortunate to have a close relationship with the K-Doe's, as they were extraordinary people.  I knew Ernie K-Doe back in the 1980s when his drinking problem was so bad that he would sometimes sleep on the street.  I saw Antoinette come into his life, literally pick him up out of the gutter, sober him up, and add years to his life which turned out to be an amazing experience for the many people who shared it with them.  They opened the Mother in Law Lounge which was their home, so when you were at the bar you were in their living room.  The place was a shrine to New Orleans R&B, full of dazzling, eccentric memorabilia.

Like the K-Doe's themselves, the Lounge was surreal.  The K-Doe's shared my interest in New Orleans cemeteries.  We had a cemetery preservation group called Friends of New Orleans Cemeteries.  Ernie K-Doe was the grand marshal, making us the only preservation group in the world with a grand marshal.  I was responsible for burying both Antoinette and Ernie in the historic St. Louis Cemetery #2 and wrote the text for their historic markers.  Antoinette K-Doe asked me to write a play about them called BURN K-DOE BURN! and she asked me to write this piece about her Katrina experience.

What was the genesis of “Katrina: Mother-in-Law of ‘em All?”

FLORENCE: Although I'm a playwright and writer of nonfiction which focuses of this region, Katrina was the last thing in the world I wanted to write about.  I wanted to put it out of my mind, which was of course impossible, but I certainly didn't want to live with it 24 hours a day as you do when writing about something.  However, in listening to people over the subsequent months and years, I'd occasionally hear stories which were so different from the popular narratives that they compelled me to write them.  The differences that struck me in these stories were that although all these people went through hell, they landed on their feet in a very strong, defiant, New Orleans way. 

They also in many cases got through their experience with humor, which is very New Orleans.  If this experience had happened to another city I don't think I'd have found narratives that are so funny.  Something else these stories emphasize is that despite how the region was portrayed – defeated, chaotic, criminal – anyone here at the time can tell you that thousands of people were behaving in exemplary ways.  Strangers were helping strangers –  countless acts of self-sacrifice, compassion, and kindness that seemed to be hidden from people outside the region.  So part of this project was an attempt in a small way to create a record from the inside-out which establishes that post-Katrina New Orleans wasn't all what people were seeing on television, as this dialogue from the play illustrates:

RODNEY
So I go back into the room where my folks are and they had run into some of the people who had been on the roof with us. So there was this group of octogenarians but with only one cot and they were taking turns lying down. The young folks were trying to help the nurses, handing out water, taking people to the bathroom, changing diapers, whatever we could. We had heard all these horror stories about the city so I walk over to this nurse I see from Alaska and say, “I just want to let you know how thankful we are that you’re here because we keep hearing these stories about horrific things going on all over New Orleans and I just want you to know that the whole city isn’t populated by crazed lunatics who are burning it down and that we appreciate your -
 NURSE
Nobody thinks that.

You write that these are based on true stories. How did you come to learn these stories? 

 FLORENCE: I think I was fortunate to access these stories because I wasn't looking for them. Again, I was trying to mentally escape from Katrina.  But like everyone else here for the past 10 years, I've been listening to hundreds, maybe thousands, of these experiences.  So the stories kind of came to me.  At the time, there were writers parachuting into the region with tape recorders looking for material, which struck me as odd with all the work that needed to be done.  Could you imagine going to Haiti after the earthquake with a tape recorder looking for stories with all the death and destruction that needed attention?  For her PhD in Theatre History at L.S.U., Anne-Liese Juge Fox wrote a paper on Katrina plays written by regional writers as opposed to out-of-state writers.  She concluded that out-of-state writers, "Cut your heart out, put it on a plate and ate it in front of you," whereas the regional playwrights humanized the people of this region through their Katrina experiences.  

How were you personally affected by the hurricane?

FLORENCE: If I were to sum up in a few sentences what happened to my life during Katrina, most people outside of here would say, "That's horrible!"  But compared to so many people I ultimately did much better so I don't like to dwell on negative things that happened to me back then.  And moving-on is a characteristic I see in New Orleans people and which people have identified in this play.  About an earlier version of this play which went to the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, one of the KCACTF adjudicators commented that the characters aren't self-pitying, which is compelling for the audience.  I guess as bad as their experiences were to begin with, they were still alive?  David Hoover, director of that U.N.O. production, commented on this lack of self-pity by comparing it to Vietnam War plays which David summed up like this:  "O.K., I'm going to tell you about my pain.  Alright, get a little closer, because you need to know about my pain.  O.K., here comes the story about my pain:  YOU CAN'T UNDERSTAND MY PAIN!!!"   

Some of the positive effects of Katrina have been that although I've always loved the people of New Orleans, Katrina made me love them much more.  The devastating human failures of Katrina were governmental but on a local level many people conducted themselves heroically. And we all know how fantastic the rest of the country and people from other countries have been to us for the past 10 years.  So although Katrina made me deeply cynical and bitter toward all levels of government, the experience actually made me feel better about individual human nature.  

ERNIE K-DOE and ROB FLORENCE
Photo credit: The Times-Picayune

The interview with Rob Florence originally appeared in Slidell Little Theatre's e-zine, Prologue, an audience guide to Katrina: The Mother-in-Law of 'em All and on the theatre's blog. Learn more about the late Ernie K-Doe here.