From Alicia Rasley, award-winning author of Bell Bridge Book’s new Kindle bestseller THE YEAR SHE FELL:
Taking it easy in the Big Easy!
The husband and I decided to escape the depths of the winter in New
Alicia's current bestseller!
Orleans. Great choice. There’s music everywhere here, and I don’t mean some kid singing along to Lady Gaga on his IPod. Our apartment is halfway between Bourbon St. (the tourist music center) and Frenchmen St. (the local music center), and every night, all we have to do is walk up and down and we hear great music. It’s not just Dixieland. There’s a lot of blues, and something they call “Swamp Rock,” and traditional jazz too. Last night, we passed one of those magical houses with the iron balcony (don’t get me started on the amazing architecture) and from the courtyard came the sound of a parade band practicing. Yep, tuba and all, they were getting ready for the Mardi Gras season. More than crawdads, more than beignets, more even than to-go plastic cocktail cups, New Orleans is the music, and I’m thankful so many musicians came back after Katrina.
Alicia is a RITA winner for her historicals
It’s a different pace down here. Now I grew up in the South (well, Virginia– we thought it was the South :), and I know all about slow-talking Southern men. Still, the guy at the tourist booth in Jackson Square won a prize for molasses mouth. I went in there to ask where I might find (I can’t help it!) a supermarket, one with wide aisles and seven kinds of root beer (just like back home). No such place, not in the French Quarter. But there is a fine little grocery… well, I was on tenterhooks, waiting for him to look down at my map and direct me there. No, first he had to tell me all about the store’s origins (as an A&P) and its purchase by a local family, and a couple (admittedly interesting) stories about this family, and a bit of history of the building (once a speakeasy/bordello, but you know, I get the idea ALL the buildings in the French Quarter used to be one or the other), and finally my yankee impatience won out– “And the address of the store is?” He heaved a sigh (a long, slow one), and pointed down to the map. “Walk here along Jackson Square. Sit down for a spell and listen to the music. You hear me? Sit down and listen to the music.” I meekly assented, and only then did he trace his pen the half-block on my map to the corner where the grocery store was.
And I did what he said. I sat down in Jackson Square and listened to the (free!) street musicians, including one who sounded like a cross between Otis Redding and BB King (divine, that is), and sang standing alongside a dummy in a wheelchair (“$1 for a photo with Ralph and his chair!”– New Orleans humor sometimes baffles). And when he was done flirting musically with every passing ladyI got up and followed the path to the grocery store.
So anyway, when I’m not comparing the relative potency of the Hurricane vs. the Swamp Daquiri, I’m plotting a book where an uptight northerner is assigned here for a few months, and she meets (of course) a laidback musician, and while she’s trying to teach him public relations and how to brand yourself on social media, he’s trying to teach her how to do the Zydeco Cha-cha, to find pleasure in something other than “a job well-done,” and to eat a beignet without getting powdered sugar all over her business suit.
It’s been an eventful few months at my house. My Bell Bridge book, The Year She Fell, came out just a few weeks after my husband’s first book (a memoir about his philanthropy and mountain climbing in Nepal). For such a literary couple, we’re pretty un-temperamental, though he keeps threatening to get us matching berets (to be worn, I deem, only in Paris). He gave me a Kindle for Christmas, just in time to see my own book beat Jane Austen on the interestingly named “free Kindle bestseller list” during a week when the Kindle version was offered for free. (But mine wasn’t the “bestselling” free novel– curse you, Sherlock Holmes!) I should take up smoking, for surely that’s a compulsion easier to give up than checking the Amazon rank 25 times a day.
If you want to abet my compulsion, here’s the info about my book:
The Year She Fell, by Alicia Rasley Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/2aygep7
Bell Bridge Books, November 2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SLxXIhch00
If you click on that youtube URL, you’ll see the book video, with original mandolin music by my genius nephew, Lucas Hamelman. I wonder if any of the Dixieland bands here need a mandolin player?
Back to normal (teaching, snow, parkas, all-weather tires) in two weeks, but until then, laissez les bon temps roulez!
Alicia Rasley
