Over the course of the last year (I forget exactly where or when) I saw someone, some talking head on television, prattling on about how America doesn't have any ruins, yet (very debatable, I say). And maybe, he went on, New Orleans would be the first of them. To which I say, "Read this article, please."
The article is primarily about a couple - a family, actually - rebuilding their house and their life in New Orleans just blocks away from where a levy was breached by Hurricane Katrina's flood waters a year ago. Artie Folse and Tonja Osborne decided to reclaim their lives in their old house. It was a year-long building process, requiring Herculean labor under obscenely difficult physical and emotional circumstances. Perhaps this is anniversary journalism, but even so, by putting this article on the front page (above the fold), The Times is doing valuable work keeping us from forgetting about The Crescent City in its hour (year? decade?) of need.
Read A New Orleans Home Is Reborn, With Grit and Persistence (login required). Artie Folse and Tonja Osborne are remarkable people, optimists with an incredible capacity for hard work in an atmosphere that, even as the flowers bloom in their front yard and the house no longer smells of mold and rot, is still not very encouraging. But they have not given in and they are rebuilding. And others are, too.
Say, aren't you guys having...? YES! We are doing a benefit with The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, special guest Ellis Marsalis and vocalist and mutli-instrumentalist Clint Meadgen and his band Bingo! The show is called "A New Orleans Revue," and it comes to Symphony Hall on October 15. 
Bingo! at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival
"A New Orleans Revue" will benefit the New Orleans Musicians Hurricane Relief Fund as well as the Celebrity Series' Arts, Education and Community Program. It will be a wild party with great music and great food and you will read more about it here and elsewhere in the coming weeks.
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